Disable the ignore function

Before I confirm or deny this you may need to just gently point me in the right direction as to what you and KW proposed?

 

lol, what you said!

* Limits to the number of ignores you can have,
* Classification of "I'm putting you on ignore" and related sentiment posts as unacceptable/baiting, and
* Active discouragement and prohibition of "can someone quote what user X said? I've got them on ignore"-style posts. The onus to view the ignored user's material sits with the ignorer, not the rest of the community.

Possibly:
* Expansion of the framework around bullying and harassment beyond the current "what to do when the head admin is a predatory pervert" document

 

I 100% agree with all of that, especially the harassment/bullying policy updating.

 

Sounds like a good plan. I would also perhaps add that if an ignored user is aware that he or she is on ignore then the ignored user should be discouraged from engaging with user via proxies or by encouraging other users to post material by the ignored user. If I had KW on ignore I would not appreciate others posting his comments to me. I would have put KW on ignore for a reason.

 

I think that needs to be case by case, Lost. It's harder to enforce; if the only person who knows an answer to a question is on ignore, what do you do then?

Similarly, if there is a chance to have people connect in a positive way which changes their dynamic, shouldn't we encourage that?

 

Yeah, I guess it depends on the content. If I had KW on ignore because he continually trolled me and baited me and mocked my username and icon then KW should be discouraged and warned about continuing that behaviour by the use of proxies..ie, KW posting "Hey, I'm on ignore but can somebody post that LostOnHoth is the name my retarded goldfish chose so that says something hey?" or similar.

 

That's right; if you scope out what constitutes bullying and harassment then I think you can give reasonable grounds for mods to say "that's not over the line, but that is" when reviewing specific incidents.

As Barriss said best, we are a discussion community to we should be fostering interaction where possible.

 

Are we now at the group hug part of the proceedings?

 

No but did you see that Parliament will now allow the kids of Members in during sitting times?

I hate it when people bring their kids to the office. I want to use the whiteboard to map out my exciting controls attestation approach and they're drawing on it. And not something funny, like enormous penises, but like rainbows and houses and ****.

I cannot fathom why MPs would want this.

 

Personally, I think the way the ignore function is implemented is so, so, so bad and the potential for abuse is so, so, so big (not going into specifics because I'd rather not give people any ideas) that I've started considering it a broken feature. I'd support removing it.

 

Well, I guess that's it then.

 

I just don't understand this-- at all. It's a straightforward feature for almost everyone (and I say "almost" because I'm allowing for a handful of people who don't seem to have surfaced yet who can or would abuse it in some unnamed way). Most people are using it honestly, myself included. It's frustrating to continually be stuck on the idea of things that could happen, rather than what's actually happening. Have there been a few problems? Sure. Nothing that can't be taken care of with some new guidelines. Has it ever been actively abused? Not that I can see. If anyone does "abuse" it, then I would suggest dealing with that individual, instead of removing a feature that almost everyone uses honestly.

 

Do you really want to create a troll's or baiter's paradise?

 

That's exactly the main problem: no one can see. There's no way to know who's in anyone's ignore list, or if it's being used in a harassment campaign (and believe, I can think of maaaaaany creative ways to do so). Any kind of tool that completely shuts the mods out of the process is, in my eyes, undesirable if not straight pernicious. This is a first: we've never had anything like this before, this kind of blind spot. As an admin, I have the responsibility to make sure we are not harboring this kind of behavior before it happens.

We lived without an ignore feature for, what, twelve years? We coped. It can be better or worse, and the pros might outweigh the cons or the other way around (that's exactly what we are discussing here) but it's hardly indispensable, so let's cut the drama and get realistic. Turning off the ignore feature won't turn us into a mix between /b/ and an ISIS recruitment board.

 

Why can't the mods see anything about this?

Why does the act of becoming a moderator, manager, or admin, cut those luminaries off from seeing or using this feature.

While I see the usefulness to the people who have had to resort to it, and cannot detect anything worth complaining about in the link that Ender provided, I can certainly empathise with your concern on something that counts as a "blind spot" for yourselves.

If you do cancel the feature, are the Mod Squad willing to look for a Xenforo update where it does not count as a blind spot?

 

I've already done some looking around on the Xenforo site. As the function stands, it has the drawbacks JTS posted above. I've said in our mod forum that I'd be willing to revisit the function if newer versions of Xenforo either improve it or if there is a compatible add-on that does the same thing.

 

Thank you, LAJ.

I am a little bit curious why the Mod Squad regard "I have you on ignore" messages as unacceptable, when noting them would negate, or at least alleviate the "we don't know who is using it" concern.

How about, when encouraging users not to post that message to their abuser, state that the user needs to notify a mod that they have used the feature?

Also curious as to the mechanics. With all the data that mods have access to, why someone pressing ignore does not send a signal to some part of the system that mods can see. Does the command sail across the internet to a central Xenforo hub, or is the whole thing self-contained?

 

I'm not sure about how the ignore function was originally implemented in Xenforo . However we are on a very old (by software standards) version and as it stands here there are no options for us to configure it as we want. I did some looking the other day in our Admin section and came up with nothing. There may be newer add-ons that improve the function but chances are they aren't compatible with our version.

 

It's self-contained in the sense of being on our servers, but it's inaccessible in the sense of the only way to check being buried deep in the proverbial guts of the forum (to the extent that even those of us familiar with said guts aren't 100% sure what it would be filed under if we did go digging). That makes quick checks for the purposes of untangling incidents pretty much impossible, which is undesirable. Self-reporting is really not an alternative as it's a perfect world workaround.

For the record, I could really go either way on the ignore feature, but from a purely technical standpoint compared to how I've seen it work on other forum software suites, the Xenforo version is pretty crappy.

Also, I want to clear up the following misconception I've seen in a few posts: as far as I am aware our specific XF suite has no way of limiting the number of users a user can ignore. That would require an additional (possibly nonexistent) add-on which would most likely require a newer version of the base software. While we're chipping away at the upgrade issue, there's no ETA owing to testing concerns and the sheer amount of custom stuff we've worked into our rather large by raw post count forum. I don't think anyone's overall opinion hinges on that, but please keep it in mind.

 

I, as LAJ did, also looked around for an alternative, but I focused on user-made plugins. There's a third-party add-on that shows some promise, in that it seems highly customizable, but it's not that well documented and it'd need a lot of testing before even considering it. Plus someone would have to pay for it, of course, because nothing half-decent in the XF world is free.

 

Cool.

Thank you all for your responses.

 

JoinTheSchwarz, Ramza - if you have to disable, obviously I have no issue with it however in the spirit of the compromise position we advocated... would requiring users to disclose, by way of their oddly-Facebooky profile, the users they have on ignore? I know it's hard/impossible to enforce but the flip side is if you implement a board-wide rules update for this, and you make sure all forums are aware a requirement of the feature is full disclosure on your individual use of it, and you find someone who hasn't disclosed their list in the course your duties... well, they can't claim they didn't know they were in breach of the rules, right?

 

You have a built in ignore feature in your brain. It's very easy to use.

 

DID SOMEONE SAY SOMETHING?

(am I doing it properly Luigi?)