Ignore button

[witzend]

Is there a possibility to add a Ignore Button to this Forum 

[Derek Uzzell]

The forum already has an "Ignored Users" feature as standard, so there should be absolutely no need to add one.

If you go into your own forum Profile you should find something like this (though showing 'witzend'  of course)

and if you click on the "Account Settings" box, you should find a screen with an "Other Settings" box

from which the "Ignored Users" feature can be chosen.

The trouble is - as I've said above - this feature does not behave as I (and PaulD the Administrator) would expect it to and, although PaulD has said he will investigate further, he is doubtful that he will be able to change matters.

What you fail to appreciate is that I'm just as keen to exploit this feature as you are and, if it can be made to function and “invisibilize” forum postings, there may be plenty of other forum-members who will wish to make use of it.

(If you believe that an Administrator can add an ignore feature as easily as removing a couple of contentious reaction emojis, you clearly have no understanding of forum platforms.) 

[PaulD]

Thank you for reporting that.

The number of reactions allowed in the limited service group has been reduced from 1 to 0 per day.

Please report any further annoyances and we will react accordingly.

Best wishes,

Paul

[Derek Uzzell]

On 12/20/2022 at 11:13 AM, PaulD said:

...In this instance, the user in question can now only post 1 reaction per day. If the behaviour continues, this will be reduced to 0, with further sanctions applied at our discretion....

 

Still on-going - 2022 December 21, 25, 26, 30, 31 and 2023 January 3

It may be that user witzend believes he is the Invisible Man, or that I should overlook his strange childish behaviour now that he is restricted to a single 'reaction' per day - but he ain't invisible and I'm not charitable.

[PaulD]

Hi,

Following a discussion internally, we have agreed that this behaviour does represent a form of harassment and despite being asked to stop, the user has chosen to continue with these actions. Although we value all our contributors, we have to insist that our users are able to use our service safe from being individually targeted for repeated and unrequested attention.

To enforce this as reasonably as we can, any user undertaking behaviour likely to lead to intentional annoyance for another user, will initially have their service limited, with any additional future behaviour meant to continue the harassment in any way, may result in account suspension. This limitation may be removed upon request following a 3 month cool down period.

In this instance, the user in question can now only post 1 reaction per day. If the behaviour continues, this will be reduced to 0, with further sanctions applied at our discretion.

We want all our users to enjoy this forum, to find the information they need, to join in discussions on topics they are interested in, and to hear the opinions of our expert users and highly experienced members which are shared freely by our community of volunteers.

Thank you to all our amazing contributors.

Best wishes,

Paul.

[Derek Uzzell]

Here we ago again - fifteen  "HA HA" reactions added to my postings by novice comedian witzend during the last 24 hours.

This thread on another Invision Community-powered forum discussed adding new reaction emojis

https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/429819-new-emoji-needed-for-reactions/

and it seems that the O&AL forum might benefit from one of these 

[Derek Uzzell]

As your were solely responsible for the removal of the SAD and CONFUSED reaction emojis, it is startling that your asking for them to be reinstated would find any favour with the forum's Administrator. 

By the time those two emojis were removed you had childishly 'awarded' my forum postings 116 SAD reactions. Your reasons for doing this are your own, but I doubt if your statement that exploiting the reaction system in that way would "seem to be accepted" by forum-members generally. Clearly the Administrator found your actions unacceptable as he removed the SAD and CONFUSED emojis.

The 5 reaction emojis that are the default for a new Invision Community forum were introduced in 2017

https://invisioncommunity.com/news/invision-community/new-reactions-r1016/

but the intended purpose of SAD and CONFUSED was never defined.

There is the potential to have a much larger set of reaction emojis (example here)

but if you have no interest in my postings, rather than reintroduce SAD and CONFUSED,, getting the forum's Ignored Users feature to work effectively should suit you much better.

 

 

[witzend]

On 12/12/2022 at 11:53 AM, PaulD said:

Sorry, it is not as easy.
Can't promise a quick resolution but it is on our list of issues to address. Personally I consider this quite important even though it's use may only ever be implemented by a small number of users, 

In the meantime, thank you for your patience on this matter.

Best wishes,

Paul

 

 

Ok Paul I look forward to seeing the button how about returning the emojis so we can again show our reactions to posts they seem to be accepted and work OK on other Forums

[PaulD]

20 hours ago, witzend said:

When I posted it was as a request to the administrators of this forum to add a feature not for endless meaning less posts on how it don't work now. They easily stopped us from being able to express our opions on posts by removing emoji's so surely adding a ignore feature would be as easy for them 

Sorry, it is not as easy.

