I am currently taking an online class where each student has their own progress thread where we share videos of our performances. For the last few weeks, another student has taken to consistently liking every reply in my progress thread but never any performance or reply from me.
I have brought up similar behavior with teacher before, but feel uncomfortable continuing to “feed the troll”. It has a annoying and real net negative impact on my learning experience.
Since ignoring and blocking are not and will not be fully implemented, is there any less technical advice to manage this behavior?
I muted them after a few weeks of class, then ignored them once the ability to ignore was unlocked for my account’s TL.
I continue to see all of their replies as collapsed links and their blank avatar under everything but my replies. There are maybe ten active users in the class, so hiding an avatar does little. They just become a user with a grey avatar.
From what I read in other threads, full blocking is intentionally not implemented because it is considered to be on the users and moderators to deal with this behavior directly.
I have tried to deal with it directly with them in private (they did not respond) and by asking the teacher if there were any private lessons or enrollment options. Maybe this kind of frustrating classroom use case was already considered in the decision to not implement full or mutual blocking.
From what I can tell, everyone else gets along with me and gets along with the other student. It is most likely a case two people not getting along in an online forum and being stuck together for the 10 month class.
I found ignoring them stopped all future notifications about their activity.
The problems I am experiencing is that their collapsed replies and likes still appear in my individualized progress topic for the class.
An idea that I have not come across is to this would be somehow restricting them from accessing my topic. Maybe that’s something a moderator can do already. Maybe it is a terrible idea. At this point, I’ll take whatever help or advice I can get.
Maybe explain carefully that you feel you are being abused and this is distracting you from learning or participating. Feel free to link to this post.
What needs to happen here is for the moderator to step in and say … “listen, X please stop replying and liking Nate’s post or I am going to have to kick you out of the course”
I get you want the tooling here to “invisible” a user, and turn Discourse into a site where user X does not exist to you. But if something toxic is afoot it has to be handled, you are presumably paying money to this educational institute, they should offer you some protections.
I have been on the fence for years on even supporting ignore/mute cause I worry it can just let toxicity fester. @codinghorror got swayed to implement it based on real world feedback.
I guess we could implement the error “Sorry you can not like this post cause Nate is ignoring you” and “Sorry you are not allowed to reply directly to Nate cause Nate is ignoring you”, but this does change the dynamics of the feature quite a bit, this is certainly not something we will be changing tomorrow.
Trolls will always find a way to troll. Even if you manage to prevent them to abuse the Likes, they will find another way to mess with the community the very next day.
Better specify such troll/spam abuse in the forum toc and kick them from the community if they repeatedly go against those.