Will the “ignoring” user get a PM from the system ahead of time letting them know they should “renew” the Ignore or will they just have to all of a sudden see the Ignored users posts and have to hit Ignore? I am hoping the former.
I’d hope the latter, just so that they can see recent contributions since the ignore was put in place, to decide if the ignore is still required.
I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with the assumption that people are incapable of change or growth.
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Well, if the person is Ignoring the other user due to PTSD that the other user us the cause of, seeing anything from them could possibly re-trigger them. I would prefer that not happen.
Aside from being an extreme edge case
- For the individual that’s grounds to reconsider being a member of the community.
- For the staff that’s grounds to consider excluding the aggressor.
An ignore button isn’t enough in those cases. What happens if your session is logged out and you hit the latest posts or a topic only to see their content?
https://meta.discourse.org/t/will-discourse-ever-gain-ignore-user-functionality/1525/16?u=stephen
In many worlds it might be an “extreme edge case” but it is something I need to deal with in the larger community I am part of. Unfortunately if the the “aggressor” isn’t seen as such by all of the community then it can be hard to exclude them. Which then means that the “individual” has to not participate in the community because they are not believed and/or have to stop being part of the community to maintain their mental health all because of the aggressor. (Though they could if they could (in a perfect world have full blocking (ie aggressor can’t see their posts and they can’t see the aggressors)) at least not have to see the aggressor’s posts.)
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It’s possible you would need to run a small plugin to add a very long ignore duration possibility.
Exclusion isn’t the decision of the community, communities aren’t democracies. Design by committee isn’t a thing.
Ultimately it’s a choice by administrator and moderators, and sets the tone for everything.
In a perfect world that would be configurable in the settings but I could definitely figure something out otherwise if necessary.
I’m new to this forum so I don’t know if I’m asking this wrong, sorry.
I’m curious as to whether the ignore feature will be toggleable in admin settings. I’m an admin on a Discourse forum with a relatively young user base - anywhere from 9-18, though we also have a sizeable amount of adults especially among the moderation/management. My concern is such a feature will ultimately kill our community - it’s already fairly small (maybe 50 active users tops, good chunk are TL3 and most of the rest is TL2) and we’ve been prone to drama among our users in the past. Users may be too eager to ignore someone for petty disagreements and result in fragmented conversations. We’ve had cases where the community collectively ganged up on someone (or a group) and that’ll be worse with the ability to fully ignore someone. It’d be great to have it more adjustable by a community’s management.
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I trully think you should live with the feature and report real issues you face in your community. Reading your post and other I see too many « might » « could » …
Be sure we are dedicated to help communities prosper and be lively. We will adress any real issue preventing this.
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Is there any indication to the reader that the post is being hidden because the reader is ignoring that user?
I think that would be helpful, since posts can also be hidden for other reasons.
How are replies by not ignored users to ignored user posts handled? Thanks!
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The only time this would matter is if you are staff. I don’t view that as an edge case worth handling because a) staff should know what they are doing and b) it would be complex and noisy to carry two different sets of text (and notices) around for what is effectively the same thing, just for staff.
If you are ignoring someone and choose to expand their post and reply to it, well, that’s an explicit choice you made by clicking or tapping…
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My mods are actually requesting such a feature. They often get bombarded my repetitive messages from community members or are getting reports from others users about private message spam.
Hence I can see a ignore function + the ability to remove the Private Message for individual users really helpful!
The PM case is already handled by user mute, so you have what you need for that.
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Jeff, I think @Jumanji’s question here concerns a third user quoting a user that you have added to your ignored list.
For example, in the embedded quote above 
, imagine I had added @Jumanji to my ignore list but I hadn’t added you. You’ve quoted @Jumanji and I now get to see it.
What are the plans, if any, here?
I imagine it could get difficult / resource intensive to check whether embedded quotes are from users you have added to the ignore list.
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Once @Tarek_Khalil gets the user page UI and the selectable durations in, we will look at further enhancing the feature. Another edge condition that @awesomerobot pointed out is in-reply-to and reply expansions as well.
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Good to hear - and I hadn’t considered the reply expansion situation either.
I’d love to know how you’ll handle it without slowing the post stream down too much.
I guess another edge case is where the text from a post is copied and pasted, but not quoted.
i.e. Jeff said…
Once @Tarek_Khalil gets the user page UI and the selectable durations in, we will look at further enhancing the feature. Another edge condition that @awesomerobot pointed out is in-reply-to and reply expansions as well.
I could see that perhaps being used if two posters were working in tandem to get around the ignore feature. That’s a tough one to deal with but likely quite rare and one that probably deserves a broader human intervention to stop it happening.
When I wrote the import script from MVCF to Discourse, I wanted to be able to use the Discourse reply to post feature instead of having mountains of embedded </blockquotes>.
I ended up using an MD5 hash on the text inside a post. If I found the same hash when looking at text inside a </blockquote> tag, I knew it was a reply to a previous post. I could then create the new post as a reply to that previous post and drop the text inside the </blockquote> tag.
I wonder if something similar would work here? MD5 hashes are nearly unique (lol) and quick to look up. It obviously falls down if the entire post isn’t quoted or if smaller sections of the same post are quoted multiple times.
But we’re deep into diminishing returns territory here.
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To me this is one Rabbit hole too far. Expansions make sense but getting into a world where we also ignore quotes is pretty ugly.
What do we do: hide the quote? hide the post that quoted it?
Next we would have to “ignore” replies to the ignored people and the list goes on.
Re MD5 idea … what if you ignored me … and somewhere on Discourse I said “I like bananas” is > I like bananas now banned from all the posts on the system and suppressed for you? This gets pretty crazy fast.
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Ignore only deals with a symptom, not the cause.
If things are that bad then surely it’s on the staff within the community to start making some decisions.
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I think there are a few easy ones we can handle without too much work, like in-reply-to/reply expansions and direct quotes. I don’t really care about anything more edge case than that.
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