This feature doesn’t suddenly invalidate our community guidelines. Users badmouthing other users result in flagged posts, almost always from multiple people, and often not even from the target themselves.
There are a lot of readers here. Bad behaviour will still be flagged even if a user is ignored by a few users. Significantly ignored users will be flagged to the mod team for further review.
While this feature will blessedly replace ”do not engage” agreements, nothing will change in how bullying or harassment is moderated here.
I do hope it makes life easier for you and for the usual suspects.
However, as it is a technical solution for a kind of social conflict, I am not completely convinced.
That said, the BB BBS community is quite outstanding. I’ve been on online discussion platforms since the early 1990s, and this, here, feels better than many if not all other places.
I’ve found it to be very useful in other forums. This is one area where a technical solution can be very effective. Some people just don’t get along - that doesn’t necessarily make them bad or bad for the forum in general, so if you can just use technical measures to keep them completely apart that dynamic never comes into play. It’s not a substitute for modding bad behavior.
I tend to overestimate the impact on the general tone, I guess. Also, to explain my slight scepticism, I tend to be wary of tech solutions because they will be used and/or hacked in unintended ways. Always, by my experience…
Having stated those concerns, I believe the mods here, and the community spirit on BB (hold up my many regular users, irrespective of TL) will make up for any of my fears in that direction.
Never assumed as much.
Just FTR, besides my sceptical approach, I much appreciate the effort and I am really curious to see the impact! I like the feature, and I will try it out myself. Soonish, I think.
I even think I would have used it yesterday on the murderous terrorist arsehole topic.
Your skepticism, nay, dare I say wariness, is quite understandable.
However, it seems to me that some people’s concerns about this feature stem from their own desire not to be ignored, let alone having a system feature in place that makes just ignoring them even easier - out of sight, out of mind.
Also because I cant just not post apt memes & gifs:
it’s almost like some people’s concern wasn’t harassment, but disagreement. a system where someone can continue to disagree will always bother those sorts, even if they can’t see the posts.
As @Melizmatic pointed out, users can opt to make their user profile page non-browsable. In that case obviously you can’t use the ignore button on their user profile page — but you can surely edit the list of muted people on your user preferences page. See screenshot in first post.
Ah, thanks. I just did a side by side comparison and found the “Hidden Reply” notices.
I do wish that you could still click on a user to ignore them, regardless of the browsability setting. But that is a minor quibble and I assume would be a coding headache. But, if I can’t click on a profile to ignore a user, how do I use the ignore feature on mobile? I found the user interface you posted on MacOS/Firefox but not on Android/Firefox.
Thanks again. I hadn’t known to check the right hand drop down menu. I was expecting nested menus the way the desktop version works. (I don’t use the user interface much on either platform…)
Word; the missing stair was finally repaired, after many years of members having to just hop over it.
To bring back a highly problematic member just because of a new feature would be akin to intentionally removing another stair, recreating the exact same hazard.
