Ignore a given thread?

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Discussion of general topics related to the new release and its place in the world. Don't discuss new features, report bugs, ask for support, et cetera. Don't use this to spam for other boards or attack those boards!
MrTufty
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Ignore a given thread?

Post by MrTufty »

Hi, one of my users on my forum is curious as to whether Olympus will give him the ability to select to ignore threads he's not interested in. I'm pretty sure we can't do it on our current 2.0.13 board, but when Olympus does eventually get released, it's a feature he'd find useful. So, any ideas as to whether it's in there or not?

Graham
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Re: Ignore a given thread?

Post by Graham »

Ignoring threads isn't. Ignoring users (via the blacklist/foes feature) is.

DOn't know if this helps
"So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish"

Graham
Eeek, a blog!

MrTufty
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Re: Ignore a given thread?

Post by MrTufty »

It's close enough. It's not a big deal anyway, just something one of my users was curious about, as I say. Not to worry.

blobber
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Re: Ignore a given thread?

Post by blobber »

That sounds actually like quite a useful feature, especially for those forums that keep having problems with annoying users, we've made the experience that deleting/censoring posts or even threads pretty much always creates even more trouble and doesn't help to resolve the situation itself.

But keeping all those offtopic discussions and crusades in the forum anyway, annoys the "serious users" who only want to talk about specific stuff and don't want to see pointless debates going on.

In that context it would definitely be pretty cool if moderators could make "recommendations" to ignore certain threads or postings, possibly even by employing different "tolerance modes" for users with different requirements or users in different situation, i.e. someone who just wants to check a forum for important threads at work wouldn't want to see irrelevant threads then, while he might still be interested in them at home.

This would create quite a diplomatic solution to a very common problem: users could simply chose whether they want to display all threads/postings, or only those that were specified to be worth to be viewed by the admins/moderators.
So users could simply decide to have the moderators make a pre-selection and rule out anything that doesn't seem that important to the average user, and still OFFTOPIC discussions could be allowed and kept.

So, making use of that functionality could be entirely optional, the admin might even enable it only for certain sub forums that are known to cause problems.

And when a users is making use of this feature there should always be a short notification that reads something like:

"you are currently viewing the forum/thread in reduced mode, xx threads and xx postings are not being displayed because they appear inappropriate, if you want to display them, click here"

That way, there wouldn't be any new problems because of users who might accidently miss something.

Also, some users might want to override moderators recommendations for other users (friends).

MrTufty
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Re: Ignore a given thread?

Post by MrTufty »

That does actually sound like quite a useful feature. It would be very subjective though. In a way it's a bit like Slashdot's system where you can choose not to see posts below a certain rating. I don't know how, or even if, phpBB's system would allow such a thing. Definitely something to think about for a mod though if someone with more PHP skills than me wants to take up the challenge.

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the_dan
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Re: Ignore a given thread?

Post by the_dan »

It could be integrated with a (potential) Karma system quite well I'd have thought...

MrTufty
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Re: Ignore a given thread?

Post by MrTufty »

Possibly. As long as people can agree on what sort of karma system to implement, since I don't think the devs are ever going to feel it's worth putting it in. Understandably really since I think only a fraction of users will ever find it useful. It is however prime for a mod.

blobber
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Re: Ignore a given thread?

Post by blobber »

Well, I don't think that this functionality would necessarily need to be linked to some sort of "karma system", personally I consider the whole karma thing quite a different and pretty special issue that's certainly much more complex and also much more subjective than what's been suggested here.

So the development effort for such functionality would be considerably less significant than the effort that would be required for a working karma system, also I assume that more users would actually be able to make use of a "thread/posting"-ignore functionality and really benefit from it directly.

Basically, the whole "ignore thread/posting" idea is about enabling some kind of "soft moderation" where moderators would enable users to specify what sorts of threads they want to see or not and by reassuring that only certain types of users (i.e. moderators) can make the corresponding assessments/decisions, a lack of objectivity shouldn't be such a problem as moderators are meant to represent the forum (policies) anyway, and still it would be pretty straight forward to configure specific requirements, so that such "anti-recommendations" would only be applied if more than xx moderators agree.

So you would basically mainly address those threads or postings that do not violate forum rules but that are perceived to be annoying/irrelevant -by the majority of users- nevertheless.

One could even easily enable users to configure custom preferences for each sub forum within the UCP, for example in one of the forums where I'm a frequent user 2 topics are repeatedly brought up by new users and old user often feel annoyed by those pointless discussions and wonder why the moderators don't suppress such threads, so those users would definitely appreciate the possibility to automatically fade out threads of a certain nature.

Also, one could not only support different "tolerance levels" for different users but also different hiding modes for potentially irrelevant threads, the weakest mode might simply display such threads using a different formatting, while more aggressive modes could directly fade out or really hide the whole thread/posting.

On the other hand, for admins/moderators it would also come in very handy in some situations to make use of categories and attributes that are not accessible/visible to the general public/the normal board user.


P.S.: Now that I think about it, it might make sense to consider moving this thread to the "new features " sub forum ?

Mr.Jester
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Re: Ignore a given thread?

Post by Mr.Jester »

SOE game forums already have a system like this. (I think its the same as a karma system) Topics and posts receive ratings, you set a level of tolerence, once the tolerence has been reached, message doesn't display. Though, would be nice to have the ability to flag a thread as ignored and not have to wait for a tolerance to be met.

blobber
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Re: Ignore a given thread?

Post by blobber »

Mr.Jester wrote: SOE game forums already have a system like this. (I think its the same as a karma system) Topics and posts receive ratings, you set a level of tolerence, once the tolerence has been reached, message doesn't display. Though, would be nice to have the ability to flag a thread as ignored and not have to wait for a tolerance to be met.
Well, having a karma system might be ONE way to achieve the functionality, but as a start it should actually be sufficient and also much less subjective to only allow moderators to set the corresponding flags - according to the forum rules.

The "ignore thread" feature should actually not depend on any specific "ratings" but rather block only those threads that may appear inapproriate/offtopic to some users.

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