Meh. I’m under no obligation to continue to listen to someone who has proven him- or herself unworthy of being listened to, and if there’s a script to assist with that process, so much the better. “You have to listen to every crazy, stupid, and pointless thing that every moron in the world has to say, or you’re not open-minded!” is… not a philosophy I subscribe to, let’s say.
That said, I reserve my ignore list for people who IMO are flat-out crazy – like, potentially diagnosable – and incapable of being reasoned with. Three or four total over the years.
Yeah, they’re the way they think and behave towards others, which is what I’m talking about, since obviously on a message board we can’t even see each other, so that quote is of entirely limited relevance. Super big props to you for referencing my user name, though!
Having an ignore list on an unmoderated forum makes a lot more sense. Back on [del]The Old Country[/del] Usenet, where a lot of groups were completely unmoderated, ignore lists saved you from having to deal with posters who Just Would Not Shut Up. I don’t mean the usual unhealthy fascination some people have for certain topics, I mean a level of monomania which causes them to intrude their idiocy into threads about something else entirely. The apex of this assholery was called Serdar Argic (aka the Zumabot), a bot which would post rambling anti-Armenian diatribes denying the Armenian Genocide whenever certain keywords came up in a post in some forums. ‘Turkey’ was one of the keywords, leading to a lot of fun around Thanksgiving. Ignore lists were the only way to avoid the Zumabot’s idiocy.
Then, of course, there was the more generic hipcrime crapflood shit and the less prolific but, in some forums, no less tiresome classic Usenet kooks famed in story, song, and net.legends FAQ. Both such phenomena argue rather strongly in favor of killfiles.
The utility on a moderated message board is less obvious, but some users are still tiresome enough to not be worth scrolling past yet can still remain within the rules. A killfile can still be a great convenience around here.
Its main utility, as far as I can tell, is to enable a poster (in the Pit, anyway) to boast about ignoring someone. It’s a kind of nostalgic hearkening back to third grade.
I was going to ignore this thread and not say anything, but I couldn’t help myself.
