Good news!
This feature is now available for beta testing. You can find the magic Ignore button on the user profile page.
And in your user preferences page under notifications, users.
The UI is now finalized – Ignore requires specifying a time period, maximum 4 months.
Please try it out and let us know what you think. Feedback welcome from people who asked for and planned to use this feature.
Sorry; couldn’t resist.
It’d be funny if there was a top ranking of which users were blocked most frequently.
That’s a worthy goal, IMO.
Hell, I’d much rather that the people I don’t get along with put me on ignore instead of perpetually trying to come for me… or even worse; engaging in petty, passive-aggressive behavior that does nothing to advance the conversation.
Well the idea is that some people just rub each other the wrong way even though individually they aren’t doing anything negative as far as the community is concerned.
So this is a way for the users involved to self medicate and “take a break” from each other, reducing moderator load.
However, note that when a person is simultaneously ignored by many other people, that is automatically escalated to the moderators as a potential community-wide problem. Where there’s smoke, there is 
and all that.
There is… for moderators.
Truer words were never spoken.
Damn, there go all my aspirations of earning a badge equivalent to the ‘Pedant Pendant.’
Oh well, back to the drawing board.
And once again, I must; because it’s just too apt not to:
This is also why I want all ignores to be inherently time (and optionally category) limited, so that ignores are periodically reviewed & renewed by the people involved… so their vendetta ignore list doesn’t grow forever without bound.
Mutes (suppressing notifications & PMs) work as they always have of course, so Ignore is in addition to what’s already there.
Damn… you should make that like an award section of BB. Be it like, this guy has 100,000, 1,000,000 blocks, etc. That’d be hilarious and informative.
That was such a great game.
Does this mean PoPo is allowed back?
No.
Will this be transparent to the ignoree?
Can I reply to the posts of people who ignore me?
(Because that’s not transparent unless only I can see the replies. And some trolls have two accounts!)
If someone quotes me can my ignorer see it?
Is there a provision in the rules for moderators to deal with a concerted campaign of ignoring used as bullying?
Asking for a friend.
Try it and see… that’s kinda the point of this… beta test?
nobody owes you their attention
That shouldn’t be much of a problem here, thanks to the excellent human moderation here that works in concert with your system. I’ve been using the client-side Mute Tampermonkey script for many months now, and the number of people annoying or aggressively stupid enough to be placed on it has never broken six at any one time (currently four, one of whom hasn’t posted in months). In most cases the person gets banned or leaves/anonymises because they can’t hang here. I have to add a new trolley to the list maybe once every 4 months, tops.
Thanks for the new feature (and for the back-end threshold trigger for the mods). I’ve added my Muted four to the new settings field, will turn off the userscript and give it a go. I’ll be glad to give you feedback on how it works.
If you’d like, you and I can test this out with me putting a temporary ignore on you and running through your questions in order.
I’m not sure how a bunch of people ignoring someone’s nonsense counts as bullying, even if it was somehow co-ordinated. I doubt most of the ignorees would notice. A certain egomaniacs who founnd themselves ignored and going unresponded to would complain about “bullying”, but that type of whinger eventually ends up banned for other reasons. For example…
Please, no.
You assume bad faith on the part of the ignored. What if they are in good faith but a bad actor convinces others otherwise? “Don’t listen to them.” It happens.
I do make that assumption. Constant bad-faith comments are the main reason I’d add a user to the list. It’s why the feature has been implemented by Discourse on behalf of the site owners.
No-one’s forcing anyone else to add the person to their own lists, and if a bad actor tried to brigade by asking people to use Ignore I’m confident that @orenwolf would shut him down in short order.
Thank you!
