Not quite - the ignore user feature here only prevents you from getting notifications about a user you have blocked. So you don’t see when they mention you, reply to or link to threads you’ve started, like one of your posts, etc…
What I (and I think @anon15383236) are thinking of is a feature that does all that and also hides all posts from a blocked user. So instead of seeing the content of a post you’d instead see “Blocked user - click to expand.” And clicking on that little sentence would show the full text of the blocked user’s post.
It doesn’t completely hide the presence of the other user, like blocking on some other sites does, but it minimizes it as much as possible. And because it’s not invisible and seamless it doesn’t break the flow of conversation the way that some user’s fear it would.
Edit: It’s the difference between watching a version of CNN where Wolf Blitzer has been edited out, and seeing a blank screen that says “Blocked newscaster on air: turn to channel 37 to watch anyways.”
It has been mentioned to El Codinghorror on many an occasion, and the discourse team just has a different philosophy on the matter. I.e. engaged, strong moderation.
Yeah. That gets tricky, but I guess I’d trust moderators (not that it’s up to me) to take out the worst (“My sister Susan made $6400 last week just by shopping online!”). But then, if bad ones have many responses – more than two, or three? – then please leave the initial one in, so that responses, even if also “blocked but visible,” can be read, so the whole thing makes sense. Hope I’m making sense too…
I feel that the moderation options available here aren’t good substitutes, though, because they end up harming the community. Are we really better off because @shaddack got banned for a while? I mean, one or two people clearly are, but how about the rest of us? And what good does it do the community to delete honest & insightful discussion just because one or two people were sniping at each other in the margins of it?
I once flagged a conversation between two users that was starting to get a bit heated but still quite good. I was expecting some kind of warning to be dropped in the thread, but instead the entire conversation was stricken from the record and a warning was issued. Had I known that was going to be the result I wouldn’t have flagged it, and I know it’s made me shy away from flagging since.
The community is not better with @shaddack gone. I support blocking users (I.e. I could block someone from seeing my posts and me seeing theirs), but that isn’t to the best of my knowledge where discourse is headed.
It has made me hesitant to flag unless absolutely necessary as well.
Underscores. The company mandated that I work in VB.NET.
Which actually isn’t bad, since it’s accounting-type stuff rather than device drivers and other low-level close to the hardware stuff. It’s easier to read and follow the code than the bracket fetish languages.
A guy a used to work for was a Russia asylum seeker in the US who had to code with three or four letter acronym variables/tables/etc in their German language equivalents.
You can export all your posts from your user page, and that will include deleted posts. So not lost forever.
I understand the collateral damage argument of deleting replies, but I am quite opposed to leaving toxic waste digressions around in a topic for people to step in. Lots of broken windows there… also there are many people who just can’t help themselves and have to respond to (IMO) obvious trollbait, or a seriously out of bounds digression. Even if it’s behind a click warning. And the more noise in the topic, the worse it gets.
I feel like the “tough love” argument of teaching people not to respond to trollies and out of bounds digressions at risk of having their content deleted is the correct choice of action.
The only hesitancy I have is when the (triggering, source, original reply) content is from regular, long term users who are known to be reasonable, reliable contributors on BBS. I think in those specific cases more caution should be applied.
How do I export somebody else’s deleted posts? Because those are the ones “lost forever.” And can a banned user export their posts while they are banned?
Anyway, for me, deletions just mean I wasn’t thinking enough when I wrote what I wrote. Usually they’re shitposts that are mostly just mean, or otherwise nonsensical. A fair few of my posts I consider too personal 12 hours later but by then, what’s the point of deleting them myself? They’ve already been ingested by google and the Internet Archive, so I don’t get to redact them, really.
Someone who had shown themselves to be a reasonable, reliable contributor and then all of a sudden becomes extremely passionate on a specific subject suggests that they have a great deal of personal knowledge about it, which means we all might learn something new. I would be VERY cautious about deleting those posts.
