I'm not understanding. You only have to block a particular person once to block all their posts. You can temporarily unblock single posts as needed.

This is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike what I meant. Sorry for the confusion. Never even considered such a permutation. I was talking about blocking all users, not blocking all the posts from a single user.

I'm not sure being able to block everyone at once is particularly desirable. If you're going to do that, you might as well just leave the board and set up a Live Journal.

The block everyone at once was the first step in the two step I proposed before it was explained to me the post labels remain. The second step was to uncheck the people you want to read.

I basically proposed that it would be easier, sometimes, to block everyone, and then unblock the one, two or ten people you wanted to read, rather than go through and block large quantities by making repetitive clicks for each person.

Say you had a group of twelve core Buffistas you wanted to catch up on, and you were 8000 posts behind in Natter. Selecting "block all," and then unchecking the twelve people would be much faster than to search for each name individually.

That's all I was suggesting. Again, sorry for the confusion.

Say you had a group of twelve core Buffistas you wanted to catch up on, and you were 8000 posts behind in Natter. Selecting "block all," and then unchecking the twelve people would be much faster than to search for each name individually.

I'm opposed to this type of usage of the filter on principle. I can't articulate why right now but it gives me a very queasy feeling.

Oh yes, it could be abused, of that I can't deny.

It removes the conversational aspect of the board because you're listening to only one side of the conversation. It turns the board into a Live Journal friends list.

Something like that. It's one of those things that if everyone did it would make this board a pretty cold and inhospitable place. Contrast that to a function like Message Center which filters out threads you don't read, but not posters, and which totally rocks.

Urgh. I thought Daniel was thinking of using the filter as a sort of jerry-rigged search function, but this I like even less.

Did we ever work out the search bugs, btw? That would be nice to have back, unless it's still problematic.

It removes the conversational aspect of the board because you're listening to only one side of the conversation. It turns the board into a Live Journal friends list.

Yeah. Let's not go there.

There's been no additional work done on the search function.

Oh -- is it worth explaining blinvisible, do you think? I mean, in terms of inches occupied by the explanation?

I thought Daniel was thinking of using the filter as a sort of jerry-rigged search function, but this I like even less.

I think he was, but for that we'd be better off reinstituting Search. IIRC, we turned off search because we were worried it was causing our problems when we first started having them, that it was chewing up bandwidth. In fact, Search probably wasn't the cause.

We could try reinstating it, maybe setting it up so you could only search one thread at a time.