Once you’ve muted them, why should you care if they give up?? Why not focus on managing your own experience and trust that others can do the same for themselves?
No Ian, Moderators and above can probably see your profile, but we only see your name, avatar and a note saying your profile is hidden.
The reason many of us keep an informal list, generally just in our heads, is that we don’t right people off totally. We continue to monitor their progress and will answer when or if we feel we should. Hitting ignore to me is for obvious trolls or spam, but they can also be flagged for moderator attention.
Any sort of up/down voting rating system is open to abuse, people can follow someone around and constantly down vote them, or register multiple accounts and upvote someone, something that has been known to be done in competitions where user votes counted. Even forum generated ratings can be nonsense, some time back a user ended up with a Help Desk title because they kept marking their own posts as the answer, I can assure you that user was no help to anyone, but was seen by other new users as someone in the know.
A quick scan of a users activity gives a rough idea of where they are coming from and can help with answering questions correctly. Often you see related issues in previous posts that they haven’t mentioned, knowing those bits can help us see how to help. Remarkably I often find the same question with an answer in their history and can just quietly remind them of it in a PM.
Public forums are just that ‘Public’ and as such their are many individual personalities interacting in a less than ideal medium. Cold written words do not always express the meaning behind them. A simple question to help find the nuances of a persons problem can be misinterpreted as condescension or arrogance, where as it is just a fact finding quest. Answering the same question over and over again can lead to an attempt at brevity in getting to the root of the issue. Lack of information leads to wrong answers. Simple things like the version of SU, the version a Win, the year of SU the graphic card can mean very different answers to the same question.
There are many people that come here and don’t like me, that is their choice, I don’t go out of my way to annoy people, I answer questions where I can and often I need to ask questions to give those answers. And yes, there are times when I lose my cool. I have long since given up writing full flowery letters to people explaining how everything works, I ask and answer. So how would that rank me if all the people that found me annoying downvoted me, but all those that I had helped simply went on their merry way and didn’t upvote me? If that was the case Trump would be head of the forum.
People already accuse many of us of flagging their posts to get rid of them. I for one never directly flag a post that is an opinion, I only ever mark it as other so it goes to a moderator before any action is taken on it. Sages are all well aware that we have slightly higher powers when it comes to flagging so we are very careful how we use them. One of the reasons you rarely see spam posts here is that we see them and flag them and they are gone, not just hidden and clickable.
So I can imagine the backlash if people thought we could effect their perceived value to the forum by some subjective voter rating system.
I was recently questioned, by someone on my mental ignore list, as to why I bothered reading a thread as I wasn’t forced to read it. Simple answer to that is I keep myself informed, I get my news from more than one place, I learn things from more than one place, I listen and read differing opinions… I make up my mind on things rather than doggedly stick to some preconceived notion of what I should believe and only get that sort of info in my inbox. If the particular thread had anything new in it I’d like to be aware, if I had anything to add then I could. If I didn’t read it I wouldn’t know if there was anything new and useful. In the same way if I ‘ignore’ someone and never read their posts I will never be able to help them or indeed let them help me.
The bottom line of all this gibberish is there are many people here, some are helpful and polite, some are cantankerous, some have an attitude before they even sign up. some just don’t care. I have learned not to respond in haste any more, if I feel like answering after a decent interval then I will, many times I don’t.
All anyone can do is be true to themselves and do their best to be helpful, and as the forum rules say ‘add to the conversation’. We never know the circumstances beyond the keyboard.
Edit: please excuse any typos as I pecked this out on my phone in the Doc waiting room.
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Well that’s not very useful is it. I assumed that forum members could see my profile. I thought only the eyes of those out in the wilderness of the inter webs were blinded from my darkest secrets.
But, as I’m me and not anybody else, I didn’t see that. I turned it back on.
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It is Discourse and is hosted at discourse.org which you can read more about how it works at their own forum meta.discourse.org.
As you now know, the mute or ignore features do exist.
You can suggest some of your other feature ideas in Discourse’s meta forum (if it hasn’t already been requested,) or see if perhaps their is an existing plugin that adds the feature.
Incorrect with respect to Discourse as it is purposefully designed to be policed by the community (ie, the forum members.) To that end, there are official rules to follow (as well as legal Terms.) Reading these rules will earn members a badge and contribute to their gaining a higher privilege level.
Everyone should use these rules and common sense with their own conduct and deciding whether (or not) to flag posts. It is unfair for anyone to invent unpublished rules, however as a member anyone can post here in the Meta category and promote additional rules to be published by the admins. This has happened several times, and after discussion new rules were added. And, of course sometimes rule suggestions are not added.
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Great post Box, especially given how you modeled it.
Most forums of this type are populated largely by we nerd men. Generally speaking, as a group, on average, we nerd men are technically clever while being somewhat emotionally, um, unsophisticated. If we weren’t this we’d be something else that also comes with pros and cons.
So sometimes one anonymous screen name yells at another anonymous screen name. No harm is done unless we take ourselves too seriously. Life goes on, another thread is posted, just another day at the office.
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Most of us here are logic oriented folks, and it’s not that logical to try to manage what an infinite number of anonymous strangers say when it’s far more productive to manage how we hear what they say.
The solution to most forum controversies is for each member to take responsibility for their own emotional experience of the Internet.
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I agree generally, but in actual practice (as evidenced by the unrest happening in many cities) there is part of the population that do not have the ability to restrain themselves.
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