Unable to ignore moderator account

[Nyaa]

Use case: I ignore all users who post stories that I'm strongly not interested in.

 

[TheMidnightRook]

Staff can't be ignored.

This is intentional.

 

[goblinquest]

You can ignore the thread, honestly makes more sense than ignoring the user. I mean just cause they wrote something you disliked, doesn't mean you'll dislike everything they write.

 

[Flameal15k]

Staff can't be ignored.

This is intentional.

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I can't even remember all of the rules, but this should be obvious - you don't get to ignore mods.

 

[JadeKaiser]

Seems like a pretty bad use-case, tbh. QQ is a writing forum, a place for posting and discussing stories. The Ignore User feature exists for when there is a serious problem: a person you just cannot get along with, or someone actively harassing you, or something like that. Removing swathes of discussion from your own awareness for petty reasons is not exactly conductive to the purpose of the site; there's plenty of people on this site who write stuff that I have a negative level of interest in reading, but we still get along just fine when we run into one another in other threads. Just because a person writes something you don't like, does not mean they will never have anything to say that you will find useful or relevant.

As for not being allowed to put staff on ignore... no duh you can't do that. You need to be able to see it if we post an announcement, or give you a warning and send you a DM to explain the details, or do literally any other action in our role as moderators and admins that could possibly be relevant to you. Unless you have a member of staff harassing you in DMs or something, which it seems you don't, then this is not a problem.

It does make me wonder which staff member you're trying to put on ignore, though. I do write and post things, so it could be me I suppose. You're under no obligation to say, of course.

 

[doll]

It doesn't automatically remove staff from your ignore list when they get their role, funnily enough.

Just because a person writes something you don't like, does not mean they will never have anything to say that you will find useful or relevant.

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This would only matter if you were consuming every available post, though. OP has 36 posts across almost a decade, if you only visit the site to read the CW and don't engage in quests or post your own stuff then ignoring users becomes much more efficient than ignoring each one of their threads. If you wanted to e.g. ignore every WC or Chaos Gatcha story, ignoring YiteWrite would hit like 60 of them with a single click. There are plenty of users with a 0 post count who would face no possible consequences for doing this because they never do anything that could require them to be aware of moderation in the first place. Nyaa isn't quite there but the use case exists, even if they're not the primary audience of the site.

 

[JadeKaiser]

This would only matter if you were consuming every available post, though. OP has 36 posts across almost a decade, if you only visit the site to read the CW and don't engage in quests or post your own stuff then ignoring users becomes much more efficient than ignoring each one of their threads. If you wanted to e.g. ignore every WC or Chaos Gatcha story, ignoring YiteWrite would hit like 60 of them with a single click. There are plenty of users with a 0 post count who would face no possible consequences for doing this because they never do anything that could require them to be aware of moderation in the first place. Nyaa isn't quite there but the use case exists, even if they're not the primary audience of the site.

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Partly fair, I suppose. But there are some moderator actions that could still happen and be relevant. It's not all about warnings. Certain announcements, like if there's an April Fools thing going on and they can't read the announcement/explanation because they ignored the staff member who posted it, for example. Or if their account gets taken by a spam bot, and a staff member has to mute their account temporarily and send a PM telling them to change their password. Or if they want to ask a question about some functionality of the forum, or look for other people asking the question in the past (Hello! This is why we're here today!), they could be unable to see the answer that a staff member gave.

 

[doll]

Having someone on Ignore doesn't prevent you from reading their posts or seeing their threads though, it just means they won't appear in threads, the threads list, or searches until you click Show Ignored Content. In the case of an announcement that doesn't get a site banner, you'll most likely see it the same way as every other user through the front page.

If you post it's certainly a problem because you won't get an alert when a moderator is talking to you and snips a quote of your post to produce such an effect, but if you're just navigating the forum then someone being on ignore hardly matters to your ability to read their posts under your own initiative.

Or if their account gets taken by a spam bot, and a staff member has to mute their account temporarily and send a PM telling them to change their password.

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While not being able to be sent a message by a moderator would be a problem (and most BBS and group chat software that allows block/ignore allows moderators to message you anyway for this reason), if you've lost your account you're going to be reduced to emailing the owners outside of the forum and if you're not posting then being muted isn't a problem anyway. Obviously it's not an ideal situation, particularly from the staff's perspective, but I can easily imagine such a user not caring.

It's a trite technicality, but I bring it up only because even if people are using the forum counter to it's intended purpose, and no compromise would likely be made even if it were feasible to accommodate them, it's easy to see why someone would want to do so.

