Rejected Private Messaging System Update

[aSiegel]

Hey all, I'm making this suggestion after too many times that players, either after I beat them or they beat me, sending some off-hand remark through PMs then immediately blocking me. I usually report them because of how annoying it is, but it happens too frequently to not at least make a suggestion.

I'm an engineer by trade so I'm not super in-tune with programming, but I assume this would be an easy implementation. If someone sends a message to another player, and attempts to block them immediately after, can there be a warning that pops up saying something along the lines of "You are attempting to block a player shortly after sending a message to which they have not responded. This raises a flag with our community guidelines of harassment. If you proceed, your messages may be reviewed by staff. Would you still like to block [PLAYER NAME]?"

At the very least, I think this will discourage people from an incredibly annoying practice. I'm not even saying the messages have to automatically go to staff either, but I would add onto this suggestion by stating that there could be a greater punishment for those that send messages like this and later block players, versus those that simply send messages like this. A warning makes sense for people that will just send a message, but the idea that someone would send a message, then block PMs from that player, means that they likely would do it again and again until someone eventually reports them. At least in this case, you as staff would have a record of how many people they've done this to (I don't know if that's something you have already).

 

[Isaiah]

I'm no dev, but as global staff at least I'm not certain I buy into the value of this much. In cases where the offending user gets reported (and this can happen regardless of whether or not your suggestion is implemented), a staff member is going to review the PM logs regardless. Additionally, we always recommend that [a given user] reports anyone who does this rather than just leaving it be, with the intent of avoiding situations where someone is repeatedly doing this without ever getting caught. Lastly, we do make note of repeat offenses in modlog, so cases like this are logged pretty well unless the person is just never being reported, which we can't really control.

If anything, I'd just suggest making the report feature more obvious than having to click the three dots first (and have in the past) so people are more aware that it's an option, but since that's a different angle than the OP I won't get into it too much.

 

[Mathy]

Going to reject this per the above. Furthermore, I don't like the idea that the ignore feature can flag staff. As it's implemented right now, the server has no idea of who you're ignoring, it's only done in-browser, and I think it should stay that way.

 

[Wigglytuff]

implementation of this would be too broad (you can decide to block someone after sending "stop talking to me" which is a valid usage and would also trip your conditions).

but it is extremely UnHonorable to PM someone after a game and then block them, so the spirit of the propsal should be preserved.

-wigglytuff