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Stack Overflow has successfully borrowed at least one XBox feature (Achievements). I'd like to see another feature borrowed as well.

Let's say I'm playing Halo online and another player is being a bigot. I have the option to add him to a list of ignored users. After doing that, all the racist things he says will never be heard through my headphones anymore.

Now, on Stack Overflow, I'd like the ability to add a user to a list of ignored users. This would hide all of that user's comments, and maybe his questions and answers as well (not sure if hiding questions/answers is necessary).

This serves multiple purposes:

  1. It would make it easy for users to avoid other users' flamebait.
  2. It would give users a more appropriate response to flamebait.
  3. The ability to start flame wars would be reduced, since fewer users would see those comments.
  4. Users would now have an incentive to be more diplomatic, as there is now a negative consequence to the behavior (the silent treatment).
  5. Administrators could review which users are the most often ignored, which would be a strong indication that someone should be put in the penalty box or even locked out of their account.
  6. Administrators wouldn't have to spend as much time dealing with complaints about abusive users, since users would have a better way to respond.

annakata makes a good point in a comment to an answer, that I thought should get more visibility:

I had a problem, reported it and got the response "not bad enough to do anything about, sorry". Which is kind of true, because the only options available to the mods are the nuclear one (penalty box) and the zero-effect one (do nothing). We need a middle ground option where abuse can be handled for you without also being handled for everyone.

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  • 5
    Sorry Kip, I'm with ya, but let's keep this feature suggestion in the abstract Commented Jul 7, 2009 at 20:14
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    This would be my #1 feature request by a long mile Commented Jul 7, 2009 at 20:31
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    "who constantly have to intervene to resolve petty conflicts" - I'll reserve judgement on that; personally, I find the calls to blacklist users far more distracting.... Commented Jul 15, 2009 at 22:16
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    I agree with Marc. All the talk about ignoring users or attempting to ostracize users via these posts is getting really tiresome. If you have complaints, voice them to the proper authorities and let those in charge make the decision if something needs to be done about it. Commented Jul 15, 2009 at 22:24
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    @TXI: to be fair, though, he was talking about lightening the mods' load. If the mods don't think they need their workload is that great, then it might not apply. But well said, otherwise. I have (facetiously) proposed that SO be run like a MUD, we earn weapons and spells to win edit duals and temporary "wards" against our "foes".... 'cause it almost sounds like life or death the way some people sound. Commented Jul 17, 2009 at 14:35
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    I request this feature. If I ever felt bad about ignoring someone, I could click 'unignore'. Why should users with high reputations be able to abuse me and go unpunished? I know if I go toe-to-toe with these users, I'll likely get banned, so I'd rather ignore them like any sensible person would. Instead, I have to let them ream me, and whoever the sadistic programmers behind this site are, they must like it. I absolutely hate it when sites don't let you ignore users. Even if they have something to contribute, I'd sooner see them banned for their abusive language. Commented Jul 26, 2011 at 3:47
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    Also, from a psychological perspective, control = happiness. Commented Jul 26, 2011 at 3:48
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    This is the most extreme example of closed-mindedness that I can possibly imagine. It also pushes SO in completely the wrong direction, to a site focused on users and social interaction, rather than one based on questions and answers. I'm very much opposed, and not in the way that "I would never use this", but in the way that "I think this is actively harmful for the site". If there is a problem, we want you to point it out to the moderators. If it's not worth pointing out, then you're obviously being over-sensitive and need to grow up a bit. Don't improve the site only for yourself. Commented Jul 27, 2011 at 5:00
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    Take a sample from any real life society, and you're going to find personality disorders. How are people supposed to deal with those? This site is crawling with losers who stalk and harass people, and there's no way to deal with it because there was little thought put into the administration pipeline. If you report someone for annoying you, that person can get together with his 'social network' and harass you by closing all of your questions. You want to talk about closed mindedness, how about racists? I guess people should just change their skin tone? Cody's solution: blame the victim. Commented Oct 12, 2011 at 16:08
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    @ShaWizDowArd It's not declined, but there are no immediate plans to implement it. This question picked up a flag along the lines of "status-deferred was added 3 years ago and it looks a bit silly", and I agree with that. Commented Dec 16, 2013 at 0:04
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    +1 - someone can attract my attention just by using my name. Some people aren't worth listening to. It would be great just to ignore them. Commented Nov 8, 2014 at 14:31
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    I like to block someone in the Delphi community, on every question, he is there. Every time something to mention that has nothing to do with the question. Or he doesn't read the question carefully/correctly or makes assumptions that is not related to question. This provokes irritation and clouded the question and if you do not agree with that, he will downvote (or his friends). So if it is possible to make a blacklist of users that are unable to view your question, cannot access the question, that would be a nice feature. Commented Jul 8, 2018 at 22:51
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    11 year later, and no kill/ignore list. It's worth noting that basically EVERY other social media site has kill/ignore lists. This goes back as far as usenet, and IRC. Neither usenet, nor IRC ever had these features built in, but they were always client features. I think even reddit might have this as a special reddit plugin (reddit enhancement suite). I haven't been on reddit in many years, but I think this still exists. It'd sure be nice if there were just plugin specifically for SE that did stuff like this. Commented Jun 9, 2021 at 20:59
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    Even just hiding names of certain users would be great. People are abusing their usernames to ram their political statement of the day into a Q&A site, and there's nothing to report. Commented Jan 28, 2022 at 15:32
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    If someone was being racist here, I would want to know about it, so I could flag for rude-abusive. Racism is content that a reasonable person would find inappropriate for respectful discourse. Commented Feb 7 at 19:28

