Perhaps the ignore button is the best of a bunch of bad ideas...
Loafy Loaf summarized the problems nicely in #56.
We probably can't let people vote... there's such a strong tendency to pounce on those who are negative about my stock. The valuable open discussion would be destroyed, and threads would become booster clubs. Not useful.
We probably don't want a human moderator, either. Sure, we could get the clone machine (maybe from CLON?) and make dozens of copies of Jill, who is, of course, perfectly fair. But until the clone machine is ready, there isn't any of us who can spend the time, except for a few who are already using all of their time posting to the Boink thread. Moderators work fairly well on Usenet, where the delays are longer, but the delays would be terrible here. As well as the difficulty of finding someone with no opinion so that they could be fair all the time.
The ignore-this-person (let's call it "anti-people-mark") flag is probably the best way to go. It means that anyone who uses it will still see responses to people he's ignored, and will see them in the lists of posts. It probably means that they show up on his people page, where he can reconsider occasionally ("I wonder if that idiot is still an idiot?").
I probably wouldn't mark anyone... because I think that doing so would be bad for continuity in reading the threads. But it seems like the least impact of the possibilities.
How should it work, if it's implemented:
I think that if you want to anti-people-mark someone, you should have to people-mark them first. If the mark is set, then the NEXT and PREVIOUS menu choices would skip that person's posts. Also, those posts could be flagged with a small warning blob on lists of posts within a thread. This would help both to skip those people, and give one a way to see what they were doing by inspecting quickly the first lines for postings which were actually of interest. Clicking on one of those posts from the postings list would work as now.
If the number of posts skipped by Next or Previous were shown, it should be done in such a way that the Next message doesn't move around on the screen, as many of us try not to move our mouse much!
It would be interesting (but might not be desirable, databasewise) to how the number of people-marks and anti-people-marks somewhere, so you could see how you were doing. It could be on a person's profile, and available to anyone who looked ("see how well our campaign against Nimnull is doing... he's ignored by 23 people, and only peoplemarked by 350...") or it could be arranged that you only see your own stats.
Just my thoughts...
Dick |
