Congratulations! The community thinks you are awful. Here are some pixels to celebrate! 
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Reading on another forum it turns out there is a way for people to use ignore lists in a hostile manner.
On another forum a popular user has a list of people in their sig they say to add to the forum’s ignore list. If enough people follow their recommendation, the users on their list will effectively be shadow banned.
BoingBoing forum doesn’t have sigs, so that exact attack doesn’t really work here. But I was surprised to come across an active use of “ignore” as an attack on other forum members.
Wow, people are really inventive when it comes to being shitty towards one another, aren’t they.
It’s just another form of the twitter open-source block list, isn’t it. With exactly the same flaw of bad actors poisoning the list by dropping their supposed enemies onto it.
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This is what happens when you allow something terrible like “signatures” to go on in your neighborhood.
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Yes, and also: that’s what happens when people do not build a great community. I haven’t seen, say, Waypoint, have toxic users - and it all has to do with the size and aims of their moderation staff. (They have 20, we have Orenwolf)
Software can mitigate but not solve all issues caused by shitheels, nor does it have a sense of nuance nor intuition.
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Yeah, as MySpace proved, too much customization on a platform is bad.
Once sigs became automated, the incentive to sign off with a brief salutation was reduced, leading to excessive verbosity and to growing collections of vestigial text.
And this social hack of the ignore feature is dependent on lack of moderation.
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I do find it very interesting that there’s so much concern about the feature being abused, via some sort of ‘cult of personality’ being able to influence vast numbers of the community to ignore someone en masse, just on their say-so.
As if being contrary and not conforming to expectation isn’t the raison d’être of so very many happy mutants here… and as if the members in good standing on the BBS are all as easily swayed and/or manipulated as the denizens of FB, or Twitter, or some other, lower-caliber platform.
Hell, it’s almost an insult to the entire community at large, that some would assume that even a fraction of us could be so easily persuaded…
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God, there are other forums where I wish I could get on some trollking’s ignore list, so that I’d be able to focus on communicating the small minority of interesting people there.
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we have something like that here already, it’s posted to the users profile page and says something like “user given a timeout until march 19, 3019.”
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Well, the Twitter Block feature effectively does this – it removes their tweets, yes, but it also removes your tweets from the other person’s timeline. As long as they are logged in to Twitter, they can no longer see your tweets after you Block them.
That’s unusual in the forum space though.
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We sort of had that here with the lounge for “regulars” only. But that had its downsides such that having a two tier membership was something BB decided didn’t work well overall,
Good. That makes the unique requirement (amongst forums I know) not to interact with members who require it workable at last. I will put the user who requested no interaction on my ignore list, done.
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Hey,
I just wanted to thank @codinghorror for all the work on making this feature a reality. It has been a multi-year process to get here, with all the gradual refinements to the discourse platform and all the discussion that got us here.
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My understanding was that if someone doesn’t want to interact with you, they can now put you on their ignore list and they won’t have to see your posts anymore. Of course if you want to make it mutual, you can ignore them too. But you don’t have to ignore them unless you have your own reasons for not seeing any of their posts.
In other words, it puts the responsibility for disengagement on the person who wishes to disengage. There’s no more holding another user responsible for fulfilling one’s own wish to disengage.
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That is the plan once the feature is out of beta. It’s a public forum, posts within our guidelines are permitted, and if you choose not to see a particular users’ posts, this feature will enable that.
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May I suggest that you amend the FAQ to that effect? My understanding is that the policy is still that I am supposed to comply with requests not to engage with a particular person when that person requests so.
Please note that I do not really want to engage users who do not welcome my comments. It is just inconvenient to have to keep track of whom I am responding to. Fortunately, only a single person had a such request.
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I will, when the feature is out of beta and meets our requirements. That has not yet happened.
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