Blocking users should prevent them from replying entirely or at least an option to disable replying, as this prevents harassment, spam and unnecessary replies, this is more common in anti-cheat threads where specific users will only reply “this is useless” cluttering the thread, blocking the said users should prevent them from seeing my posts and the ability to reply.
Ability to hide certain replies could also be useful, like in Twitter.
I don’t think this is a good idea for the DevForum; especially for #bug-reports or #feature-requests where blocking someone could lead to duplicate threads and/or critical information not being able to be shared. Malicious users could also use this feature to block people who are likely to report their innappropriate post, and keep their topic up for longer. Echo-chambers are also a massive concern here, a malicious OP could simply block anyone who doesn’t agree with them; essentially blocking discussion.
Cluttering a thread used to be against the forum rules afaik, I can’t find it mentioned in the new re-write though so perhaps it was overlooked and needs to be re-added. The ideal solution here would be to just be able to flag cluttering replies and wait for forum moderation to take a look. Sure, it isn’t as instant as a blocking feature would be, but it also is much less easy to abuse.
Technically it is a criticism (and true too, anti exploits do not work since it depends on the game) on the internet you have to be able to understand a criticism, empty criticism, but it still is.
It’s another thing to say “This sucks” without saying why.
Problems with criticism? yea, just censor them sarcasm
If someone makes a personal attack you can simply report the message and explain to the moderator.
It’s not criticism if it’s repetitive, almost every anti-cheat post has the SAME people saying “this is useless, don’t do this, clients can’t be trusted” without providing any proof thus demotivating OP and encouraging users to not implement a simple anti-cheat method to at least drown out some people.
It is true, the first “phase” to try to implement an anti-exploit is that, NEVER trust the client: always implement filters, make sure the values are correct, etc.
After the rest: shouldn’t players fly? should players access X area after something?, etc.
People repeat it because it is obvious, a module or script will not solve the problem.
Also, imagine that someone wants to spread an exploit, with this function they could delete the posts of those who warn about this.
Everybody knows that, but like I said. “and encouraging users to not implement a simple anti-cheat method to at least drown out some people.”.
Hey folks, we don’t think this request feel appropriate for a public discussion space. If you block a user, it should already hide all of their posts and suppress notifications and private messages just from your perspective.
There are probably some other issues under the hood here regarding repetition or spam that shouldn’t be solved via blocking but instead by changing how people discover forum content. We’ll keep that in mind and it’s aligned with some other forum issues we know about regarding finding posts that are relevant for you.