While this module is perverse, and probably mostly a practical joke, I think it could be home for a feature I've always wanted in community sites. The silent treatment.

I want to be able to invisibly shun a user - without letting them know.
When trolls get out of hand, we just stick a filter over them so that they can continue to post in threads - but only they see their own posts putting them in a little bubble.
This means that the rest of the community won't see the noise, but the user just thinks that no-one is answering them. They can 'win' every debate by getting the last word, without provoking any more troll-biters.

Banning a user is an active, aggressive act, and usually just causes escalation and noise.
Preventing a user from making a comment is called censorship, and gets dirty.
Choosing not to republish certain things a user says is an editorial decision, within the purview of a site admin. Choosing not to let them know that they are no longer being listened to is just a choice.
They can post what they like, we are not preventing them from doing that and feeling better about themselves - but we reserve the right to not store and repeat it to others.

Slashdot karma and youtube votes already do a form of filtering that just doesn't show low-grade comments to average users. I just want to do this without directly challenging the trolls to game the system - that just makes them try harder.

Of course, they can eventually figure it out, maybe by logging out, and some sites may not be suitable for this form of clandestine moderation ... but that should be within the admin control.
Just as disemvowling is now an effective tool for moderators - letting the haters and spammers howl in the darkness without even knowing that no-one is listening is what I want to do to them.

Is this wish evil enough to live within the Misery projet?

Comments

EgonO’s picture

sounds interesting... will love to see this way of managing trolls. should be really simple to make this tpye by autoignore the "shuned" for all other users...

DarkLight’s picture

Haha. I kinda like this idea, but I would never use it on my site as it would be using valuable resources (database storage) and it could also cause a great deal of confusion, which when asked for support, you would have to admit it was a purposefully added prank, to which your users would think you highly childish and unprofessional.

Maybe for a lot of websites this would be a fantastic idea (I do like the idea myself) but for bigger websites this may not be such a good idea.

Nice idea though ;)

danielb’s picture

Ah yes, I've already thought of the option to hide a users posts from other users, making them not realise that they've been excommunicated. I've seen that sort of feature on a forum before. It minimises the chance that they'll just try to ban evade out of rage.

The module isn't a joke, I used to administer a fairly light hearted community where we had this sort of thing for a while. Check out this page for some info on the original hack to vBulletin. Gives some other ideas like post limiting, throttling, disabling form submissions, random redirects... all great stuff :P

Certainly would not be an appropriate module for a lot of sites, or even for certain users. But if there were 1200+ cheeky forum administrators that went to the trouble of hacking it into their old vbulletin, I reckon there might be a few around here.

I'd also like to support the IP address misery, and affecting individual users (so we can avoid the user role method). This would make it a lot better to administrate.

Also would love some jquery features similar to one mentioned in the description for this module: http://drupal.org/project/anti_existing_field

fei’s picture

Things like this remind us that d.o is a community (of brilliant people!)

Suggestion: Consider changing title of this issue from "shun" to "dunce"? From a themer's perspective, I like the sound of "dunce cap" icons next to these users posts.

Keep up the great work! ^_^

danielb’s picture

I don't know what a dunce cap is, but I do know how to shun http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMlGpDfyxEA

crea’s picture

It would be great feature, for example for dealing with aggressive spammers who will register new accounts over and over just to post same stupid advertising. Banning them sometimes can't be effective enough, because of existance of proxies. This feature, OTOH, would make spammer go away satisfied.
Most tricky stuff would be to generate special content just for his account/ip/whatever (to be controlled), so he couldn't easily log off and find out the trick.

dman’s picture

"Dunce" is related, and possibly another feature.
I often see bad questions (RTFM or do-my-job-for-me style) and wish I could flag a user as a "dunce" and lower their importance or prominence somehow. Yeah, I'm a bitter hell-desker sometimes.

BUT, "dunce" is a bit different.
Duncing is shame. The user and all others see it. (yes to icons! shunned posts don't show, so no icons)
Duncing could be for breaches of nettiquette, common sense, or just being a jerk.
Duncing should be strictly temporary! IMO. (Not sure how this relates to whether it applies to users or comments etc... TBD)
It should teach you a lesson!
And duncing should be done with good humor, something you can kid about.

"Shun" however is for malicious behaviour where we are no longer trying to educate a user, but just need to turn the volume off. It's not cute. There is no fanfare. It's just cauterizing a malignancy.

danielb’s picture

I have a question for any of you that run a drupal forum - do you have the ability to delete a user's post without permanently deleting it from the database? This is so that priviledged users can see what the post was. I've made this feature for vbulletin before to mark posts as *nuked* rather than deleted - but then in a subsequent versions that became a standard part of the delete function (undeleting and such).

I'd like to hear more about the duncing idea and what exactly would happen. Perhaps you can't comment very often, and are unable to create content. Is there a max posts or time limiting feature in drupal or another contrib module we could affect?

EvanDonovan’s picture

danielb: You can always unpublish the posts.

crea’s picture

To make it work for comments (forum replies), one would have to use nodecomments solution.
Actually, this feature is already in todo list of DruBB module/group

danielb’s picture

Great I will keep an eye on that module.

As If’s picture

FYI on some systems this is referred to as "Caving". As in "Cave your trolls."

Other people have discussed it here: http://drupal.org/node/272913

danielb’s picture

I'm looking into whether I can use the troll module to select users/ips.

edit: / hmm doesn't look like it :(

danielb’s picture

deekayen, the troll man himself, assures me this is possible - expect an update today and some more info regarding my plans for a shun function.

dman’s picture

I think there's a lot of synergy if Troll+Misery talk to each other :-)

danielb’s picture

OK an update. I've added some Troll + Misery integration so that Troll's blacklist visitor punishments lists 'Endure misery' as an option.
I haven't decided on this but I'd like to create a 'shun' module that plugs into Troll the same way. The reason I'd prefer to do it in a seperate module is because Misery's code is thus far devoted to affecting the user's experience upon visiting pages and posting, etc... whereas hiding posts from the other users is a different type of manipulation. There is also a lot of work that might be needed in a shun feature, possible complications with caching, that would warrant it's own project. People who want the shun feature might not be interested in Misery's other features. And also because you might want to 'shun' and 'misery' different groups of users, not the same users.

One thing that sucks about this is idea is that you can't Troll blacklist shun users at the same time you are Troll blacklisting misery/punishment users - but then again it's probably a rare use case to need to IP shun. Perhaps a feature we could suggest to the Troll module is the ability to maintain seperate blacklist categories, and configure the punishment options for each seperately.

danielb’s picture

Status: Active » Fixed

Yar I've started a new project where we can focus on this.
http://drupal.org/project/cave
I have started an implementation already but it's not working yet.

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.