Topic

A Different System for Blocking Players

At the present, there is no way to look at a list of blocked players, and blocked players still appear in global and group chats. While the latter seems like it should be fixed sooner, doing so would actually pose a much larger problem. Imagine this scenario: let's say I'm annoying and you block me. But one day in a group chat, someone seemingly has a conversation with an invisible person. The conversation seems to be going in an interesting direction, but you can't really tell because I'm blocked, and there is no block list so there is no way for you to unblock me because my name isn't anywhere for you to click on. Difficult situation.

So I propose a different method of dealing with blocked users entirely. First of all, we have to realize we are the ones who block players -- because we choose so. In other words, stuff that is blocked is not secret or otherwise sensitive from us. Therefore, it should be perfectly okay with everyone for the message to actually reach our computer, as long as it is not displayed.
What I think is that an extra group should be added to the friends list: the block list. This list would be updated at the same frequency (and preferably, time) as the friends list. Aside from being informative, this list would also tell the Flash Player (I'm going to call it the client from now on) who to block.
All chat messages would reach you like normal, but if a blocked person tries to send you an IM or a group message, your client simply won't show it! That way, the server doesn't have to do hard work trying to figure out who has blocked who. It just indiscriminately sends messages to everyone, and it's your computer that does the work trying to figure out whose messages you don't want to see.
I don't think I've ever tried to IM a person who has blocked me, but if a message or something like that shows up (I think one does, right?), then that can easily be accomplished by having the destination player's computer send a message back to Glitch servers that the message was blocked.
If my idea works out, then everything would seem just like the way it was, except we could block people from global and group chats, and we would have a block list with which we can unblock people! Yay!

Posted 14 months ago by Catriona Subscriber! | Permalink