h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ignore lists are far too easy to abuse.

In what way

I may be misunderstanding how this 'ignore list' idea works, but I would have thought it could lead to very disjointed threads.

I'm interested in the suggestion that there is prevailing 'overt acceptance' in h2g2. That's not my perception at all.

Ignore lists can be abused in the following ways:
People ignoring anyone who argues with them.
People ignoring those with a different point of view.
People ignoring others because of ethnic origin, sexuality, gender, etc.
People ignoring the board moderators after being told not to abuse the ignore function.

All of those are real examples I have encountered on message boards with ignore lists.

I think Teaswill raises a good point.

Anyway, wasn't an ignore list raised and decided against somewhere in the mists of the backlog?

Threads are disjointed anyway, especially if there are a lot of people on them. They usually become a collection of sub-conversations, like this one has. But then, I've only just signed up to a site with an 'ignore' list option, and I've had no cause to put anyone on the list - so perhaps that's why I'm failing to see the downside.

Oh, simulpost. I didn't know it had been suggested before. I don't suppose you remember why it was decided against?

Don't worry.

Actually, that was a bit misleading of me, I don't think it was decided against as such; I think Jimster may have mentioned some reasons why they weren't going to do it. Can't remember what they were though.

There's one _major_ problem I can see with ignore lists and why the beeb might not like them...

Reactive moderation...

Imagine the scenario... researchers A, B, & C are involved in a debate - newbie D comes along and starts spouting a load of rubbish... A, B & C all hit their 'ignore' buttons and carry on.

A month or two later, the beeb gets hit with a lawsuit because someone who's not even registered with the site runs across one of D's posts, which wasn't even seen by any of the other people in the debate, but which is either defamatory, racist, whatever...

If the beeb trust _us_ to keep order in here then they'd be pretty daft to leave such a gaping hole in the moderation system.

For those who would like ignore lists then the following top tip from viz:-

"An easy way to simulate the existance of an ingore list of a web based message board is to simply ignore the person involed and pretend you cannot see what they post. The same result with no need to change the site!"

That's the method I like to use.

"A month or two later, the beeb gets hit with a lawsuit because someone who's not even registered with the site runs across one of D's posts, which wasn't even seen by any of the other people in the debate, but which is either defamatory, racist, whatever..."

In order to file a law suit, somebody has to see the illegal post. If somebody sees the illegal post, they can have it removed by clicking the Yikes button.

"one of D's posts"

I dissociate myself from this part, though!

"In order to file a law suit, somebody has to see the illegal post. If somebody sees the illegal post, they can have it removed by clicking the Yikes button."

Yup, but if it's in a thread where everyone else involved is using their ignore button and it's been on-line for several weeks - if someone from outside happens across the comment they might well want to take it further than just having it removed...

Imagine it were you... If someone posted something defamatory about you and you saw it straight away you might well be satisfied with it being removed...
If you came across the same posting four months later and had no idea just how many people had read the post in the meantime, you'd be a little more annoyed (and rightly so!)

"Yup, but if it's in a thread where everyone else involved is using their ignore button and it's been on-line for several weeks - if someone from outside happens across the comment they might well want to take it further than just having it removed..."

Isn't that what the Mods and the Italics are for?

>>Isn't that what the Mods and the Italics are for?<<


Only if they are notified of the posting in the first place.

Not nessecarily, I've been in convos where the removal of a post was nothing to do with any of the participants,

"Imagine it were you... If someone posted something defamatory about you and you saw it straight away you might well be satisfied with it being removed...
If you came across the same posting four months later and had no idea just how many people had read the post in the meantime, you'd be a little more annoyed (and rightly so!)"

But this kind of thing happens anyway. If something takes me four months to find, it takes me four months to find--regardless of how many people have the comment blocked from them.

(I am more likely to be indignant about a post being yikesed on my behalf before I've had a chance to read it, but that's a personal thing and probably irrelevant to this conversation.)

Just reading through the backlog, I was concerned to see the distress that my earlier hypothetical post caused for Anoldgreymoonraker. Hopefully you and everyone else) will have read post 449 now, which explains that my question back there was mainly to do with how we judge 'value'.

Some people come here because the find value in the variety of conversations and with the often-challenging points of view. Others find value in the Journals and more personal contributions. We're paid mainly to create the Edited Guide - and to ensure that other activities don't interfere with that (for example trolling, illegal content etc), so presumably quality writing is held in some esteem.

As most websites are 'judged' according to the page impressions they generate, this might suggest that all these different forms of contribution provide value to each person.

But just to put people's minds at rest, we have no intention of setting up an 'us and them' caste system, and it's unlikely we'd be able to have an 'Ignore' button either - if you want to ignore someone, use the scroll button on your Mouse / browser.

By the way, Anoldgreymoonraker, although I sometimes pop onto the site out of hours, h2g2 staff generally don't work weekends so it's not uncommon for questions to remain unanswered until we come back on a Monday. We're not ignoring you

Jimster

I agree, Reefgirl: I've had some of my posts edited without their having been yikesed. But the h2g2 editors have a lot of posts to trawl through, and I'm sure if there was some automatic doohickey that could cut down on their work, it would be very useful to them. The Yikes buttons serve this purpose to some extent, though their usefulness is somewhat stymied by different people's levels of tolerance. At least with an Ignore list, everyone can impose their own tolerance level without having much effect on others' freedom of speech.

Hi, Jimster. Simulpost, again!

What's your reason for no Ignore list? Is it connected with preventing an 'us and them' situation, or is it just too costly to implement? Or something else that hasn't occurred to me?