There are already commentators who rub me the wrong way, and recently I hit a really nasty public comment on one of my favorite blogs. I’d like to be able to mark individuals as “muted” and never see public comments from them again.
The public sphere of Newsblur is picking up, and there is zero moderation. This is ripe territory for a single reddit or 4chan troll to drive away the growing community. The ability to mute users would allow individuals to enjoy new internet friendships despite the trolls. That said, you should consider some sort of moderation system as well.
I fear that I’ll stop enjoying certain blogs if they’re peppered with comments calling the author slurs and other nasty shit.
I’m not sure about moderation, but I would certainly enjoy the ability to make specific users disappear from my feeds. I’ve only encountered 1 person so far that I would actually mute though.
An okay workaround for me would be to turn off comments for a specific feed, if that’s not already possible. Usually there are a few sites that attract particular commenters. I’d prefer not to turn it off globally, though a few more good trolls and I’ll flip the switch.
So you can do this, although it’s a pain to do it. Open the user’s blurblog (which you can access through their profile), and then train the user’s blurblog. You can not only turn off sites they share, but the entire user.
Indeed, same here - I would like to be able to just hide comments from some users, but training their blurbblog to not see stories they post doesn’t do it.
I’m looking to be able to block specific user comments too. I like the public comments in general, but when some people appear to be going on and on about certain things repeatedly on some feeds I want to read it’s pretty annoying.
I don’t even see any training buttons on the person’s blurblog, but it doesn’t work anyway, I guess.
I also like the public comments, but there are individuals who seem to follow blogs just so they can post snarky comments about them, and I’d love to be able to mute them entirely.
Or failing that, perhaps a way to turn off public comments for a particular feed?
Adding another request for the ability to mute a person’s comments on stories in a feed I’ve subscribed to. It’s become a really annoying problem recently - when the same person posts a snarky comment (sometimes several comments) on many stories of a site that updates very frequently.
I think it doesn’t work because it’s still “Preview”. If you go back to the feed and open the trainer, there is no training saved. I think it may be required to follow a feed to train it? Seems a little perverse to follow a troll only to gain the ability to block.
At least Newsblur has some well-defined markup on comments. It shouldn’t be too hard to write a browser add-on that could match username to a blocklist, and remove the comment. But that won’t help mobile users, and I won’t have time to write something like this for a few more weeks. I’ll make a note in my calendar to look into this more.
I too would like to see a smarter, easier way to mute some users from showing up in Public Comments as well as (if not especially) in Replies to other people’s Public Comments. I think what I would like to see is simply a collapsed “Comments hidden from users you’ve muted (jerkwithdumbopinions, someotherguy)” link that I could expand if the discussion seems interesting or it is not a controversial post. I guess this would still be a sort of training, but it would be great if there was a quick “Mute” button on the popup that shows up when you click a username.
I poked around a bit on this over the weekend. Ditched the idea of doing this in a userscript, since it significantly slowed down the responsiveness. Also, the most straightforward way to do it was take over parsing of story data (and that felt gross); or have a bit of code latch on to the end of web requests, that searches for the comments, and removes them just after they get added to the page (and that just seems wasteful and kludgy and prone to break). I can try to polish it up a bit and release something as a stop-gap for those that are interested.
Instead I am going to try adding an attempt to add a mute feature to a Newsblur fork, and send a pull request. It looks like a simple thing to filter comments as stories are fetched, but the UI to manage the muted users will take a while.
If you’re going that way, I recommend taking a look at assetmodels.js:571, which uses the data model from stories.js. That in turn creates a model using comments.js. If you override NEWSBLUR.Collections.Comments.prototype.add and NEWSBLUR.Collections.Comments.prototype.reset you can then check for the poster’s username/user_id and block the add from there.
Not the easiest method, but it would be a possibility.