The emoji's were an admin function, but the ignore users issue seems to be an error in our implementation of the chosen template. The fact that the post appears as well as the "This post has been ignored" message, seems to me that the class added to make the post invisible is not making the post invisible as we believe it should.

This, unfortunately, is a developer job, but before I make a request to have this investigated, I am just trying to make sure that it is not an overlooked setting somewhere (which it does not appear to be at the moment).

Can't promise a quick resolution but it is on our list of issues to address. Personally I consider this quite important even though it's use may only ever be implemented by a small number of users, 

In the meantime, thank you for your patience on this matter.

Best wishes,

Paul

 

 

[Derek Uzzell]

More testing...

I decided to register one of my alter egos (Larry Lamb) on a (non-motorhome) forum that uses the same Invision Community platform as the O&AL forum..

(I don't know how involved registration is on the O&AL forum now, but the forum I chose had a significant amount of front-end checking, plus a subsequent 24-hour delay before approval was given for Larry to participate.)

Once Larry had been approved, he identified a reasonably long thread that had been running in mid-2022. From that thread he picked out 4 adjacent posts by different forum-members. Larry then went into his Profile and added the user-names of  those 4 posters to his Ignored Users list, ticking the "Posts" box.

Returning to the mid-2022 thread, Larry saw that the content of the 4 adjacent posts was no longer being displayed and in place of each post's content was a message"You’ve chosen to ignore content by xxxxxxx. Options” 

As I said above, this is exactly how I (and PaulD) would expect the Ignored Users feature to behave, but its not what happens on the current O&AL forum. Logically, there is something wrong with the version of the Invision Community platform that the O&AL forum runs on, or the O&AL forum's Ignored Users feature needs to be tweaked to get it to 'blank' posts.

Even if the feature worked properly on the O&AL forum, I see it as being useful but I don't see it being used widely.

Regarding a "one gem in their lifetime" scenario, (and purely as an example 😇) if I had put witzend's posts on my Ignored Users list, each time I subsequently received a "You’ve chosen to ignore content by witzend. Options” message in a thread I was looking at, if I thought his contribution might be a gem, I'd still have the option to read it.

 I remember, years ago, Eddie ("JudgeMental") complaining that the 'old' O&AL forum had no user-blocking capability This was when three forum-members (one of which was Eddie) were at each others' throats on the Motorhome Matters forum. Eventually the forum Administrator had enough and all three miscreants were permanently banned.

This Quoro thread may be of interest as it questions whether internet forums should have an 'ignore user' feature

https://www.quora.com/Would-banning-the-ignore-user-feature-in-internet-forums-cause-less-political-division

[Brian Kirby]

On 12/9/2022 at 4:54 PM, witzend said:

Just thought It would be good to just be able to Ignore all posts by any member whose posts You wouldn't miss like long posts containing out dated links etc Many forums have this facility 

I'm not bothered either way but, philosophically, I think merely ignoring posts by a particular individual is less a case of "some of the people all of the time", or "all of the people all of the time", and more a case of "some of the people some of the time"!  🙂 

In other words, whoever the poster, and whatever the general quality of their posts, almost all whose record is poor unexpectedly submit posts that are useful, and others whose record is good posts that are wrong or misleading.

I agree that it is extremely difficult to detect any usefulness in a few instances, and quite impossible in one or two cases!  🙂  

The danger I see is that by ignoring all posts by a particular poster, one misses the one gem in their lifetime that is, actually, of value.

Having said that, there are one or two on CB whose entire output is complete drivel, or intended to sabotage or subvert any attempt at a rational discussion of any topic, whether motorhome related or not, and I fail to see why their continuing presence is tolerated by Warners - especially as those I have in mind have re-cycled themselves several times after previously being banned.

They are like the habitual drunk who is tolerated by an over-indulgent landlord until he realises that the drunk has become his only customer and he's going bankrupt.  But that decision rests properly with Warners.

[witzend]

On 12/7/2022 at 10:42 AM, witzend said:

Is there a possibility to add a Ignore Button to this Forum 

When I posted it was as a request to the administrators of this forum to add a feature not for endless meaning less posts on how it don't work now. They easily stopped us from being able to express our opions on posts by removing emoji's so surely adding a ignore feature would be as easy for them 

[Derek Uzzell]

This Invision Community forum thread starts in late 2020 and was still being posted to in October 2022.

