Blocking, muting, and anti-harassment features

For the kind of site FN is (an art showcase, basically) I think preventing a user from favoriting or promoting or viewing submissions is a bit much and offers the blocker too much power. I can see people abusing that (You don't like the shading in my picture? FINE, hater, now you don't get to see any of my art!) and it isn't in the spirit of what this site is trying to do. User-based blocking should not prevent someone from enjoying the art on the site, but only prevent him or her from contacting or harassing others. It should also never be within a user's power to control what content someone else can view on the site. If FN implements things this way, Blocking and Ghosting should be limited to comments, posts, announcements, etc. and frankly I would lump ghosting in with blocking: a blocked user cannot comment on your work and cannot view your comments or posts.

Muting, however, sounds entirely fair. It's one user's decision not to view any more of another user's content, be that submissions, comments, posts, announcements, or anything else. You could even go further and if, say, the person is obnoxious but you still like his or her art, customize the mute to allow it to show submissions and announcements, but not comments or posts.

Quarantine is creative, but also unnecessary and I could see it nurturing bad blood. My following someone who turns out to be a jerk does not mean that I am also a jerk, or even aware of said jerk's behavior. It is not fair to then apply a block label to me, especially if that means that there's now art I can't access normally and I didn't do anything wrong. Further, many artists have large followings, and though they may be really good artists, not all of them are friendly to everyone. That's a LOT of people blocked unfairly.

I really do not agree that blocking someone from favoriting or following you is "going too far". For many people, just seeing someone's username or KNOWING they're there can be extremely stressful. It is not at all "wrong" to chose not to share your work with certain people, and people who are blocked on other art sites have abused the "favorite" function by favoriting and un-favoriting an artist's work, which spams the artist's inbox and (in the case of some sites) prevents the artist from reporting them since the message simply says "favorite has been removed" when removed.

So, if you want to block someone, I feel you should be able to in it's entirety.

Blocking problematic users is definitely a useful feature, but I agree with Twelve, here. It shouldn't go too far. The reason of an art site is to see art, not to block everyone and everything that MIGHT become a problem. That would do the exact opposite.

Sure, but having a site dedicated to being an art showcase does no good when the only way to prevent contact with harassers is to just opt out of using the site completely. Right now the only place I feel comfortable posting some of the content that I draw is to a private twitter account. Furrynetwork currently has no accomodation for that sort of use case.

I see. If a private Twitter works for you, maybe a "Friend" feature on FN would do the trick for you, with an option to make certain pieces only visible to those friends that were accepted by you?

You can prevent contact without stopping people from viewing work. A blocking feature that prevents people from viewing your comments or contacting you accomplishes that goal without stopping anyone from viewing your artwork. After all, if a harasser views your artwork but can't contact you about it, do you even know he's viewing? If he hates your work so much that he wants to harass you for it, but can't, would he bother continuing to view it? Either way, I remain against preventing people from viewing content on the site because while I understand why an artist might want that control, it is something that can be abused.

It sounds like you've been harassed about your work in the past, and I'm very sorry about that. People can be truly inconsiderate. Perhaps you can find use in the Unlisted feature that FN has. You can submit your work to FN without listing it publicly, and it still exists on the site. I think the ultimate intention is to make it so you can choose who to share your work with. Maybe a "Privacy" setting on each submission is in order for things like that instead, where you can choose to share with Followers only, Non-followers only, only people who have a link, etc. If anyone is truly harassing you, you should always get site staff involved; you may not be the only one he's harassing.

Hey folks.

Great idea! We have been working on the nuances of this, because it's definitely a feature unlike any other and something I personally believe will be very important to allow users to remove themselves from any confrontation without it causing a problem for others.

We employ a feature on some of our other projects that lets a user enable a permanent status on their account that will squelch any interaction of another user, and prevent them from privately interacting with them either. We intend to use a similar function that will prevent anyone from being harassed by another, and all without having to wait for a moderator to get involved.

This feature is not currently enabled, due to the complexity that is needed, but I will bump this request for you.

I may not work for the site, but as someone who's administered communities in the past, I can honestly say that this isn't exactly trivial. In fact, it's nearly impossible. from a development and user experience standpoint.

1) If you block people from seeing your profile, comments, etc... they can easily see such information by simply logging out. This is how simple it would be on sites like FurAffinity and the like.

2) If you add the ability to block unregistered users from seeing your profile, they can simply register a new account using a throwaway email address (which are trivial to obtain through GMail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc...). At that point, you would have to block any new account they make.

