Dunno about you guys, but I joined to unwind after a long day and read about cool things the community is working on.
But if certain members of the community annoy me–and there are a couple–, then I’d like the option to block them. Sometimes muting threads isn’t enough because those annoyances might share your interests, and you might have to interact either way.
I don’t think it was meant towards you … Your comments and posts always had been accompanied with reasonable points , even in an argument, you had taken your time to lay out reasonable points and argument with detail information… even if i may not be in agreeable circumstances with you, your comments and posts always worth a read , your commitment in your thoughts and inputs are always admirable …
What do you have in mind? (We can change the rules.)
Like ban everyone tallking about politic/religion/sex etc.? It won’t work…
No. 
As a general rule, I’d assume that anyone who thinks someone might want to ignore them is too self-aware to be a PITA on the level that people want to ignore them.
To pick up @dfabulich 's image of the park, I can deal with the litter, but I have an issue with people playing music I don’t like out loud on their boom box or whatever. They’re within their rights to do it, they’re not hurting anyone and I still want to go over there and kick the whole thing over cause they annoy me. Since that’s not great for them or the community here at our local park I’d rather have some earbuds.
Cause again, I’m specifically not talking about people committing flaggable offences, just people whose way of posting I find personally offensive. I come from a debate culture with clearly delineated ways of presenting or countering an argument, including a burden of proof for every point you raise.
Let’s say we are currently having this discussion right here. Now, someone comes into the thread and posts, ‘IDK what you mean, we don’t need an ignore feature’. That may be their valid opinion, and they’re not derailing the thread or spamming it, but it’s just not good enough for me since it’s devoid of any evidence to support the statement and if all that poster’s contributions to any thread they ever post in are like that I plain don’t need them around. Worse are people who just make up their evidence, admittedly, but I’ve only seen very rare cases of that around here. Imagine someone posting to this thread, ‘if we don’t get an ignore feature people will commit suicide cause they can’t escape the meanness of other forum goers’. Still not malicious or derailing the thread or spam, just a very harebrained personal opinion. And again, if that happens a lot with a given poster then I don’t want to be around them.
Flags are fine for policing actual flaming, trolling, spamming etc. but there are nuances to human interaction that are best handled by two people ignoring each other. In a social situation, I can just go where that person is not. In a forum with open threads where everyone can join, well, an ignore feature would make it easier on everyone even if it’s a cheap way out.
Also… @Avery_Moore it’s so funny you mention the Star Wars thread cause that’s definitely one place where I felt like I wanted to ignore someone.
I block users under the following criteria.
I do this by using permanent marker on my monitor to remove the offending posts. I’m on a first-name basis with my local computer parts guy.
Well, no matter what policy I defend I can say the time I’ve spent around here has provided me with a mostly positive experience. Sure, I’ve had a few disagreements and a few arguments gone sour (there was an individual here I borderlined hated but they’re gone now so all is well).
We have here a community that seeks to provide shelter to those who have suffered societal segregration yet manages to keep it’s composure without forming an overly oppresive enviroment for the rest. For the most part there’s a happy medium, sense of respect and tolerance amidst the people, even if they possess entirely different opinions and mindsets over certain things. You can’t say the same about other social medias or the internet in general.
Given the kind of forum this is, the fact it’s policied by mods and has no block feature, I think it ain’t that bad.
Particularly not in a community where many of the games themselves deal with such issues and will often contain allegories to their real-world equivalents, thinly-veiled or no, intentional or no.
The immediate price to pay will be that you’re going to see either gaps or blacked out text in such threads, similar to almost any freedom of information request you might make with the courts or the government, which can on occasion make it very hard to follow what’s going on.
Granted, but I’m not below unignoring someone to get me some context if I realize I’m reading a statement in reference to something or someone I’m not usually seeing. I mean, ignoring users has been a staple of most any forum software for the past 20 years that I recall. It’s not like reinventing the wheel; this is a problem that was solved over a decade ago already.
Never mind that any opinion on anything can be divisive. Also see the Star Wars The Last Jedi thread. Or my personal dislike of democracy. Hell, I once had a fight with someone over the validity of capitalism because their idea saw the generation of wealth as happening in a vacuum. Politics, sex and religion make for some of the best stories for a reason. The Three Musketeers has all three of those and look where that got it.