 

[Zone04]

just means they won't appear in threads, the threads list, or searches until you click Show Ignored Content.

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I would also like to add that with the lack of ability to mass-ignore threads with specific tags (unless you make a URL browser bookmark), it is easier to ignore a user instead. I went through about 14 pages in CW individually ignoring posts under one tag because I dislike those stories, and some users because that's all they create, or I simply dislike their writing style.

Alternatively, an option to ignore a users specific-content instead, such as stories, fixes the entire issue of not being able to see Moderator threads and messages.

 

[JadeKaiser]

I would also like to add that with the lack of ability to mass-ignore threads with specific tags (unless you make a URL browser bookmark), it is easier to ignore a user instead. I went through about 14 pages in CW individually ignoring posts under one tag because I dislike those stories, and some users because that's all they create, or I simply dislike their writing style.

Alternatively, an option to ignore a users specific-content instead, such as stories, fixes the entire issue of not being able to see Moderator threads and messages.

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That's not the purpose of the Ignore function, that's the purpose of the Filter function. Found here:

Spoiler: location

Spoiler: menu open

We have a tool for this. It's a tool that actually works quite well, as far as I'm aware. It can do exactly what you're asking for, a lot more effectively and efficiently, and can actually do a hell of a lot more on top. It is not the "Ignore User" tool.

 

[goblinquest]

That's not the purpose of the Ignore function, that's the purpose of the Filter function. Found here:

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Only problem with that is there are a lot of threads where people post multiple stories. So you could miss out on lot of stories you'd enjoy because you choose to exclude a certain tag. For example I don't like watersports so I add that to excluded tags list. A thread with that tag is filtered out of my search results, all fine and dandy. The thing is that thread had 30 different stories, and only 3 of those stories had watersports. Now cause I decided to filter that tag I'm missing out reading a bunch of stories that I could have really enjoyed.

 

[Nyaa]

Having someone on Ignore doesn't prevent you from reading their posts or seeing their threads though

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Totally does. Repse Krad Eht was temporarily ignored for science.

Spoiler: images

 

[dotted_line]

We have a tool for this. It's a tool that actually works quite well, as far as I'm aware. It can do exactly what you're asking for, a lot more effectively and efficiently, and can actually do a hell of a lot more on top. It is not the "Ignore User" tool.

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Overall the filters are absolutely a more elegant tool, but they've got the problem of not being 'sticky'.

You can use them to get a cleaner result than the ignore user button, but you'd have to spend a variable amount of time re-blacklisting things each time you came back to the site. If you have zero interest in ever reading anything from SI-Georg, who has twenty SI-fics near the front page, it's very tempting to go with the option that takes far fewer clicks.

With that said, I've only done that for four users ever and several of those I had other reasons for ignoring them on top of that.

 

[JadeKaiser]

Only problem with that is there are a lot of threads where people post multiple stories. So you could miss out on lot of stories you'd enjoy because you choose to exclude a certain tag. For example I don't like watersports so I add that to excluded tags list. A thread with that tag is filtered out of my search results, all fine and dandy. The thing is that thread had 30 different stories, and only 3 of those stories had watersports. Now cause I decided to filter that tag I'm missing out reading a bunch of stories that I could have really enjoyed.

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Perhaps, but if you're Ignoring users entirely that sort of phenomenon is going to be MUCH worse and more difficult to manage, and that's what we're comparing it to.

 

[JadeKaiser]

Totally does. Repse Krad Eht was temporarily ignored for science.

Spoiler: images

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I believe they were referring to the fact that there's a little "show ignored content" button at the bottom of the page whenever posts by ignored users are present. Which is true, but it's very hard to notice and doesn't really fix the problem of "when a staff member makes an announcement post, it needs to be visible and obvious to everybody, because that's what an announcement post is for." Nor does it allow you to receive PMs by ignored people, which is kind of important because PMs are how staff members contact a user personally if we need to.

But yes, making it so that you don't see a person's posts and threads is basically the single thing that the Ignore function does, the whole reason it exists and its very definition. If it didn't do that, it would be doing nothing at all. They probably could have worded their post more clearly.

 

[Pure Unadulterated Ego]

Overall the filters are absolutely a more elegant tool, but they've got the problem of not being 'sticky'.

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On this particular issue, it's better just to use the proper filters and bookmark the resulting search. It's not that big of a deal to go back and click on a bookmark even if it's more annoying than being able to save the filters.