Block Party
| Friday, June 15th, 2007 | --Sean |
If you've ever been part of just about any online community, you'll know that, sometimes, people can be really annoying. They'll follow you around, try to get you into trouble, send you inflammatory messages, or do any number of irritating things to try to ruin your day. We call these people "trolls" and usually hope that, if we just ignore them, they'll retreat back under their bridge.
To allow you to combat this problem a bit more actively on Yahoo! Answers, the Y!A Team has introduced the Block User feature. It's actually pretty neat how it works: when you block a particular user (via their user profile or the mouseover on their avatar), they can no longer see Your Q&A page or your contact information, they can't view questions that you've asked, and they can't become your Fan. This greatly reduces their ability to follow you around, maliciously report your questions as offensive, or bother you through personal contact. In addition, the Yahoo! Answers team can use this as a tool to spot users who are incessantly getting on peoples' nerves, so that they can monitor their behavior a bit more closely to see if they need to take action. It's a tough problem to tackle, but hopefully this feature, along with existing community moderation tools, will make Answers into a bit more of a troll-free zone.