Reminder: comment filtering

Posted Jan 21, 2016 8:14 UTC (Thu) by seyman (subscriber, #1172)
In reply to: Good riddance by HelloWorld
Parent article: The State Of Meteor Part 1: What Went Wrong

A quick reminder that LWN has a comment filtering system:

- Head on over to https://lwn.net/MyAccount/
- Go to the "Comment filtering" section and click "Edit filtering" then use the "Add user to filters" form.

Reminder: comment filtering

Posted Jan 21, 2016 8:27 UTC (Thu) by liw (subscriber, #6379) [Link] (6 responses)

Note to those who use the "reset to defaults" button when playing with colour options (in order to get links to be visible): that will reset the filtering to "disabled" by default. You'll need to re-enable them. The list of filtered users does not get emptied, though.

Unfortunately, this type of filtering works about as badly as it does for mailing lists or Usenet groups. It's per reader, and even if a thousand readers ignore someone who routinely behaves badly, that person can still continue to behave badly, and a lot of people will be exposed. This makes the place worse for everyone.

I don't have a good solution for this, either.

Reminder: comment filtering

Posted Jan 21, 2016 21:24 UTC (Thu) by utoddl (guest, #1232) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe once enough people filter a given user, his comments are only visible to him?

Reminder: comment filtering

Posted Jan 22, 2016 14:29 UTC (Fri) by eternaleye (guest, #67051) [Link]

Though I suggested it for an unrelated forum software (and moreover, one with the forum as the primary purpose, which leads to certain central UI elements of my suggestion being less appropriate here), this may be of interest:

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/suggestion-a-more-g...

Reminder: comment filtering

Posted Jan 22, 2016 22:21 UTC (Fri) by lsl (subscriber, #86508) [Link] (3 responses)

> Unfortunately, this type of filtering works about as badly as it does for mailing lists or Usenet groups.

You mean it works very well, has a plethora of advanced, time-tested tools available (as well as tons of accumulated community experience) *and* leaves control in the hands of the ones actually affected by the filtering, namely the readers? Sounds awesome.

Reminder: comment filtering

Posted Jan 22, 2016 22:32 UTC (Fri) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (2 responses)

> ... *and* leaves control in the hands of the ones actually affected by the filtering, namely the readers? Sounds awesome.

Speaking as a reader who approves of putting those most affected in control, it would be nice to have sufficient control over the filtering to dynamically filter based on patterns (such as the number of other users explicitly blocking the account) rather than just a static list of usernames to block.

Reminder: comment filtering

Posted Jan 22, 2016 23:04 UTC (Fri) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link] (1 responses)

What I'd really like is to fold threads in the unread comments view, or even better mark them as uninteresting. A topic or two aside peer week the reader and commentership here's intelligent, well informed and so on. Being able to hide the insane topucs would make it easier to see the signal.

Reminder: comment filtering

Posted Jan 23, 2016 1:22 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I too think this would be a good idea, I've mentioned it before, but I recognize that this kind of feature is not for free, it costs more db/server processing.