Self Moderation Features Request

[mechahamham]

Self moderation features... that is, features that allow a person to tailor what they read or 'hear' in chat will simply by definition be more effective than GM moderation: Once /ignored, you never hear from the ignoree again unless you want to. There are some downsides. One risks isolating themselves on purpose or accidentally. However, in game chat, that's not a huge concern, especially if you include some kind of 'undo' button.

 

I'd like to suggest the following features to enable more control over one's experience:

 

A 'match string' filter for chat channels. Example: A user does not ever want to do Citadel's TF again. They filter /lfg or private chat channels for 'Citadel'. Any line mentioning 'Citadel' is not displayed. Ease of implementation: Easy/Medium Difficulty. This can be entirely client-side, giving zero server overhead to the feature. Additionally, there are several very good public domain and BSD-licensed matching libraries available. The hardest part of this is the UI. You'd need to add a 'filters' window for chat channels. For extra credit, allow those with the know-how to use regular expressions in their matches for super-fine-grained control.

 

Re-implement character-level ignore: Right now /ignoring a character defaults to the /gignore behavior: Ignoring the player at the account level. Generally, that's a positive thing. If a troll is going to troll on one character, you generally don't want to hear from any of their characters.  However, that knocks out some use-cases for character level functionality. The obvious example here is to ignore farmers who recruit in /lfg without ignoring their non-farm characters. Ease of implementation: Easy. This is almost certainly still in the code base and needs simply to have the old default behavior rehooked or renamed.

 

Expiring ignore: People have bad days. People are upset by news, current events, or events in their life. Sometimes, people have a few too many drinks or tokes before playing. Occasionally, a player comes into the game with negative expectations, but then lightens up when they learn more about the community. However, once you've /ignored a player, that's it... unless you personally try to take people off your ignore list. I'd like to have an 'ignore for 1 day', 'ignore for 1 week' and 'ignore for 1 month' options to better allow for 'bad days'. Ease of implementation: Medium/Hard difficulty. This would almost certainly have to be server-side and require new data to be stored, complicating what are probably already scary database/data file joins. It would also require new UI elements.

 

Client-side Ban/Generic: Sometimes /ignoring a troll or abusive player is not enough. Sometimes the mods aren't quick enough to keep your day from being ruined. Sometimes there are costumes that upset, offend, or otherwise cause you grief, even if the player behind them isn't doing anything wrong. You don't want to SEE that player or character, ever again. (People with serious Coulrophobia might know about this.) In that case, allow players to either permanently hide another character that is problematic for them or cause their costume to be 'genericed', say reduced to monotone tights, but only on the client side. Difficulty of Implementation: Hard. This would need to be, effectively, a client-side mod that watches and intercepts the zone data to remove or alter character data.

 

Certainly any development effort is not without cost. Even for volunteer developers, time spent on features like this is still time. The upshot of this kind of work is that it might ultimately cause a reduced workload for volunteer GMs. Let me know what you think.

Edited March 22, 2022 by mechahamham

[kelika2]

The character only ignore sounds nice.

[Greycat]

Only one I really see as not really doable would be the client side ban/generic. And if it were possible to make them completely invisible to you ("you don't exist in my world" level,) the way I'm reading part of that? It'd be like self-selecting for griefing. Someone doesn't like you for whatever reason, you do this to them, they *realize it,* suddenly you're getting mobs trained on you, anything outside of a mission (and what happens if someone else invites them *to* a mission you're on?) you try to fight, they wipe out... yeah, just a whole pile of problems with that.

[Marbing]

On 3/20/2022 at 10:48 PM, mechahamham said:

Re-implement character-level ignore: Right now /ignoring a character defaults to the /gignore behavior: Ignoring the player at the account level. Generally, that's a positive thing. If a troll is going to troll on one character, you generally don't want to hear from any of their characters.  However, that knocks out some use-cases for character level functionality. The obvious example here is to ignore farmers who recruit in /lfg without ignoring their non-farm characters. Ease of implementation: Easy. This is almost certainly still in the code base and needs simply to have the old default behavior rehooked or renamed.

This would be fine with me. Don’t care either way though.

[Alchemystic]

When CoH's return was in its prototype phase it had an XMPP client that connected users together. While there was very little to do in this client besides RP and explore, the way putting people on block/ignore worked is that it basically made that person cease to exist in your instance of the game, and vice versa.

 

However, that led to some rather unfortunate miscommunication as the small user base led to a lot of people having seemingly partial conversations. In one case, somebody who effectively blocked 90% of people present became jokingly known as a 'ghost', whom which only a select few people could see.

 

So, as far as option 1 and 4 go, I think it may be more counterproductive than anything, since it may lead to a lot of self-inflicted confusion over why only fragments of a conversation are being shown.

 

 

Edited March 22, 2022 by Tyrannical
few posts were hidden, fixing syntax

[Oklahoman]

On 3/20/2022 at 9:48 PM, mechahamham said:

A 'match string' filter for chat channels. Example: A user does not ever want to do Citadel's TF again. They filter /lfg or private chat channels for 'Citadel'. Any line mentioning 'Citadel' is not displayed. Ease of implementation: Easy/Medium Difficulty. This can be entirely client-side, giving zero server overhead to the feature. Additionally, there are several very good public domain and BSD-licensed matching libraries available. The hardest part of this is the UI. You'd need to add a 'filters' window for chat channels. For extra credit, allow those with the know-how to use regular expressions in their matches for super-fine-grained control.

 

It's not great, but I did write a powershell script that could do this, and some of the other stuff you mentioned. I was a programmer once until I took an arrow in the knee, and I hoped someone would take the concept and create an actual program for it. It needs to run on a second monitor, and by default is designed to highlight certain keywords. It could easily be reconfigured to exclude certain lines, as you suggest.

 

I would love to see some enhancements to chat, including loading the last X minutes of LFG when you log in, highlighting team and/or league leader chat, and limiting users ability to post to LFG to 1 post per minute (because, seriously, I don't need to have second-to-second updates on how your DFB is filling up). I have also supported the suggestion you made to be able to ignore someone for, say, an hour or a day.

[biostem]

We have to think in terms of difficulty of implementation vs benefit;  A basic "character-specific" (contrasted to entire account) block seems pretty easy, especially since every name is unique.  Though there may be some edge cases where a name got freed up, used by someone else, so now you're blocking a completely different character.  Maybe the name could be translated into a unique character ID block, so this doesn't happen.  How would you handle the expiring or time-based block?  Set some kind of timer when the block is removed?  Maybe just allow the player to set the counter in hours or something?  As for keyword blocking, my issue is people misspell or use abbreviations all the time, so I don't see it being all that useful - maybe allow wildcards or something...