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/459206-hide-ignored-content-completly/

The thread advertises a purchasable additional plug-in designed to remove all traces of an ignored user. However, comments indicate that the standard "Ignored Users" feature should be effective in automatically blanking postings by the user who is being 'ignored', which presumably would be sufficient for witzend.

[Derek Uzzell]

On 12/7/2022 at 11:26 AM, Derek Uzzell said:

There is an "Ignored Users" feature that can be enabled from within your Profile's Settings but I think this only becomes operational from the time it is enabled.

Further experimentation shows that 'ignoring' a user DOES apply retrospectively.

For example, if I 'ignore' user "Birdbrain" - who used to post lavishly in the old Chatterbox forum - every posting made by Birdbrain in the past gets preceded by "“You’ve chosen to ignore content by Birdbrain. Options” However, as the Content of each of those Birdbrain postings is still displayed, the Ignored Users feature as it stands seems to have no value where Content is concerned. 

I don't know if there's a maximum number of users that one is permitted to 'ignore'. I chose 10 user-names  (just for testing!) and that was allowed. (I anticipated that I could not 'ignore' Moderators or Administrators, and that proved to be the case.)

[Derek Uzzell]

1 hour ago, PaulD said:

After reading a bit on the Invision support board, the lack of functionality around "ignore user", "block user" or "anti-stalking" is well documented. However what you describe here is just weird, perhaps the post is supposed to be hidden until you click 'show post', which is how I would expect it to behave.

Will keep looking into this but my expectation is low that we can change it very much at all. 

Paul.

Yesterday (for testing purposes) I set one of my forum alter egos to ignore user “Derek Uzzell”. Since then , after I have signed in as my alter ego, all of my recent Derek Uzzel postings are visible, but preceded by the message “You’ve chosen to ignore content by Derek Uzzell. Options”.

As you’ve said, logically each of those postings should be hidden and only be displayed if the “Show this post” option is chosen - otherwise ignoring a forum-member’s content would not be worth doing.

All that the choosing the “Show this post” option does is delete the “You’ve chosen to ignore content by Derek Uzzell. Options” message that preceded that posting.

I came across an Ignore User tutorial on this (not for the easily offended!!!!) Invision Community forum

https://afc-chat.co.uk/forums/index.php?/topic/46067-tutorial-mastering-the-ignore-user-feature/

so presumably it can work.

 

[witzend]

9 minutes ago, PaulD said:

Will keep looking into this but my expectation is low that we can change it very much at all. 

Paul.

Just thought It would be good to just be able to Ignore all posts by any member whose posts You wouldn't miss like long posts containing out dated links etc Many forums have this facility 

[PaulD]

On 12/7/2022 at 6:09 PM, Derek Uzzell said:

The Options are "Show this post" or "Stop ignoring posts by xxxxxxxx" or "Change ignore preferences". HOWEVER, directly beneath the "You've chosen to ignore..." message" is the post that was made by the user that I've put on my ignore list. So there's no point offering me the option to show the post as it's already showing!!! 

After reading a bit on the Invision support board, the lack of functionality around "ignore user", "block user" or "anti-stalking" is well documented. However what you describe here is just weird, perhaps the post is supposed to be hidden until you click 'show post', which is how I would expect it to behave.

Will keep looking into this but my expectation is low that we can change it very much at all. 

Paul.

[webby1]

Getting more used to this Forum and beginning to see that an ignore button would be a useful tool.

Sad but................well no just sad.

[Derek Uzzell]

I've been 'testing' the Ignored Users feature and - where posts are concerned - it doesn't work as I had anticipated.

What happens is - having added a forum user's member name to my ignore list and ticked the "Posts" box - when that forum user subsequently posts to a thread and I look at that thread, I get a message "You've chosen to ignore content by xxxxxxx Options".

The Options are "Show this post" or "Stop ignoring posts by xxxxxxxx" or "Change ignore preferences". HOWEVER, directly beneath the "You've chosen to ignore..." message" is the post that was made by the user that I've put on my ignore list. So there's no point offering me the option to show the post as it's already showing!!! 

The implication of the "Show this post" option seems to be that the post will not be visible at that point and - if I want to see it - I have to say so. I understand that an Ignore Users feature is quite common on forums, but,  as I've never used the feature elsewhere, I don't know what it's supposed to do so I may be missing something important.

Advice on this useful tool would be appreciated.

[Derek Uzzell]

There is an "Ignored Users" feature that can be enabled from within your Profile's Settings but I think this only becomes operational from the time it is enabled.

Not sure if this is what you  are looking for, or just an "IGNORE" icon similar to the SAD and CONFUSED reaction icons that have now been removed.