Frankly, I think there are some users who have gotten themselves put so widely onto “Ignore” status that they’ve dropped off and then come back with a different account. Since they weren’t banned or given a time out, they can’t get banned automatically for evasion. Yet, when there are a dozen or so users who’ve put them on Ignore, they get around that with the new account.
Is the issue bad behavior in the public forum (which should be moderated) or on DMs (that needs to be read by folks and flagged)?
It looks like there’s a blanket DMs on or off option, but I think it’d be personally reasonable to add a whitelist in Discourse for accepting DMs from folks you trust, or code in some variant of would you like DMs from X (eg consent). This seems like a basic safety feature that should be added if Discourse is interested in encouraging more vulnerable folks in participating.
I can potentially donate some coding time in the short-term, but I won’t be able to guarantee long-term maintenance. It’d be ideal if there was an active plugin with other maintainers or if the Discourse team was interested in the feature, at which point I could spin up a try PR for this.
Another short term hack is potentially just re-upping ignores every X months via an automated job, so users don’t have to if the Ignore feature is enough. Though I’d need to take a look at the code again to see if this is viable. It’s been a while.
7 Likes
This. I would like this so much. I have received one or two dms from people I like. All of the others are irritating and unwelcome. I hate it when some one is an ass in public or even thinks I am but then tries to isolate me after. I don’t know why people think that is helpful. If some one reacts poorly to you the answer isn’t time alone with you.
13 Likes
They just want to bully you into forgiving them, often times.
11 Likes
If there’s anything the BBS can do to assist in this process, let me know. I think a whitelist for PMs would be an extremely welcome function!
7 Likes
Maybe spin up a new feature request thread on https://meta.discourse.org/ for more fine grained DM permission options if it doesn’t exist yet? It’s not the same as the ignore feature. As a customer I think BBS should have a bit more weight on the feature request, and I can follow up on meta if there’s interest.
5 Likes
Whitelisting would be really nice. Yes please, and thank you.
8 Likes
I’m not a moderator, but this is how I think it might work:
Moderators have the capability to read PMs, and via the Terms of Service, they have permission to do so. But the BBS is so huge, I doubt they have much time or interest in reading every PM. So most likely, they wouldn’t bother unless invited into the conversation, by flagging or direct request.
@orenwolf, would you like to clarify the mods’ policy on PMs?
7 Likes
Like virtually every discussion forum everywhere, most email servers, and most non user-to-user encrypted messaging, administrators usually have access to the database.
In practice, users can flag messages, even private ones, and also invite moderators into discussions. If you intend to use private messages to violate the community guidelines here, the other party will very likely alert the mods, and we will find out. Don’t do that.
13 Likes
Oh, one last thing:
The BBS runs on Discourse, which is seriously awesome, free, opensource software. The entire codebase is at github if you want to see it and understand the system.
13 Likes