There is one solution that works, and it's what Twitter uses for protected accounts: whitelisting. For someone to follow what you do, you would have to allow them access yourself, and do so knowingly. This allows you to pick and choose who sees what you do. It tends to be a hassle for those who use it, but it's the only thing that would do what you're looking for without having loopholes to get around it.

Actually, there might be another way.

You bring up an excellent point about people creating multiple accounts to creep on people. Would it be possible to ban someone's IP? Ultimately you can only do so much, ya know? But it's still better to try and do as much as possible in order to help someone out.

I think that the idea of whitelisting is an excellent choice though! That would resemble how twitter has protected accounts that require the user's permission to follow them.

IP bans are more destructive than helpful. IPv4 addresses are limited, and most ISPs cycle people through the limited addresses they have regularly. Because of that, someone could easily wind up with an IP address that was banned previously, and without any warning.

There is a way to make this work. An already a planned feature is for privacy which will allow one to only display their profile to users logged in - with this option on, blocking a person could disable them from viewing the persons page and they couldn't evade it by logging out either. Evading this by creating a new account should be punished by an actual ban from the site < case where you submit a ticket about harrashment.

Another nice thing to work around this is if and when groups become a thing, there will probably be private groups where group only can see content and joining is by join request only.

A feature for banning I'd love is when you block someone, you also block yourself from accessing their page / commenting to them. Multiple times on FA people abuse the block feature, they block a person and spam their page with questions and complaints that they are ignored, trying to create a negative image for their target. Sometimes when this happened to me I didn't even first get it was troll, wrote a long reply to them and then realize I couldn't post it... on my own page!

With this I think a system that lets you tick which notifications you want to receive when watching someone would be handy. Deviantart has something like this. Plus a watch list control panel do modify later.

Another handy thing with promotions would be that if multiple people you watch promote the same drawing they'd collapse into just one post instead of all.

I'd want to be able to do with not just with promotes, but with all categories of activity. Sometimes I like a person's artwork but couldn't be less interested in what they have to say about anything, and might want to turn off their comments and journals. And sometimes I am interested in someone as a friend and enjoy reading their journals, but really do not care at all about the five hundred fursuit photos they bring home from every con they attend.

So granular control over what kind of content I'm interested from each person I'm following would be really nice.

This is something I'd also like to see here. Deviantart does a nice system with this, letting you choose what type of site posting you watch from an artist, and you can toggle them on or off whenever you want, if say someone gets a little too spammy with their journals.

Hey everyone!

We've spent some time planning this out, and are intending to build something very similar to Twitter's "Mute" and "Block" functionality.

Obviously user control and enabling users to handle situations on their own is a priority for Furry Network, so we're going to make sure this is implemented for launch.

Thanks!

This is being implemented as "Muting", similar to how Twitter does it!

Great feedback everyone! I'm merging this into the other similar 'blocking' thread, as I believe the suggestions made here could be incorporated into the broader 'blocking' and 'muting' functionality we have planned for the site.

I like the way how blocking is currently-- but I think to make everyone happy-- Just give us all an option to hide our content from them all together, like a checkbox?

Some people just want no contact-- some want to be non-existent to the person, for example if the person like to pick about your artwork it would nice if they couldn't see it at all. If the person is just rude, No contact, but still able to see their artwork would seem fair enough to me.

I can see how hiding galleries from each other would be abused tho (in a case of hiding stolen art from the real artist), but I'm sure theirs easy ways around that.

I'm sure if artwork ends up stolen and the artist blocked, said artist could get one of their followers (or an admin) to get screenshots on their behalf. :)

Yep! That's the 'easy way around that', I meant.

I'm sure an admin or friend wouldn't mind checking for you.

I think it might be prudent to add multiple features to the blocking option since the reasons we block people can vary greatly. For some it's simply what they comment and for others its the continuous action of faving removing and favign ones works over and over again. The list goes on. So making it so we can choose what each user is blocked from doing might be more helpful.

I'd also suggest making it so we either have the option or must give a reason as to why we blocked someone. because we tend to forget why we blocked people and if we ever clean out our block lists, it would eb nice to know if the reason we blocked them is something we'd happily forgive and forget or still hold them accountable 10 years later.

Though personally, I'm unnerved by the general attitude people have when they block soemone since the idea that people change over time isn't exactly acknowledged by people that block others too readily. I actually go through my block lists every year to see if I even remember why I blocked someone in the first place, if I can't remember why no matter how I try to prompt myself to remember, I unblock them. But that's just me.