Community health initiative/User Mute features

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This is an archived version of this page, as edited by TBolliger (WMF) (talk | contribs) at 20:33, 20 June 2017. It may differ significantly from the current version.
Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T164542

This page will be used to collate ideas about productizing a User Mute feature which allow users to blacklist specific users from interacting with them on a wiki.

For the feature that allows individual users to broadly protect their user pages, see User and User talk page protection tools.

Current ecosystem

User requests

Users can request that another user not interact with them, but this is not enforceable via the MediaWiki software or by most communities.

Interaction bans

Admins can impose interaction bans between multiple users. During an interaction ban the users are not allowed to write on each others' talk page or user page or any other page they are active. There is no software to enforce or monitor these bans (short of manual solutions or AbuseFilter for particularly hairy situations.) See Community health initiative/English-language Wikipedia harassment policies & enforcement#Wikipedia:Banning policy for more info on interaction bans.

Considerations

  • ...

Notes/Ideas

  • This general mute feature may consist of:
  • If this is a way of productizing ibans, then maybe admins can also set this protection for a user?
  • A kill-switch per account for users who abuse this feature?
  • Cross-wiki blacklist?
  • As an alternative, instead of an outright protection, we could show a warning message, akin to "USERNAME has requested that you not post on their talk page unless absolutely necessary. [OK]"
  • How granular will these preferences be?

Use cases

  • Annie feels annoyed by Bobby. He's not breaking any rules but his presence makes her uncomfortable. She wants to continue participating but wants to keep Bobby at a distance.
  • Carly notices that Darryl edits a lot of the same pages she does. She wants to make her Special:Contributions log private from him.
  • Ethel and Frank have receive an interaction ban. Frank wants to move on so he wants to protect himself from Ethel's messages.
  • George relies on emails to keep up-to-date on his wiki work. Harry is a productive editor but very chatty. No offense Harry, but George doesn't want to see emails triggered by your edits.

See also

  • ...
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