Option to block users comments

Old lady H wrote:

Except that relies on the quiet, polite, civil people to actually participate. Actively. The equivalent of intervening in bad behavior at a party. Who is more likely to make their voice(s) heard, the "drunks" or the wallflowers???

H.

I think its more of who has jobs that allow them to post to MP at work...

Todd the Tangler wrote:

I'll respond with D.H. Lawrence's assertion in 1930 that Jane Austen was a "mean old maid," "thoroughly unpleasant, English in the bad, mean, snobbish." 

I would've blocked her too. 

I doubt if D.H. Lawrence ever met her, since she died in 1817.  In any case, her books are really enjoyable, irrespective of her personality.

I've been part of a few online communities with the ability for individuals to selectively block seeing posts from people they don't want to see. There's absolutely NO downside to this. The person being blocked generally has no idea (and shouldn't be notified, IMO, otherwise certain trolls take pride in being "persecuted" by being blocked) and, overall, the quality of discourse improves.

There are certain folks on MP who some folks find annoying and I enjoy. Likewise, I wouldn't be surprised if some folks find me annoying. And there are people who I'd love to block. I say bring on the ability to do so, just to reduce drama and the overall tendency of threads to derail into posturing and moralizing.

Old lady H wrote:

Except that relies on the quiet, polite, civil people to actually participate. Actively. The equivalent of intervening in bad behavior at a party. Who is more likely to make their voice(s) heard, the "drunks" or the wallflowers???

H.

True, but I think more polite, civil people would actually participate if the trolls were less impactful to the conversations ;-)

Jon Hillis wrote:

Yes because the circle jerk that is reddit is such a great example...

I just had a comment downvoted to the hiding point bc I used SoMo instead of South Mountain... That's the kind of stuff I like to see.

Reddit is a MASSIVE community. There are good subreddits and bad subreddits, but to paint the entire forum as a circle jerk because a few of the 130,000+ individual forums are that way is unreasonable. There are great conversations to be had there, and I think the downvoting/upvoting feature is what allows that to work.

Chris Hill wrote:

I doubt if D.H. Lawrence ever met her, since she died in 1817.  In any case, her books are really enjoyable, irrespective of her personality.

I am blocking you bc you like Austen... Such dull reading imo

FosterK wrote: There seems to be a lot of confusion between the implementation of a block function (controlled by each individual user, with their own separate criteria) and banning (controlled by admins and prevents that user from participating at all).

If there is a genuine fear that you may miss good content from the trolls, why not add a time-limited option to each block? That way, if a user thinks that someone's behaviour is probably temporary, they can set a timeline to see that user's posts again.

There also seems to be a lot of confusion over what admins do on this site, and the difference between local/regional administrator and the site administrator.

Local/regional administrators do not control forum content and also do not remove users.  They can flag inappropriate posts like anyone else, but only the (single) site administrator can remove posts/replies, topics, or users from the site.  Following this, no one "monitors" the forums per se, aside from when the site administrator removes something that has been flagged by a user.  I suppose you could call that selective moderation, but there isn't anyone that is following every single topic to make sure that everything is kosher.  Hence why some garbage gets through, and some doesn't.

If you think this or some other function is useful - I don't see an issue with this one in particular, but I personally probably wouldn't use it - contact the site administrator. Search user "MP Team".

Jaren Watson wrote: I’m with Tim and the Buddha on this one—scary how often those blokes coincide.

But I’ll add, since people are not averse to naming people directly, the Tradibans of the forum have provided substantially more value than the Mettys.  5 comments in 5 years, and every one of them a complaint?

Who’s the real troll here?

I'd like to not see any of them, and see everyone else.  That hurts no one.  That's not hard to do.  Virtually every social media platform has this feature.  No downvoting, no uprating, no "naming", no doxxing, no drama, just filtering.  Why everyone conflates this feature with all the other nonsense that has been mentioned is beyond me.  It's not a difficult concept to grasp.  You just won't see comments from certain people.  And if seeing quoted responses to those comments bothers anyone that much, just block them too.  Most of the time responses to trolls aren't worth reading anyway and the people that respond most to trolls often don't contribute much either.  Come to think of it, I'd probably block most people except for RGold, Mark Hudon, Tim Lutz, Greg D, GregG, SPrice and a few others.  Show me that forum and I'd never piss on a cornflake again.

Reformed Troll wrote: Old Me:  I'm always surprised by the relative softness of a group of people who you'd imagine would be rather tough.  Hanging of the side of a cliff or mountain.  Placing pro that may/may not save your life.  Beating the hell out of your body.

And then we have calls for "how do we block the annoying, time wasting, nonsensical man?!?!"   LOL!

 Aren't you ashamed? 

