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### Topic

#### Stalking

I had a stalker the other day (claiming to be an 11yo boy, though that seemed entirely improbable), who at one point said s/he was going to keep pinging me until I came to their party... though they eventually went away after being ignored.
Alas, this makes me wonder if there needs to be some rules or guidelines for behavior and what constitutes "unacceptable", and whether there needs to be a way to report players who violate the guidelines.

Posted 24 months ago by clare | Permalink

### Replies

- Good point, clare. In the same vein, some things that might be useful for individuals:
  - being able to block IM from players that have been personally obnoxious.
  - being able to hide rude players in my local / global chat.
  - some way to flag offensive animal and avatar names
  On the whole, the testing group is generally a pretty decent bunch of people. But as the population expands it's inevitable.
  In particular I think animal names have a lot of potential for abuse -- it's a bit like vandalism. Only the devs would know who renamed all the piggies on three streets with ethnic slurs (for example; fortunately, this hasn't happened yet AFAIK). Maybe repeat offenders of whatever guideline is offered would have naming privileges suspended for x days per offense.
  Posted 24 months ago by Lelu | Permalink
- +1 lelu's suggestions
  Posted 24 months ago by striatic | Permalink
- Definitely +1 for Lelu's points.
  Posted 24 months ago by Hburger | Permalink
- +1
  Posted 24 months ago by bluto | Permalink
- Maybe we should have something like Glitchtiquette....
  Posted 24 months ago by Demon Thinker | Permalink
- Maybe a semi automatic system would be a good idea. If Glitch gets very popular, this would allow the Glitch team to keep their focus on development and support rather than spending their time with spammers and other rule breakers.
  You can block someone and if a lot of people unrelated to each other (not in the same groups, not being friends, etc.) block someone, he gets automatically banned for a week. If this happens three times, his account is automatically disabled completely. Not automatically deleted though, people should still be able to talk to an admin about their account being banned or disabled in case someone manipulated the system in some way, so that his account can easily be restored completely and the system can be improved to prevent future manipulations. Blocks should be evaluated with a time frame in mind so that someone who offends 10 people in 2 years is valued differently than someone who offends 10 people in 10 minutes. You can make this system pretty intelligent, you could for example take the friends of the person in question into the calculation, see how many he has and maybe if a percentage of them was banned before.
  This system would both allow to just ignore someone by blocking him (which means you won't see his posts in the chat and on the forums, removes you from his friends list, maybe you wouldn't even see his avatar in the world anymore), but would also weed out really bad people and spammers, without adding complexity for the user. No need for an additional "flag as spammer/whatever" button, just one block button that handles everything by design.
  A lot of the big social network sites use a system like this, although in a less automatic way from what I know. Twitter uses information about blocks for example not to automatically disable someone's account but to automatically flag it for inspection by a Twitter employee (IIRC).
  As for the animal names.. All the name changes a disabled account made could be reverted to the name it had before when his account gets disabled.
  Posted 24 months ago by Sir Drinkalot | Permalink
- My favorite ignore is to remove the stuff off the ignorer's screen, but don't notify the ignored that they're being ignored. Have the ignored's screen act like everything is going through fine so they'll never know if they're being a pain.
  Posted 24 months ago by Tingly Claus | Permalink
- I think people should have the right to know that they had been ignored though. At least they will notice they are being annoying.... people deserve rehabilitation right? :D
  Posted 24 months ago by Demon Thinker | Permalink
- "Have the ignored's screen act like everything is going through fine so they'll never know if they're being a pain."
  In one large forum I moderated, we had a category we could put unrepentently obnoxious members into called "Send them to Coventry". When in this state, members could post all they pleased, but they themselves were the only ones who saw their posts. In the right situation, it was the perfect answer.
  Posted 24 months ago by Eleanor Rigby | Permalink
- Ignores could expire after awhile.
  Posted 24 months ago by Tingly Claus | Permalink
- No. I dont want my ignores expiring. I just want to see my ignore list. I can manage it on my own thank you. ;)
  Posted 24 months ago by Cap'n Bob | Permalink