Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Blocked Notification

After a discussion with a friend and doing some testing both directions to make sure that we had a solid foundation for this request, would it be possible to include some sort of notification that you are looking at the page of someone that you have blocked?

I know that the system tells you that someone you are talking to is someone you have blocked, but that only comes up if you're trying to PM them. While this is helpful and I am grateful for it, it seems that it's only protecting one road, as it were.
I'm not trying to suggest that which person is blocked be revealed, though I understand that those with only one person blocked would easily figure it out. But a notification, even just a little red bit of text at the top that says "you have this player blocked" would be nice.
In situations like chat, a forum discussion, or outside places like Furcadia, it seems like a protection that is easily subverted, on purpose or not, by simply not PMing. Especially with people fond of using anonymous characters. Through Furcadia is is especially easily exploitable, given that they have their own messaging and are completely separate from RPR, but most Furcadia players use RPR for their characters, and a great deal of them are anonymous.

Yes! This would be super helpful. In the past I've gone to PM an anon character that has a thread in the LFRP forum and went a head and typed up a 3 paragraph message consisting of plot bunnies and suggestions only to find that when I sent the message that I have that player blocked. -_-'

This has major privacy problems. It turns the block option into a tool for exposing anyone's anonymous characters, without risking anything, not even an awkward situation.

We offer anonymous characters on the site because there are many legitimate reasons for a person to not want to be publicly associated with a character. Since this is the case, there has to be a balance between protecting people from harassment and allowing rule-abiding members to maintain their privacy.

With such a feature, to uncover who an anonymous character belongs to, you just have to block all the people that you suspect it might belong to one at a time, refreshing the page after each one. Eventually, the message will appear, and you'll know who that person is. Maybe that's good because that person was catfishing you elsewhere on the internet, but maybe that person has never bothered you before in their life and you want to embarrass them by revealing to people that they have an anonymous alt that engages in sexual RP.

That's understandable. I guess I had thought that exposing someone's anons was against the site rules, maybe as harassment or something, thus leading to a consequence for destructive behavior. I'll admit to thinking that the lack of such a prohibition is slightly worrisome, but I do thank you greatly for the clarification.

There are prohibitions against it; the trouble is that once done, no amount of punishing someone for doing it undoes everyone else knowing that information.

Just for clarification - if a person you have blocked messages you on an anon character profile, the message goes through because otherwise it reveals who they are?

No. Blocking any portion of a person's identity blocks all of their identities.

For example, blocking a user prevents them from contacting you with their user account or any character, anon or otherwise.

Blocking an anonymous character prevents them from contacting you as all of their characters and from their user account, even if you have no idea who those other identities are.

Okay! That's super helpful 😄 Ty Kim !!!

As someone who has been stalked and harassed by weird folks on furcadia I'm particularly thankful for these implementations. It was a bad enough situation that without the furc guardians and the anonymity many page hosts provided at the time, I probably would not have had much opportunity to protect myself and disappear from their radar. Protection is a two-way street.

That aside, I'm aware that folks who were foul to me made second RPR accounts to write with good friends of mine who may have not played with them otherwise. So even if you have that players known account blocked, be aware that they could be abusing the rules to get to you anyway by making an account with a proxy IP which makes it difficult even for Kim to shut them down.

RPR admins do an excellent job of managing harassment with the tools they can, but awareness is so, so important in covering yourself.

I concur! About 85% of all my characters are anonymous. The idea of having a feature that allows anyone on my block list to dismantle all these characters' identities is horrifying to think about. I appreciate immensely that the block features work the way they do, so thank you!

That's really annoying (and unfortunate!) but if you have them blocked, surely that's for a good reason? Maybe you can change your approach a little to save you time: "Hey! I'm really interested in discussing some plot ideas with you, are you interested as well?" -- this doesn't waste your time and efforts and checks with the person in a polite manner. If you do have them blocked you can move on, and if you don't you're just a reply away from sharing all your lovely ideas!

Yes of course ^^ if I had them blocked I wouldn't want to interact with them.

I didn't mean to limit that to me being the person who blocked the player.I should have made it clearer in my original reply by saying that there is a block put in place by either myself or the anon character's player. Sorry!

But your advice still applies ^^