Staffs are not gods from the heavens. Sometimes they can have a bad day, or just have a kind of behaviour that just don’t go well with someone else.
As an admin of a community, I can see that happening and given that not all communities have paid staff to moderate, it’s also unfair to ask for professionalism all the time from the moderators/admins.
Which lead to users frustration when they try to mute someone from staff and discover that they can’t. I mean, it makes sense, as a post from staff members would usually be important. However, sometimes staff just want to participate in a discussion just as “another user”.
Proposal
Default behaviour is that mute works on any user
Staff can PM bypassing the mute
Staff posts will be displayed anyway if they get the Add staff color to the post
This should guarantee that a staff member can still perform its duties and be noticed by everyone, no matter a mute state, but allow users to feel in control if they decide that a user is just getting on their nerve and they want to mute it.
Interesting that option exists but there isn’t a link to that at the user card profile for staff members that is there for non-staff members, don’t know if that is intentional to make that more difficult to figure out?
This could make sense, but may require the ignore feature not mute for what you are talking about to hide posts in a topic that aren’t specifically addressed to an individual who wants to mute/ignore a staff-member.
That may already be possible as is the mute feature for staff members but requires user be at trust tier #2 to be able to use the “ignore” feature. In the context of if a staff member is making posts on a topic that are not important staff announcements, then those could be minimized out if folks are wanting to focus on talking to other people.
I suspect we hide it there because it’s not generally a good idea to mute staff, nor should you need to. But the option exists should it become a necessity, you just have to look for it.
