Equivalent of adding an individual to a kill file?

Discourse Feedback
1

Is there any way in Discourse of doing something similar to adding a user to a killfile in a mailing list? Specifically, if I want to block posts from one user, so that:

  • I don’t see new threads created by that user
  • Posts by that user are hidden by default in existing threads (but can be expanded for context if needed)

It seems like there are limited options in Discourse for choosing what is presented to me. I’m aware of the “watch” options, but as far as I can see they need manual action, and they don’t really help at the individual message level :slightly_frowning_face:

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Discourse can plonk users, but the user interface to the ignore feature is not intuitive. Yesterday night I spent a while to search for the setting again and finally found it.

  • Click on a user name or profile picture to go the users profile and summary page
  • On the right side click on “Normal” right next to the “Message” button

There you can switch a user from normal user to muted or ignored user.

The setting is not available for some users. For example I don’t see the setting for administrative users like @brettcannon and @EWDurbin nor on your profile.

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Thanks, I’ve tried that. It looks like what I was after (although it only allows you to ignore for a period, not “forever” - which is probably more forgiving than I would be, but maybe that’s a good thing :slightly_smiling_face:)

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4

Thanks to @pf_moore for raising and @tiran for answering. I can see myself using this…

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5

I’ve used the ignore option for a while now. Some personal experience (YMMV):

  • Ignoring a user does not stop you from seeing them. Their posts are hidden in a thread, but you’ll still know they posted because their icon would still show, and the thread would still be marked as unread.
  • Same goes for new topics. You will still see them on the “new” tab.

I hope I’m doing something wrong here, because as it stands the feature is not doing what I want at all.

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Yes, I’d spotted that icons were still visible. I don’t use the “New” tab so I hadn’t seen that. For my purposes it’s probably doing enough, but presumably you could take it up as an issue with the Discourse developers?

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Doesn’t the usual caveat of ignoring someone apply? You won’t see their posts, but you’ll see replies to their posts.

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There is more going on. Discourse bumps the thread up in the Latest category when an ignored user posts a reply. It looks like there is a normal post. Discourse also indicates posts of ignored users with entries like view 1 hidden reply.

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Ok, so it’s the same as muted posts: they still appear in Latest AFAICT.

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Yes, it’s not perfect. FWIW it’s good enough for my needs, but could do with some tweaks.

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Same for me. The main point I care about is to not have to wade through multiple posts that do little more than annoy me.

Seeing replies is difficult to avoid in a medium like Discourse that explicitly rejects the idea of tree-structured discussions, but I’m weirdly sort of OK with seeing patient people comment rationally on a troll’s rants. (It’s a bit odd that quotes of the rant are hidden while the response is there, but whatever).

Post counts and the “New” list are things I already find unreliable, so having them a bit more broken is a cost I’m willing to pay.

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I’ve never quite grokked Discourse’s sense of “newness” or “updatedness”, including the blue/grey colour number buttons. Mind you, I’ve never tried too hard either: I just set the home page to “Latest” which seems to come close enough to what I want.

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Isn’t this a CoC-related issue? If an individual’s excessive posting rate and an aggressive style of arguing get to a point where they make multiple people uncomfortable, this calls for a some kind of intervention by people wielding executive power, not forcing everyone else to adapt with ignore lists etc.

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Not for me. The fact that I don’t happen to care for someone’s posts or their frequency doesn’t put them in contravention of anything except my patience :slight_smile: I have no idea whether the people I’m looking to ignore are the same as others who have posted here.

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Only if it’s the same person that multiple people are concerned about¹. And even then, if their communication style irritates me, who’s to say it’s me or them at fault? I’ve avoided naming individuals here for precisely that reason, and I’d appreciate it if people didn’t try to infer who triggered my original post.

¹ And even then, I wouldn’t personally feel it’s necessarily a matter for the CoC. “Assume good faith” applies here as much as anywhere else.

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16

/me impressed by @pf_moore working out how to add a footnote with a superscript :wink:

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I have an autohotkey macro that lets me do this with Win-K 1 S (the script is here). But you can also just use raw HTML: <sup>1</sup>.

It probably says too much about how I like convoluted sentences that I felt the need to work out how to do this :slightly_smiling_face:

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Well now I’m even more impressed. I do use autohotkey for running programs etc. But I don’t have anything quite so sophisticated set up.

However I do catch myself out in the act of Inception-level parentheses so I try to pull out before they become too deep :slight_smile:

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Same here: it’s very confusing. And I can never remember what a “topic” vs. “category” is, so that doesn’t help.

Do you do that on the iOS app? I can’t figure out what that setting might be, but I’d love to find it.

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Just the website I’m afraid. ISTR using an android app when we first had a Python discourse. But it seemed to be just a slightly glorified web app so I didn’t bother…