I see a lot of time people report a post or reply to a thread starting a flame, with the result the post will be locked because the discussion has no more sense.
Few people knows that you can ignore a thread or an user. I didn’t know it either, I just read it on a thread.
Maybe we should encourage people to use such tools:
when someone clicks on the report button, they could be suggested to just ignore the user or the thread
the existence of these tools could be explicitly stated when someone register to the site the first time
I discovered it surfing on the settings. You have to go to Profile → Preferences → Users. You can mute an user – no notifications, private or direct message – or completely ignore it – the same as mute, but also posts and messages. You can also decide how long. Just tried now and it works.
This can be lead to ghosting. Honestly, I never used it. I prefer to mute a discussion because I feel no interest in it or because it’s a pointless flame. You can mute also entire categories.
But maybe someone can be bored by an user and decide to ignore it completely. It’s softer than report a message.
OK, that’s far too heavy-handed IMO for muting a user who’s being annoying on a particular topic. I appreciate the information, but I don’t think I’d ever use it myself. Reporting the post still seems to me like the best option we have (well, that and not being too quick to take offense from the occasional ill-considered post ).
).