Geni.com have used the “ignore member” for 4 months but are about to remove it.
The “ignore member” has an immediate appeal, especially with some prolific baiters, but since these baiters also add valuable content that others non ignored members respond to, the “ignore member” kind of fragmentises sensible threads. (Some baiters even had fun adding seemingly innocent URL’s, that caused to have other members put on ignored inadvertently, NOT FUNNY!)
An “ignore thread” would probably be more useful for when a thread goes silly or off-topic, so you can ignore the annoying behavior rather than person.
Thanks for the feedback edwinfoo. The history behind this suggestion is that I am a very active contributor on “Geni.com” forum (they use bbpress).
The forum mob tends to end up in flamewars due to the moderators not being able recognize even simple “ad hominem” flame baits and step in in time. Threads gets hijacked and flamewars breaks loose across several threads and all the moderate contributors suffer as a consequence.
There are some clever trollers creating sock-puppets and repeatedly throwing small baits on certain targeted users. When the targeted user eventually snaps, he is the one that unfairly gets blocked.
I neither think a thread creator should be able to “edit” other contributors posts, only “flag” them as either “irrelevant” or “flamebait” and by that”hide” the text of the offensive/irrelevant post, not the fact that there is a post. Basically like putting a big fat stamp over it. The offender would then have to dispute the matter via PM with the thread owner or forum moderator.
Further there could be a “3 flagged posts in 1 thread blocks offender automatically from further posts to that specific thread”
