First of all, I don’t know if this is considered an appropriate question to ask or not. I understand it’s your own personal business, so I won’t blame anyone for holding their tongue, and if this thread gets zero replies or gets deleted, I understand fully.
But this question has been burning me ever since I joined the Dope. Every now and then I see people talking about the “Ignore list” and about how you should put posters that you don’t like on it.
But I don’t see the point of it. First of all, if there’s a missing post, you might not understand what other people in the thread are talking about. And if someone has said something bad enough for you to want to ignore them, chances are they’ll be provoking some kind of reaction in the thread, and a lot of people will be talking about what they said.
And I can’t really see how anyone could say anything so awful that you’d want to ignore them in the first place. Is the idea here that certain posters are so offensive to some people that everything they say must be upsetting? Or is it that some posters find themselves goaded into debates by other posters, and wishing to avoid such squabbles entirely, choose to ignore them?
I think the function is much more useful on un-moderated forums. I’ve only used it to deal with one troll in another forum I used to frequent. Back in the pre-web days I would have liked to have had such a function for one of the usenet news groups that had a persistent troll.
Here at the SDMB, the mods tend to keep the trolls more or less in line, and the ignore function isn’t needed much if at all, but it should still be available for use by those who let their buttons get pushed too easily.
I have tried it, but it’s disruptive enough to the experience of reading threads that I quit using it. The reasons stated by the OP are what made me stop using it. Someone that provocative (that would push one’s buttons enough to prompt use of the Ignore function) often gets quoted, and so it isn’t as if you will actually miss their posts anyway.
I don’t use the Ignore List. I don’t find it difficult to ignore people whose posts I don’t want to read. I just scroll down past them and they go away.
I’ve used it, but here, it’s more annoying in use than not and as Kevbo said - it’s pretty redundant here. On other boards, I’ve used it to block specific users who had a habit of posting lots and lots of large images, or had huge annoying sigs, but never posted anything beyond ‘LOL’, or were just complete and total wankers. None of that happens here.
slightly off-topic… does anyone know the term for (if you’re an admin) putting a particularly obnoxious poster on everyone’s ignore list, permanantly? I know there’s a word for it, but I forget what it is. (And what a slam it is… not even good enough to get banned…)
Just for one person. If it wasn’t there I wouldn’t miss it but since it is, and that one person has never posted anything I agree with or find remotely interesting much less even semi-intelligent, it saves me getting puzzling over another poorly thought out and pointless diatribe.
Yes. I have one person on ignore at the moment. Not because they disagree with me, but because every post is a joke that doesn’t really relate to the topic.
I don’t bother. If a particular poster is uninteresting or irritating at the moment, I just skim over the posts by him/her; I don’t need an ignore function for that. The mods won’t allow, say, someone to post every time in giant screaming red letters, which would making not reading them difficult; if they did, THEN I’d start using the ignore function.
It’s mostly long-banned trolls on my list (I like to read through old threads on occasion; the Ignore list makes it more pleasant). The few active ones that are on there have offended me to the extent that I don’t respect a thing they have to say.
I’ll allow this thread to stay open with the following stipulations:
1.) Don’t mention who, if anyone, is on your Ignore List. That’s a board rule, anyway, so you should be familiar with it.
2.) Don’t hint about who, if anyone, might be on your Ignore List. I don’t want anyone trying to score childish points by trying to get around the rules.
Violating either stipulation will find the poster warned and the thread (probably) closed. I think we can have a pretty good conversation about the reasons why people choose to use an Ignore List without having to bicker about who’s on the list.
To expand on what I said:
I tend to read the post first and the poster second, so, without the ignore list, I’d read a post, go “What’s this?”, look at the poster, and say “oh, nothing important”. The ignore list lets me skip the “What’s this?” question for people who never add anything that I find useful or interesting.
I have about two dozen. Most of them are long since banned, but there are several long-term/semi long-term posters on there. You can’t hang around somewhere this crowded for seven years and not find a handful of people you’d love to fall off the planet.