Keep to the topic 
Depends on whether ignoring or un-ignoring is implemented as a casual action, I’ve been on other forums where un-ignoring required some sort of approval or waiting-period, which can still make it inconvenient, even if it was implemented to prevent spamming the function.
On the one hand implementing it as a casual action makes it into a very cheap tool, but if you try to give more weight to the decision, it eliminates the convenience you speak of and you’re going to have to live with gaps and blacked out text.
Given the safe-haven nature of this forum, I would not support the cheap version here, ignoring, if it’s going to be possible here, has to be an action with some real weight to it and not a whim, as many people who come here including me are ignored, talked down to, etc on whims every single day.
Not wanting to engage to the point of not wanting to see someone’s content at all is something I can tentatively support, but not as a casual feature, at least not here.
This is not primarily a raging politics forum where ignoring is useful as the “time-out” or “cool-off” button on occasion.
Lastly on some other forums I’ve been on in the past some of the users I most wanted to ignore where the ones I couldn’t because the worst bigots were some of the mods, whom you cannot ignore, which can be a very big flaw in the system.
So the tyranny of the majority, eh? Well that’s often no good for people like me if the majority decides they’d like to have a good old fashioned stoning of the gays, for example.
But, as @Eiwynn just said maybe not discuss this right here and now.
Relax, I’m not about monarchy or something 
I just mention that in democracy it’s hard to change anything thanks to bureaucracy and differences in sociality.
Yes. As much as I love most of authors on this site, many of the users are very… sensitive.
I think it’s worth saying that CoG has done a remarkably good job of creating a forum community that’s free from most of the acrimoniousness that you tend to find online.
At the same time, there are still times when an ignore list would be constructive. There will always be people that you or I will find abrasive or otherwise prefer not to deal with. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re breaking any rules, or even making the forum a worse place - but there are some people who just aren’t going to get along.
Hmm… am I right in thinking that browser software’s available that effectively allow you to create your own block list, even on forums that don’t otherwise support it? That could be one solution to the OP’s request.
I must shamefully admit that was mostly an obscure barb thrown at some of the ever anonymous but rampant flag-throwers. I well remember my righteous anger the one time I had a perfectly legal post flagged into hiding and I’ve seen it happen to other people. Maybe those overactive flag-throwers might be better off with the ability to ignore people whose posts they don’t care for.
Honestly, that might be worse. If people have the ability to ignore whoever they want to, that could severely limit the potential for discourse on the forums. Eventually there will be a point where a portion of people will have ignored so many others that they essentially have their own clique formed, and no outside voices are allowed into their clique. When things like that are allowed to form, it really hurts the ability to talk and share with people, which is, arguably, one of the main focal points of this forum.
At least flagging is handled on a case-by-case basis by a third party (the mods). That seems like a more fair system than ignoring everyone you don’t like.
if we take into account that the mods JUST NOW banned a user who edited harmful links into quoted posts, ignoring instead of flagging might, yeah, be a very bad idea.
Granted, this luckily is NOT one of the forums where the mods would go ‘its their decision to post that, no one has to click the link, so just ignore them’
Not necessarily. Posts get auto-hidden after X amount of flags. This is kinda like Reddit, just without the ability to counter flags with upvotes.
And again, not anything someone might not like is necessarily against the rules. There is a gap that shouldn’t be covered by flags or moderation but might still require some kind of help.
Yeah, I kind of agree with you there. In a way. It’s a very case-by-case problem, sort of.
If someone rants about murdering small children, maybe that should be hidden. If it’s a completely innocent post that a handful of people might have been offended by, it probably shouldn’t be hidden.
But really, all that should be done to fix that is change it from auto-hiding posts with enough flags, and make it something mods can do actively at their own discretion, maybe while they’re reviewing the post or the thread to see what lead to that point, etc, etc.
I dunno, mostly just spit-balling here.
Maybe they could limit how many people you ignore or something. Maybe make it so you only ignore them on that one thread.
And it would be up to the users if they want to limit their discourse, it’s obvious a fair amount of people already don’t listen or have no interest in honest or sincere discourse so it wouldn’t make much difference to them. Just my on the fly thoughts anyway.
But frankly I don’t expect them to add that option so I’m not too concerned how those in charge would look at this. Do I think it would be nice? Yes. Do I expect or demand this feature? Nope. 