I started working on this today, first thing I did was added this little user preference for: “Allow users to send me private messages”
This is simplifies some bits of civilized mute. When we show a modal saying that “you may not send PMs to this user” this could happen cause you muted them OR you just do not accept PMs so there is a level of plausible deniability here.
I am uneasy with the original spec @accalia I feel that if you are muting a user you are not only “sort of muting” to protect yourself from mention bombs and quote abuse. I think that muting is a last resort thing:
“This user has gotten on my nerves SO much that I don’t want to see blue bubbles from them or green bubbles from them ever”
Its a simpler spec, a lot easier to explain and what I will be going with. I worry that if we allow for too much fidelity here it can get confusing very fast.
I really do not want this “do not accept PMs” anti-feature. Who was asking for this? Now every user has another option on their user page inviting them to wonder if they have reason to refuse PMs. No, just like you don’t auto refuse emails from everyone in the world.
However I do agree that the mute should be all or nothing, zero notifications from that user. You will of course still see their posts if you happen to be in the topic, you will just never be notified of anything that user does, ever, including PMs.
This does leave PMs… It is really fine to either
quietly sinkhole the PM the user sends to the user with the mute
Or
pop up a “user is not accepting PMs” dialog as Twitter does for blocked users
Just make that a site level setting, I really do not want a per user setting here for people to agonize over, especially since nobody was asking for a per user global PM disable.
I’d hope that posts from muted users also get a special CSS class? Discourse doesn’t have to use it by default, but that way users who want to could hide, collapse or fade out muted posts, or even just suppress quote blocks and images.
Devil’s Advocate: When I try PM someone but can’t, I’ll assume this person has opted to ignore me specifically. Seems feature was removed anyways though.
I really feel it’s best to just be forthcoming about the mute action. This isn’t the same as unfriending someone on Facebook, which is another way of saying (without saying it) “I’m just not that interested in you”. Muting means “Please stop talking to me”. It’s a super lightweight restraining order, and people with a restraining order are well aware of it.
You can add a user to a list and then get no green or blue bubbles from them.
I have not implemented the site setting to notify the “mutee” on PMs they make, and honestly am not sure its worth adding, for one it complicates the code a fair bit.
I have not yet added the special CSS styling and intend to do so next.
Probably not needed in the 1st round of this but something to keep in your back pocket as a “nice to have” would be to be able to mute/unmute a user via their usercard and profile.
That would give the feature a lot more visibility than I think it should have. Like a “do you hate this user?” button appearing on everyone’s user card… this is also a pretty rare event that does not need to be placed in convenient locations for frequent use, does it?
@sam I am fine with PMs just silently not being notified, that works for me and we can consider this V1 of the feature with the dimmed (like flagged) CSS class applied to that users posts. That will also help remind people who they have muted, too, and provide evidence of it working as designed when they enter values there.
There is a particular user who has expressed an interest in this feature, and I will be one of the first to go into his list. I am also a moderator. He has ranted (as is his wont) several times about moving and / or not moving stuff for various reasons. I’m not sure if it would be “worse” if he got or didn’t get the notifications of my occasional moderation actions.
I’m sure he’d complain either way, so it’s probably not prudent to try to predict or prevent this by warping the feature according to him. But it just seems like more of an “official” thing going on than a reply or mention or something.
There is a weird edge case, if a TL3 edits your topic title / wiki and you have them muted you will not see it, but I guess you asked for it and we are obliging here.
Did this happen? It does not seem to, based on just testing here on meta? It would be nice if posts by muted individuals were folded (i.e. visible so it doesn’t remove any context from the discussion, but click to expand the actual contents) or at least dimmed/spoilered…
