blocking NEEDS to be more useful

nemu 5/23/2023 08:08 am 1120

seriously when i block someone, i dont want to be able to see ANYTHING that they post, be it patterns, comments, pics, etc, and i dont want them to anything from me either. the block button feels almost entirely useless the way it is now since it seems to only prevent you from seeing their profile or leaving comments on their posts, which are fine and good things but i dont get why its not more than that. i like to block pretty liberally as a means of curating my online experience, and this is like the only platform i use where it feels like it doesnt actually help

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Crumpet
Site Owner

May 24, 2023 12:31 am

@nemu: to be fair, even if you did know about coding, on many sites it wouldn’t be a problem to implement. This type of feature is very common. As part of my job, I coded a particularly complex blocking setup with lots of different rules - much more complicated than the one we’d need on this site. But the difference is that the other codebase is newer and the server also isn’t at risk of becoming overloaded from the lack of caching.

I might still be able to do it, but I would most likely try it out on one area at a time to check performance, e.g. only apply it to photos first.

nemu
Member

May 23, 2023 4:09 pm

@Crumpet: ahh i see, i'll admit i don't know much about coding myself, so i really appreciate the insight. if there's not much that can be done then i think that's pretty fair and i can def accept that. i wouldnt be too shocked if im doing a large portion of the blocking on this site anyway lol, so if it would only benefit a handful of people + be strenuous on the site then i can understand not prioritizing something like that

Smolgecko
Member

May 23, 2023 3:23 pm

So far I haven't had to block anyone on here but it does pretty much the same thing on discord, there all it does is keep them from dming you and puts a "blocked message" thing where the person's messages are, and you can just unblock and view them by tapping the message thing. They can still see your messages and talk to/about you if you're in the same server, and its genuinely stupid to even have a block button if it only does one thing thats actually useful and not, y'know, literally block them from seeing almost anything you say, like it does on other platforms

Crumpet
Site Owner

May 23, 2023 2:09 pm

The issue I’ve got is that content like photos and patterns is globally cached for performance reasons. So in order to have different results for different people, I’d have to either disable the cache or cache by user and both of those might kill the server with how old everything is. I’ll still look into it and try it out, but this might have to wait for the site rewrite.

I’ll keep you updated. It might partially depend on how many people use the blocking feature. I suspect it’s actually quite a small number of people who use it. If that’s the case, it might not be too much of a performance hit, because only those people would need the non-cached version.

A lot of things on the site are like this… so old and crappy that they’re hard to fix or other things might break if I change them. I saw someone made a suggestion about favorites recently and the same applies there

Crumpet
Site Owner

May 23, 2023 2:04 pm

This is a hobby site I made all by myself in 2011 when I knew hardly any code. It’s a miracle it’s still online, to be honest. The social features were part of a plug-in and were/are very limited. The site was never supposed to become as popular or as social as it has, so unfortunately, a lot of things on it are no longer fit for purpose - including blocking

I am only performing limited maintenance/upgrades on the current site because the whole thing needs to be rewritten or it will go offline soon. If I can improve blocking within a reasonable timeframe, I will do it, but I can’t write any code for a couple of weeks.

blocking NEEDS to be more useful

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