Simple question really. It’s not something I plan to use, but I’m curious. What does it mean to put a member on my ignore list? Does it mean I won’t see threads opened or replies made by him/her? Or does it mean that the person won’t be able to send me private emails?
I know it’s something taken very seriously around here, witness the strict rule against telling somebody they’re on your Ignore List. So I’m naturally curious.
I found the use of ignore unworkable. Half the time, other posters quoted the ignored, hence making the content of their posts entirely visible anyway; the other half of the time, I coud barely figure out what the hell people in a thread were talking about, as I only got a portion of the conversation.
Thank you for this little example of solvitur ambulando.
Honestly I don’t see much use for an ignore list if that’s what it does. Even if you think someone’s stupid, or a jerk, or whatever, don’t you still sometimes need to read their posts for reasons of continuity in a thread?
Exactly. That’s why I don’t use the feature at all. I tried once, and half the time ended up reading the posts anyway, because I couldn’t tell what the hell was going on.
I use the Ignore List to filter out posts by “babblers” whose posts are usually content-free and rambling—especially posters who are hard to understand, and after you go to the effort to decipher what they were trying to say, you’re left thinking, “I reread that post four times for that?” And people who regularly quote an entire, long post just to add a childish one-line attempt at humor. Yes, you can just skip over or skim these posts, but, then from time to time I get sucked into them, and always regret it. It’s much harder to skip past posters who try to use big fonts and colors to give their pointless posts the illusion of being interesting. And people who have big, distracting sigs. (I like sigs in general, so I don’t want to turn them off, entirely, just avoid the obnoxious ones.)
Browsing the Boards is just a wee bit more pleasant forme with a few posters on Ignore.
If these posters say something worthwhile, they’ll usually be quoted. If you need to read the post to understand the thread, there’s a link in the ignored post to click to show that one post.
I rarely use the ignore feature but it did come in handy when I wanted to avoid Dopers who were behaving like raving lunatics. Took 'em off ignore when they were banned.