I hate you, Milkman Dan.
Just kidding. That’s favorite character from Red Meat after Bug-Eyed Earl
Just so you know, one of the Mods’ rules here is not to talk about who you’re ignoring. I’m not really certain about the reasoning behind it, but that’s what it is. You can probably find a more complete explanation in the “About This Message Board” forum.
Could I put myself on my ignore list? would my posts disappear as I typed them? Hmmmm… I have a few posts I wish I could apply this to.
Actually, I tried that once I saw this thread.
Evidently you can’t put yourself on ignore.
Oh well. I’ll just have to avoid myself as best I can.
I sometimes read posts by people on my Ignore list, but because they’re on my Ignore list I don’t feel the need to respond. Since they’re on my Ignore list I could have read the thread without seeing their post, so even though I actually did read it I can act as though I didn’t!
It’s sort of a head game I play with myself. I’m not sure what this says about my mental state, but it’s worked out pretty well for me so far.
If I were ignoring you, I could have made that joke and felt all original and funny and obscure.
But nooo. You had to be cool, too, and be quicker than me, to boot.
I hate you, Sublight man!
:mad: 
Band name! Or a good user name.
Anyway, I don’t use the ignore function. I have had people on other boards that did not have the ignore feature and I just had to learn not to read posts and respond to by those people who annoyed me.
Unfortunately, I am a moderator on another board and so I can’t ignore the annoying people there.
No, but you can ban them. 
There are two posters on my ignore list, both for completely different reasons. One made a comment quite a while back that really dropped my opinion of him/her, which let me know that there was a particular subject it just wasn’t worth getting into with. Having that poster on my ignore list reminds me of that. I happily respond to the person’s post when I want in other subjects, but this keeps a damper on that one particular incindiary topic.
The other poster just pisses me off 95% of the time, and having him/her on the ignore list makes me take an extra step if I want to respond. Having that opportunity to reconsider is best for everyone’s demeanor.
Putting posters on an ignore list makes ME a better poster, because it limits my flying-off-the-handle potential (which never really occurred in the first place, but it’s better to be safe than sorry).
Heh. I used to post on one of the Delphi forums until I finally unsubscribed from it. I had put so many people on ignore for being total assholes that I would open threads with 20+ messages and maybe be able to read 2 or so.
Yeah, it works. I hated reading through lists and having an asshole post a message in the middle. It was like stepping in dogshit while walking through the park.
I have a question for the dopers who uses/has used the ignore list to one degree or an other, specifically:[ul][li]Kyla[]Sublight[]Larry Mudd[]Cheesesteak[]Medea’s Child[]Lamia[]umop ap!sdnMunch[/ul]Hypothethically, what if a (usually annoying / grating) poster on your ignore list posted valuable advice? Or take it a step further, what if the advice you missed (because it wasn’t visible on your monitor) could end up saving your life? [/li]
Totally Far-Fetched & Overly Dramatic Example: You despise the faux doper Joe_Mechanic’s posts & ignore him. In a SUV thread, he mentions the fact he has inside knowledge that Honda CRVs have defective gas tanks that could cause them to explode on impact. You drive a CRV and Honda hasn’t completed it’s recall appeal process with regulators. You get rear-ended and are severely burned. Any regrets?
I have a genuine reason for asking - but don’t wish to elaborate.
I have about 10-15 people on mine. At first I had the same feeling you did, but after a few times of clicking and seeing “yep, still a jackass,” I stopped caring. Now I only read them in threads where I’m the OP
I suspect most people who use the feature are GD regulars. If it’s a thread where you really want to know, there’s the “read post” button.
And, them’s dice I’ll roll.
I expect the ignore feature is more useful on message bards that allow HTML content, which can be annoying (or I suppose offensive) to scroll past. I suppose it could be marginally useful here is there was a poster who consistently made huge, long stream-of-consciousness posts that were also annoying to navigate past by conventional means.
And of course there’s the most widespread use for ignore lists; the ability to tell the person that’s you’re putting them on ignore (except we are not allowed to do that here).
Oh my God! My car is a deathtrap.
::runs out of thread to throw keys into the lake::
Ha! I popped in specifically to provide an update, so I’d be happy to answer your hypothetical, JohnBckWLD.
First, the update: One of the members on my ignore list has not dropped out of sight, as I thought that s/he had. All that this poster ever does is post incredibly stupid (glue-huffer stupid) questions in GQ. I sometimes accidentally open them before they sink like stones, and the [THIS POSTER IS ON YOUR IGNORE LIST] in the OP spares me the time of reading something that experience has shown will be a total waste of time, so I back out.
Because this thread has been bumped, and because each time I stumble in to one of this poster’s threads my reaction is “What? Not banned/bored yet?” and because I have a bit of time to kill, I temporarily “unignored” the poster and did a quick review of their posts from the last month to see if I was too quick to judge and have been missing something. (I do recall a couple of posters who turned out to be quite interesting after inauspicious beginnings.) Turns out I haven’t missed a damned thing. The pattern persists – questions with trivially obvious answers, or questions that are so absurd as to be a complete waste of time. Based on the number of replies, it seems that the poster is being ignored (via ignore lists or manually) by nearly everyone. The poster’s participation in other people’s threads is nil, which is probably a good thing, and almost certainly how they’ve avoided annoying people enough to earn a banning.
Back on the list for <CENSORED>, then.
So, to answer the question, I don’t think that the hypothetical scenario presented (or anything remotely like it) is likely to come up, given the way that I use the ignore list. I don’t “ignore” people because they rub me the wrong way. I only “ignore” posters after it becomes clear that they don’t have anything useful to say. There has to be a pattern in which the person is uniformly having a negative impact on the signal-to-noise ratio. I honestly don’t believe that <CENSORED> is capable of acting as a conduit of information – or even posing a question that has an interesting answer. Total waste of time.
Useful information coming from this person would be like #1 Bass Pale Ale coming out of a skunk’s ass. I’m not going to let a skunk build a den under my sofa in the faint hope that maybe I’ll get a nice frosty one out of it, sometime down the road. I suppose I’d regret it if the skunk did start leaking golden elixir into a pile of old leaves in the back yard, but I trust my assessment that it just ain’t gonna happen.
You get the feeling that Ignore Lists would be far more popular if posters were permitted to indulge in this schoolyard stuff (“WELL! I’m not paying any attention to you.”)
It might be useful to have Ignore Lists for entire subjects - the irritating ones that provoke high blood pressure and never lead to anything useful.
Not clicking on them works just as well, though.
The way I see it: even the most obnoxious person on the board has something useful to teach me, namely, “Don’t be like this.” There are a couple who have, as Larry Mudd said, absolutely nothing of merit to contribute and have consistently proven that to be the case. Still, putting them on an ignore list just seems petty and wouldn’t do me any good. In fact, every time I saw “ignored poster” it’d just remind me and annoy me even more.
Plus, what if one of those posters is trapped under a filing cabinet in a burning building and posts on the SDMB pleading for help? I like to think that I’d be around to see their post, and ignore it manually instead of having the computer do it for me.
The people who used to be on my list were generally there because they were constantly posting things that were infuriating and valueless. Which is why pretty much everyone who made it on my list eventually got banned.
If I ran across one of their posts in GQ, I would probably check out their contribution, unless other posters complained about his post further down in the thread. In GQ, it’s pretty unlikely that I’d get the sort of maddening post that prompted me to put them on the list in the first place.
What, you mean you read other threads?