Ignore Improvements

[AlexWright]

The ignore function is an extremely essential part of running community services such as Invision. However, I feel as if one of the most overlooked features is a fully functional Ignore and/or Block system. While we do have the current iteration of the Ignore function, it is severely lacking in some departments. The image below is (while themed) on a clean install:

This install has all of the Invision applications enabled (Forums, Blogs, Pages, Commerce, Downloads, Gallery). The above only references Posts (which many assume, and correctly, this refers to the Forums), Messages, and Mentions.

So how can this be improved? There's a number of ways, and a few other items I'd like to add.

1. Add most community applications to the Ignore list. This would mean adding Downloads, Blogs, and Gallery items (very unlikely that the need to Ignore admin generated Commerce content would arise) to this list. If I want to Ignore someone's content, generally I want to ignore all of it, not just some.

2. Extend the functionality of Ignore into a full on Block (perhaps as a user option). Most major community/social media platforms do this. Think Twitter, Facebook, etc., where when you Block a user, they cannot access your content (including your profile) either.

3. Add admin options to force users to ignore each other. Currently this requires logging in as the user and adding to their ignore list. At least make this accessible in the admin panel, and have options to disallow the user(s) to un-ignore/unblock each other.

Numbers 2 and 3 here are major reasons why I moved one community off of Invision and onto a competitor and repurposed the license for another project that doesn't need this functionality yet (yet being the key term, of course). The question of "why these changes, specifically" arose in a conversation with my mod team for the community we moved away. Our main answer was: this lowers the amount of moderation work, and allows us to not need to use posting moderation and/or account suspension between users tossing barbs back and forth. We weren't a large community by any means (about 18,000 registered users), but even so these features were so asked for by the moderation team and users that it caused us to shift platforms. Hopefully something will be done with this feature set in the future.

Cheers,

Alex

[Morrigan]

17 minutes ago, AlexWright said:

2. Extend the functionality of Ignore into a full on Block (perhaps as a user option). Most major community/social media platforms do this. Think Twitter, Facebook, etc., where when you Block a user, they cannot access your content (including your profile) either.

If its extended to pages I think that the admin should be able to turn on/off showing ignored content in certain areas. I have a database that anyone can contribute to and its not actually attributed to any 1 user (even if the end user submitted it) but there is no way to have my cake and eat it to so if they could ignore all content then a user could inadvertently submit the same content as the other person because they don't see it.

But overall I agree.