having some kind of kill file, filter, or whatever is so old-hat that when I first joined this group (on WX) I hesitated to get too involved because I really felt like any board was badly broken without one

Yeah, but plonking is still an issue on USENET -- I see it done and bitched about to this day. And introducing the paranoia that you're posting to an empty room (and you're not actually a troll) is going to be a shift in board culture.

A significant shift. One I'm not thrilled about, although I certainly respect and understand the need for it. It's just too bad.

Yeah, most of the people testing said they'd probably never use the filter.

I hope the shift in board culture won't be too severe.

As for me, thumbs up from this tester. I was never able to cause an error of any kind.

I'm just a little curious....

If user X decides to filter user Y, would user Y know? What if user Y asks user X a question, and then 20 posts later Y is all, "I ASKED YOU A QUESTION, X - WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?" OK, that's an extreme example....

Or various other scenareos where X, Y and other Buffistas are conversing about a particular subject, and X not reading Y's posts causing confusion and a bunch of extra posts to clear up the confusion, before it is realized that X is filtering Y.

I'm not saying things should be a certain way - ENUF filters have never come up as an issue with me... I'm just curious.

Tommy, those are certainly things that happen with filters. It's why they aren't magic, and why anyone using them needs to be prepared for them raising tensions.

Yeah, those are completely possible. There is a function to allow you to look at a particular post from a filtered user without unblocking them, so that would make it easier to follow a conversation where one person was blocked.

I'd think that if one were filtering someone else, one would be capable of managing one's posts so as to not make it obvious, though. (Well, minus the example given of a specific question.)

Jesse is right, RIGHT I TELL YOU, that it should just be called user filter. And then, the post should read, "This post has been filtered."

Agreed. Personally, I liked MARCIE and find the term "blinvisible" grating, but I recognize that whatever we call it formally will quickly become background noise. But in general, I think low-whimsy is good for this function.

Well, minus the example given of a specific question.

Eh. You can always say, "sorry, I was skimming." There's no way to prove a post you didn't respond to is filtered.

Eh. You can always say, "sorry, I was skimming."

Given a number of people have already copped to pre-event paranoia of being filtered, I don't see this calming things down much. Especially if it happens a lot, or obviously.

I know that there's not gonna be a list of who's filtering who, but I'm guessing the filtering won't be very widespread. Maybe after filtering has been going on for a few weeks, a stompy coud say, "15% of (activly posting) Buffistas are using filters - they are filtering an average of 2% of other (actively posting) Buffistas."

Might make people feel better. Of course, if filtering becomes widespread this won't help.

Actually, I'd rather not report on filtering at all.