We need the ability to block people/accounts. There has been and increase in spammy posts, with dangerous covid misinformation. I would like to block these users, I don’t want to see their posts in the global or all shared areas and I don’t want to see the toxic lies they are trying to infect our little haven with. and I don’t want them following me and commenting on all of my posts.
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Please, yes. Without this, the only choices are to put up with them or turn off the community features. It is… unpleasant.
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People have been asking for this for ages, I don’t know why the requests are being ignored.
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Let’s assume good intentions here, I bet the requests are not being ignored but carefully thought about. Blocking is nothing trivial. Who decides what should be blocked? What if someone at some point suggests you should be blocked because they disagree with you and/or think you are the one spreading false information? It is a hard problem and at some point there must be content moderation for obvious illegal content.
I understand the desire to feel safe in your haven but blocking reinforces your filter bubble and divides people further instead of getting them into a dialogue. This helps you short-term by making you feel better but please think about / observe the long-term consequences of a divided society!
I didn’t get to this point of wanting a block feature bad enough to ask for it until the covid misinformation brigade started here, so I think it is an unnecessary attack to say that that I’m living in a filter bubble or I need to give in to trolls to deal with a divided society. I should not have to listen to their lies to get to my news.
Also as a woman on the internet since Prodigy and ICQ I have been personally harassed and driven away from almost every community I love, and I would hate to have this happen here.
I made an account to agree with Dianne.
This has nothing to do with freezpeach or whatever; this is an issue of a paid-for subscription service offering a basic function that users are requesting.
That @samuelclay has simply ignored this request for years isn’t great. There should be some response when multiple paid users say “Hey, I would like this feature to exist”. That response absolutely could be “Nah, I don’t wanna do it”. It shouldn’t be “How about this version that doesn’t actually solve the problem?”.
Ideally, it’d be one of three outcomes:
- This is on the roadmap, and will be out in a forthcoming release. It is behind features x,y, z. This release is targeted for .
- This is not on the roadmap, because it is not a priority of Newsblur. But, wanna become part of the dev team? Here’s the git branch. Have fun!
- This is not on the roadmap because development is solving only critical bugs.
Those are really the only three good options. Ignoring requests isn’t cool.
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Please I would also love the ability to either block people, or block individual sites that are shared in the community global feed. I normally love reading the interesting posts and stories there, but it’s being ruined by one person sharing “Best of Nextdoor” type tweets. It’s the worst kind of online content, and it’s spoiling the entire experience of the app. If I want shitposts, I’d follow people on twitter. But I don’t. I use Newsblur for news type things, and now it’s suffering due to one person unthinkingly spoiling it for me.
Please let me block user “dreadhead” or at least 90% of the sites he shares.
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go to the “friends & followers” setting page. at the bottom of the first tab, there’s a search box. search for the user you want to block and follow them.
there’ll be a link there to the website for their blurblog, [username].newsblur.com
go to that link and at the top there’ll be a title/username (the default is “[username]'s blurblog” but it’s customizable) that’s a link back to newblur: http://www.newsblur.com/social/[some number]/[username]
that puts you back at newsblur at the feed for their blurblog. hit t and train thumbs down on everything from that feed at the bottom of the box.
you have to remain following them.
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Thank you for the thought. But this doesn’t stop them from following me, and commenting on my posts, or from me seeing their comments on my posts or other public posts.
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Thanks for the guide, but that shouldn’t need to be my job. I’m sharing my experience to back up a feature request of someone else, to show that it will be useful in other ways.
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sedot, I don’t think anyone is asking for the ability to block a user from being seen by everyone. We just want the ability to stop certain users from appearing in our personal Newsblur experience - shared posts and comments. If others love their contributions, great.
I’ve had this problem as well and would very much like the ability to filter out certain people.
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I hear you and I’m planning to build this feature. The issue is that right now I’m deep in an infrastructure overhaul, moving the site from python 2 and django 1.11 to python 3 and django 3.1. I don’t have the bandwidth to also add a feature like muting users. But I’ll get to it soon after.
Just to confirm, muting a user (which you’ll be able to do from their profile) means that you don’t see their shares in the Public Comments section. They can still reply to you though, so you’ll want to switch to a Protected blurblog (Manage > Blurblog Profile > Privacy) if that’s what you’re going for.
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That’s great news, thanks!
Out of curiosity, though, why wouldn’t blocking/muting someone also stop them from replying on your blurblog? It seems unfortunate to have to go private just to deal with a few bad users.
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The ‘protected’ privacy flag isn’t quite private. It just means you can approve people who can comment on your shares, which are still public.