intfiction.org

dfabulich: That sounds like a great way to handle trolls.

The mute topic request isn't directed towards trolls, though an individual user might use it that way. Trolls are ultimately for admin/mods to deal with. As a user, I just want to not be bothered about new posts each time someone makes another comment on the Megaupload proceedings (to give a concrete example). Those posts are not trolling the community, so banning (silent or otherwise) is inappropriate, but I don't care about it, and I don't want to have to manually ignore it each time I scan the new posts/unread posts lists. Throw in 3 or 4 active topics that someone doesn't care to read more about, and the new/unread signal drowns in the noise.

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I'd favour a permanent ban. If a troll registers another account, ban that. If he registers another, ban that. And so on. Sooner or later, even the most persistent troll will get the message and either leave or behave himself.

Secret bans normally are permanent. They're permanent and secret.



There's no easy way to tell when a troll registers another account; you just have to wait for the troll to do more damage and then ban based on the new behavior, after the fact. With secret bans, trolls don't bother to register another account. They just go away of their own free will.

Another subtler technique is a "slow ban," which just makes the site horribly slow for the troll account.

I agree; that makes sense.

I've been looking at how phpBB handles this all.

When you look at the index page, the forums listed there can be marked out as having unread content. Right now, that's just a simple comparison of timestamps: when was the last post made to that forum versus when was the last time the user looked at that forum's topics. Making a forum show as having unread posts only when that last post wasn't in a muted topic would mean a lot of database hits, since you'd have to actually pull the posts for each forum in order to cross off the muted topics and calculate a possibly earlier latest (non-muted) post date. That's probably not worth it, and if you're relying on the unread/new posts searches, it doesn't matter, anyway, since you'll mark all read when you're done.

Filtering the new/unread search results looks doable so far. You're already pulling topics, so omitting them based on a condition should be dead simple.

Long story short:

• Clearing the "unread posts" icon next to the forums on the index page won't be happening.
• Filtering out muted posts from the new/unread search results is in the works.

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jeremywsherman.com | @jeremywsherman
wip: Ten Rooms comp entry