Add 'moderator' to ignore list

feature
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So, I want to be able to ignore messages from moderators. Regular users should be able to ignore moderators. Please adeed it.

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Hello and welcome @Marcus_Cheng :slight_smile:

I think this feature may be somewhat problematic for the smooth running of a forum. Could you outline a use case where this would be a benefit to a site?

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Moderators (and staff) have an odd position on a forum. On the one hand, they have official duties to perform:

  • Handling flags
  • Making decisions about suspending users
  • Taking actions to reduce needless drama

They often are also members of the community who participate in discussions. It’s not at all a good idea to ignore moderators who are performing their official duties. (There’s no upside.) But I can see an argument for ignoring moderators when they are acting a regular members within a discussion. Just because they are moderator doesn’t mean they can’t be annoying.

So I could see a scenario where it would make sense for a user to ignore moderator posts and messages, but not warnings or posts that have “Staff color” turned on. The difficulty is that moderators don’t always think to use those options. There’s also advantages to having moderators behave with moderation in public. Letting people ignore moderators via the system itself might communicate moderators are not held to a higher standard.

It wouldn’t be crazy to have this as a site setting (default: moderators and staff can’t be ignored) but I struggle to think of a scenario where I’d want to turn on the ability to ignore mods. It just adds too much friction for moderators and not much benefit for a community.

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Tend to agree with @jericson here: since moderators (and admins) of communities will often act as members, it would be fair to allow others to ignore them while they act as members. Ideally it would be possible to switch between different roles on a single accounts, so that a moderator or admin only needs to assume the respective role when needed for moderation activity.
Personally, I would find that quite useful since it also declutters the interface while acting as a member. But I assume this is not exactly in line with the way user management currently works in Discourse, so it would mean a larger refactoring.

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