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I tried to revisit this question here Can we have a feature to ignore specific user's pings?.

The argument that Stack Exchange is no a social network is used to refuse this feature.

To an extend there is a degree of socialising in the SE sites, comments, chat rooms and meta. Regular users do develop online relationships to varying degrees.

Sometimes people just don't get along.

Sometimes may receive pings from a user that they find annoying, where there is no objective reason to flag those pinged comments.

We all have our good days and bad days.

Sometimes it would be helpful to mute a users pings. It may reduce flags, and it may reduce tensions.

If the feature is in chat, it makes sense to include this feature for the site. It would reduce noise. And as in chat, the user can be un-ignored, so it's not doing anything irreversible.

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Now we have the Official FAQ on gender pronouns and Code of Conduct changes this would actually be a useful feature to prevent mods having to clean up too many gender pronoun comment threads.

This is an old feature request, and it gets requested every now and again, and would save a lot of work.

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In my opinion you should never hide any questions/answers or comments from other people.

But what could be interesting is a specific highlighting for the question/answer/comment.

This has the advantage that you could still see everything but if a comment of your "ignore" list is set you know to ignore it because otherwise you will ending in a discussion.

On the other hand, you can see it also fast and for some particular reason you never want to answer that user, you see it fast but you still see it and you still can answer them if you find the question good enough to answer.

I do agree that it's the content of the question matter in stead of the user but we are all human and almost everybody have some person they really don't like.

If this update ever comes, I also should implement a tool where consistent downvoting of ignore list is checked.
It's not because you want to ignore a specific person, that the person should be punished by you.

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It is important that victims of abusive behaviour aren't the ones who have to expend the emotional labour to deal with it.

The current stance of the moderators / owners is almost akin to "victim blaming".

Simply asking people to "ignore" bad users and downvotes is wrong.

Even if a client-side script was used to block users from view, the negative effects of their downvotes are still in place.

A block function needs include preventing comments, visibility and downvotes.

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  • How is the existence of the rude/abusive and unfriendly/unkind flags you can flag a post with "victim blaming"? If you see that behavior, flag it and if it is legitimate, the user in question will either get a warning or get suspended. Commented Mar 29, 2021 at 23:38
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    @Daedalus - that process doesn't seem to work . Because it depends on the judgement of the moderators, who sadly have shown over time that they are happy to tolerate behaviour which others consider sufficiently bad to drive users away. Commented Mar 30, 2021 at 1:34
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    Your answer got 3 down votes(at the time of this comment). As this is meta, they likely disagree with your premise that SE is victim blaming. Moreover, that process does work; I've seen it happen with many flags I've made. Commented Mar 30, 2021 at 4:38
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