ADMIN: Killfiles?

Really, I mean it. It might do us all some good.

Then again, it's your choice whether to use them or not. And I can see why some people might not ever want to see certain people's postings (intolerable political ideaologies, for example). It can be done on the client side easily enough, so I don't see why we shouldn't do it server side.

Can we actually debate the killfile idea now please?

The question is - does my personal distaste for them stay personal, or would my (or anyone's) enjoyment of ILX be diminished if they knew other people weren't participating/couldn't be heard fully?

i personally dont think its a good idea (plus server utilization issues)

(although part of me is amused at the thought of someone ranting on, but with no audience whatsoever!)

But it also destroys the spontaneity of this medium, and breeds distrust and paranoia into this community, which by definition is very large, free, and open to any and all who would wish to post here. Just think of all the new posters you guys get every week - I can't think of too many other e-communities which have sucha thriving/welcoming vibe to them...but administering killfiles would hamper the open-society feel of it all. It would be akin to cyber McCarthyism, "let's get our contingent to vouch for killfileing so-and-so!" could be used as a secret weapon to drive people apart and blacklist them, no? and for those who use it, they'd be lost on the threads where the blocked posters are communicatign with those who don't have a problem with them.

So no, I think it'd change thevery nature and structure of your electronic family. If you have a major problem with someone's posts or a certain thread, just shout for the moderator who might be able to do something (like take down the offensive thread).

Yes, I'd vote against that. I can easily choose not to read the posts of any particular person if I were ever so inclined. I'd be annoyed if I had set that for X and then read this thread where it all kicked off from something X said. I might not even grasp for a while that a post was missing, it would just stop making sense.
Then again, Nicole wasn't trying to make use of such a feature compulsory, so what do I care?

-- Martin Skidmore (martin.skidmores@btinternet.com), Today 2:11 PM. (Martin Skidmore)

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all graham's improvements to date have allowed us to personalize the way threads are presented -- this will change how they read from person to person in a substantial way. if a thread isn't the same from person to person, that's an important change.
-- Alan (AlanTrewartha@yahoo.co.uk), Today 2:14 PM. (Alan)

Every day on ILX we forge art. Boundlessly collaborative and imaginative, we maintain our collective consciousness post by post, thread by thread.

Ladies and gentlemen, not only do I believe that we should not implement this feature (which would eventually be our downfall), but I believe that it is a metaphysical impossibility to do so.

(Andrew, I set up an admin type page to show the current processes, and as far as I can tell, it isn't a problem with processing power so much as concurrency issues with the Lastread table. I'll rewrite the whole thing once my computer comes back from being repaired, whenevr that might be)

I'm serious: that is the road to hell, as chris rea has said.

to that end, people might not want to killfile just because other posters are crazy or abusive or because they have bad ideas, but maybe just because they're boring, or because their posts, whatever their merits, happen to not be of interest to the person doing the killfiling.

killfiles could also be used in the opposite direction, to highlight in some way posts of interest. it's not all negative.

both of these sorts of goals are not necessarily the free-exchange-of-ideas killers people seem to be making them out to be, but rather more efficient ways of doing what I suspect many people already do, which is read selectively.

Josh has the most cogent points in this thread thus far.

All philosophical issues aside, how would one guarantee the killfilees could remained killfiled? login name? e-mail address? IP address? If anyone was causing so much trouble as to be killfiled by certain people, they'd probably go to more trouble to easily circumvent what little form of profiling and identity ILXOR can track, anyway.

Killfiling posts from particular IP addresses would work to a small degree. But this would possibly be a load on the moderators, as they're the only ones who would have access to that information.

of course, the respectable thing to do if you are using a killfile is to not talk about it so that people don't get all a paranoid. which is just what we are supposed to be doing now when we do not talk about people whose posts we are not interested in for whatever reason. er, not talk about the not being interested, I mean.

people who know that they aggravate lots of people might have a hard time not wondering if they are being killfiled, but perhaps this just means that they should work on being less aggravating.

I hope it would discourage many of the annoying trolls. A short statement as part of the registration process might make clear that we are not, for instance, a hair dye advice centre, so might reduce the irrelevant and misplaced stuff. If it's designed and implemented well, it shouldn't prove too onerous to join and therefore it shouldn't be too much of a disincentive.

Registration with a valid email might be worth exploring if the coding to do so isn't too difficult or time-consuming for the little code squirrels.

Taken out of context, this is almost like a Zen aphorism.

All the more so, because it would not actually work in practice!

Er... because you don't want to read them. By way of example, kill files make usenet much easier to read. ILX doesn't quite have the signal-to-noise ratio of usenet yet, but as more and more people find ILX, the sheer aggregate number of threads and posts will increase. As it stands I only read half the threads anyway.

Awww! I thought you were lurking?

I still love Jon but not in...that way...anymore...

Yeah, I highly recommend it.

adsffdasdssdf

Marcello OTM

however, kate, you've been purdy damn snipey as of late.

-- doomie x, Monday, 19 April 2004 09:48 (3 years ago) Bookmark Link

do you guys have 486s?
-- I LUV FAETTY (ex machina), Tuesday, June 15, 2004 1:37 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Link

DX2-50

A turbo button is no longer seen on most mainstream personal computers.

CHECKS OUT MY NEW MATHS CO-PRO look at dem povray renders.