Topic: So, You Can Now Ignore Users

Just want to say this, PMing has always been a thing on forums I've been to. Even forums I went to long before social media was even a thing, they all had PM as a feature. Nintendo Life is the first forum I've been to where PMing does not exist.

As for blocking, it was a feature at the previous forums I've been to as well. Again, forums that existed before social media was a thing. I had to use it several times due to people harassing me over liking cartoon based games. Sometimes it's something I had to resort to doing. I think at one of the old forums, it stopped the blocked person from PMing you.

Personally, I'm ok with ignore/block options given experiences I've had in the past. Here, I think I used ignore twice.

I don't think anyone would mind if block stopped you from pming someone (@-ing them for this site). It's the fact that blocking you makes it so you can't see public comments which is the complaints — I've personally never seen that sort of block on other public forums though maybe you have. Yes, some social media has that type of block, but social media pages and accounts are often focused on a particular person, whereas the 'social' part of this site is purely focused on public discourse. In most social media you can also, for example, simply make things private or only accessible to friends etc. so it is different than stopping someone from seeing what literally the whole world can see which is what block does on this site.

@FishyS Yeah, I always thought blocking just prevents you from seeing the person you block, which is the ignore function here. I always saw this place as a forum rather than social media. I sometimes post pictures to the chit-chat thread, but everything here is organized into categories and topics.

To me social media is I post something, anything, and people click like and comment, but there's no subjects or ways to organize outside maybe hashtags. I only use Instagram, so I go there for that. I come here to chat about gaming, or movies in case of the movie thread, or anything in the chit-chat thread.

PMs were definitely a thing on forums before social media was really a thing. The main reason I created an account on this site was because the band forum I was on before this wound down after they stopped releasing albums and eventually broke up. There were PMs there, was how people shared leaks/bootlegs/etc. I was also on various other forums around that time, not all but certainly many had PMs. Honestly I can understand why this site doesn't have them, you just know that the feature would mostly be used for ROM sharing. Even so, it's hardly a social media invention

Ironically given this discussion I'm fairly sure Facebook messenger didn't exist when I was on most of the forums I frequented before this one. I was certainly using MSN Messenger a good year after I joined Facebook. Must've been somewhere around mid-2008 they added that. This was also before they added the news feed and well before they started to jam ads into the feed and have an algorithm tailor your feed to you. Facebook back then was basically just like having your own personal page where people could comment on. That was it. Good times

But yeah, social media is generally been a lot more personal than a forum. On a forum your account only really exists to make it possible to follow the discussion. You can set your avatar, name and signature but you're not given that much space. It's basically an unwritten rule that on places like this you don't share personal information. Often it's an explicit rule. On a site like Facebook you're quite literally given spaces to put your real name, where you live, where you work, where you went to school, your phone number, your email, literal photos of you, the ability to tag yourself in photos, who your friends are, what your relationship status is, how you know your friends etc, etc....

If someone on this forum is hyper focused on attacking me personally? I mean sure, I might ignore them so I don't have to see when they respond to me. But does it matter if they see my ramblings about what I think a toy-makers next toy will be? Not really. But on a social media site where if you follow me you can probably see me being tagged in work photos or there might be discussions about what I'm doing. Is it possible I might want to hide that stuff from someone who might be a literal stalker? The real world kind of stalker? Yeah, it's an entirely different ball of wax

I've used the ignore function and that's about all I've been willing to really use. Blocking feels really unnecessary when I could just do the same thing with the ignore button. If people see my comments, it doesn't really effect me, since I don't get notifications that they've seen what I said or even remotely have to engage with them if I wish to not do so. I just don't get why we need a two-way block when ignore is frankly enough.

Update: https://www.nintendolife.com/forums/announcements/changes_to_...

@antdickens Thanks for the update. I like to clear my Ignore/Block list every 6-12 months - if we could get a button to 'Clear all' that would be great. But I appreciate that's probably one for the lower end of your priority list.