Nope.  Do you let mosquitos keep biting you, or do you swat them?  That's all I'm really talking about.  A virtual flyswatter.  Not that difficult to understand.

 Tradiban's name keeps coming up, the guy climbs harder and more often than likely 98% of the people on this thread.

Cool.  If only there was some correlative factor between climbing prowess and level of annoyance, and maybe that would be relevant.

New Me:  I'm for this idea to make the forum a less annoying space, as long as everyone else is okay with it.

That's more like it.

Reformed Troll wrote: the guy climbs harder and more often than likely 98% of the people on this thread.

So what?

OK, I want a button that will automatically cause kittens to die when I don't like someone's post, can the admins do that for me?

thx

BillS wrote:

Because this is a climbing forum and people who actually understand climbing invariably create higher quality posts.

If you thinking climbing harder or more often invariably makes you understand climbing more, I think you're mistaken. I've met plenty of people who have enough experience that they should know better, but don't. How you spend your time is more important than how much time you spend.

BillS wrote: Flat, across the board posting limits.  3 posts per user per day - period.  

IMO, you complainers can look in the mirror and suck it.  Go reply to one of his posts and put him in his place.  Oh wait, you can't, you're just a whiny noob and you're no match.

I will use my last post in this thread for today (i am relegated to two per day), to agree with you here good sir and award you gold bars.

don'tchuffonme wrote:

Come to think of it, I'd probably block most people except for RGold, Mark Hudon, Tim Lutz, Greg D, GregG, SPrice and a few others.  Show me that forum and I'd never piss on a cornflake again.

Except SPrice left because he was tired of bad behavior by certain trolls...

Hey All,

Thanks for the all the posts and emails on this. Providing the ability to block/hide/downvote specific users is definitely on our radar and has been for years. The pros/cons of such a feature are presented pretty well above in this thread already. Too laissez faire and the signal/noise ratio plummets; too restrictive and you run the risk of starving the fire that drives forums of oxygen.

All that said, from a product development standpoint our priorities right now are squarely focused on improving the utility of the apps (both web and mobile, and across all the 'Project' activities). Inspire, educate, and outfit - that's pretty much our mission with the apps. Inspire you to find new crags and new adventures, educate you on what a specific climb or area is about, and then to outfit you with a trail map + guidebook on your smartphone so you can access all that info while out in the wilds - even when offline.

Getting back to forum health, right now the best tool we have for keeping the forum useful and civil is the community itself - via self regulation and the flag button. We review every flag that comes in - some get removed, and some get left as-is. The more flags that come in for any given post the more scrutiny that post gets.

Anyway, just thought I'd share an update on what we're up to and our top priorities.

Thanks

daveg Gauvin wrote: Ha ha! This is great.   I don't think it would be hard to add the feature.  Making it visible to certain people to see how many people have blocked them might serve a valuable community service in showing who's oppinions are not cared for.

I volunteer my spare time working in ERs in the rural colorado hospitals when the weather is bad. As much as i hate getting on this forum and see such unworthy comments from such terrible people, it becomes inevitable as i run out of things on the internet to look at while waiting for patients to show up. I don't want to see it. I don't want to hear it at crags. Maybe if these people know they are not wanted, they won't even show up to the crag. That would be nice.

Cheers

But Dave, what if you are downvoted/blocked the most?  Wouldn't you wonder every time you were out climbing if that guy/girl over there was one of the people that blocked you? What if it was your belayer, would you worry they wouldn't give you the best belay? 

What if there was a teen girl that gets blocked the most, and kills herself over it...who is liable? Wouldn't the blocking humiliation serve the same purpose as bullying?

Just trying to think through what the ramifications might be.

don'tchuffonme wrote:
Nope.  Do you let mosquitos keep biting you, or do you swat them?  That's all I'm really talking about.  A virtual flyswatter.  Not that difficult to understand.
Cool.  If only there was some correlative factor between climbing prowess and level of annoyance, and maybe that would be relevant.

That's more like it.

Alaskan hardman climbers don't even notice the ten zillion mosquitoes biting them.

If someone starts a thread about how to solo safer, it needs someone to say that soloing can't be done safely when you get your first pair of shoes and a harness with a PAS and a single rack of cams. Some kid that's going through the normal phases of bulletproofness will be heavily influenced by that, just like they are in other sports. That's not something that can simply be ignored. The killer clown with the candy needs to get killed! Lol 

Paul I am not sure if you're aware but there is a really popular movie called FreeSolo out that is inspiring every idiot kid to go free solo... Pretty sure a thread on MP is not going to be the cause of someone deciding to solo...

I agree it should be added.

I often skip the posts of folks I don't want to read. But it takes a second or two to read who is the author of every post and skip to the next post and read who that is, etc. If you could just filter them out in one shot it would end up saving a lot of time in the long run because you wouldn't have to check who was posting every time.