Single post in Implementing A 'Block' Feature

I had to step away because I was getting... frustrated, I must admit. However, I think that was due to me not communicating my side of things well enough, so for that I must apologise to Mandibuzzard. I would like to try again and make things clearer. There are two issues at play here: 1. Site performance. As you may have noticed, the site already suffers from occasional lag spikes that refuse any attempt to diagnose or fix. It's something that's been a real thorn in my side. Or Lego brick under my foot. There are about 5k users who visited the site in the last 24 hours. That's a total of about 12.5 million possible inter-person links. Of those, I would estimate that maybe a few hundred to a thousand blocks would be made. After all, most people either get along just fine, or are content to ignore each other. Even if I generously round up the number of blocks, you're still looking at less than 0.01% of potential inter-person links being blocked. For such a tiny fraction, it is absolutely not reasonable to add extra database lookups to the Shelter page, for example. The Shelter is highly optimised to work the way it currently does, and adding a "block check" to that would slow it down by several orders of magnitude. All of that, for a less than 0.01% incidence. Similar logic applies to other parts. On the other hand, blocking the Profile page is super easy, barely an inconvenience. This is what I mean when I say it's about compromise. 2. Game mechanics. PFQ is a game where every user is massively inter-connected with every other user. Most features involve interaction with other players in some form. Every single one of them will need to be tweaked to account for possible blocks. Many of them can probably be "fixed" by just anonymising the blocked user's name. ***** can work quite well because that's what we already use for censoring inappropriate usernames, so technically you don't know if it's a blocked user on the Timeline, or just someone who named themselves something rude. That's a good idea. What I might be able to do is add a filter to the Clickback list, such that blocked users won't appear on it - but they can still interact with you. That way you can benefit from their interactions, without even being aware of it and without the need to reciprocate. However, this may need some kind of limitation on it to keep things reasonable performance-wise. There may need to be a cap on how many people you can block, just to ensure it doesn't become a performance issue again, but that cap should easily be higher than anything you'll actually need. In any case, my "push-back" here is really just to try and drill down and get at what people want from this feature. "A block feature would be nice," sure, but figuring out exactly what it'd be used for will help with implementation details later. EDIT: To add an example of why a limit would be needed to prevent performance issues. There was a person who accidentally crashed the site every time they logged on. Eventually I figured out that they were subscribed to over 1,000 threads and had been offline for a long time, so there were many, many new posts and the system was trying to notify them of it. But that involved loading the usernames of the people who had posted. That was too much, and the server ground to a halt. That's why your forum subscriptions are limited now.