Ignored user's topics still displaying

[paulprogart]

I have a user on ignore but am still seeing their created topics, which in this particular case pretty much completely defeats the purpose.  I expected that "ignore a user" would ignore everything from that user, unless I unchecked one of the boxes (which I did not).  Any chance this could be fixed?

[Snark]

On 2/19/2017 at 3:27 PM, paulprogart said:

Any chance this could be fixed?

I'm not an expert in the forum software (by which I mean I have not the slightest tiniest clue, so I could be completely off base here), but I imagine that this would be problematic.  If someone posts a topic, lots of people can post in that topic, not just the author of the original post.  So if the software hid the thread from the person you're ignoring, it would also have to hide potentially large numbers of posts from lots of other people, whom you aren't ignoring.

It may be that you, personally, would be fine with that... but the forum software has to make assumptions based on what all users want, and therefore I imagine it has to be fairly conservative about how it implements features like this.  Not every user would necessarily want to ignore hundreds of messages from hundreds of non-ignored users, just because the OP happened to be from an ignored one.

So (and this is just speculation, here) I would imagine this would be a difficult thing to do.

[paulprogart]

Thanks for replying, @Snark.  I guess I should have been clearer in my request.  I was primarily referring to hiding the user's topics from the list of topics when you click a forum to browse it, which is the primary way I view stuff here.  It seems pretty elementary to me that if I'm ignoring a user then I'm not going to want any topics of theirs showing up in that list.  (Especially because, on other less-well-policed forums, the feature would have great use to ignore spammers.)  The edgier cases I could certainly live with.

And, as it happens, though obviously not an expert in this particular forum software I am an expert in both web and database development.    So I know that if the technical design is at least halfway competent then it's trivial to accomplish this technically; it's just an SQL join or other such filter when retrieving topics.  (Even doing the more complex cases is just a matter of applying an extension of the same filter to any query that retrieves posts.  Although as you pointed out there are certainly subjective concerns as to what rules apply around that.  Also, another legitimate concern there could be performance.)

So by "any chance this could be fixed?" I was really asking if it was just a configuration setting or other such simple adjustment that could be made, because it's possible this simply just hasn't come up before.  (When I searched "ignore" before the original post I think it only got two hits...)  But I realise the forum software developers may have (sadly) overlooked this, and that even if it's not technically difficult to change the source code/queries there are probably other priorities there.

[Snark]

3 minutes ago, paulprogart said:

But I realise the forum software developers may have (sadly) overlooked this, and that even if it's not technically difficult to change the source code/queries there are probably other priorities there.

Bearing in mind that the forum software isn't produced by Squad, it's third-party sofware by Invision.  Since it's third-party software, they're pretty much at the mercy of that third party.

I don't work for Squad, so of course I can't speak to their choices and internal implementation mechanisms directly.  However, just speaking as a forum user, my observations have been that they're really not in any kind of a place to be tinkering with the software directly.  Their options for altering how the forum behaves basically boil down to:

• Changing behavior via specific configuration options provided by Invision
• Report a bug (or feature request) to Invision and hope it gets fixed, then do a major forum update later
• Install an add-on for the software (though this option may be constrained by various other concerns, such as risk of taking a buggy add-on)

Note that "go in and alter the forum software themselves" isn't in the above list.  I think they've got their hands pretty much full with developing KSP, so they don't have time or manpower to spare on developing the forum software.  Administering the forums in general is something they can't spare a lot of effort for, I believe (that's why they rely on volunteers for staffing the moderator team).