Meaningfully? Or to their satisfaction? That's 2 quite different outcomes. And I did say I was preparing my reply. Which has now just be posted.
Unless your intention is making POTM a single-player game, these are one and the same.
We have explained already why the option for a player to block another is not acceptable. It's not a good way to deal with harassment issues. It's only ignoring it at best, and allows the harasser to continue with others at worst. An harasser that is really motivated could also change his IP address and create a different account to just continue circumventing this feature. The staff needs to be involved if a more permanent solution is to be found.
So I have been on the administration end in several other roleplaying communities and while I'm certain this might sound compelling to the average player, to someone who's been dealing with these kinds of things from the admin end it really isn't.
Let me put a hard truth out there:
no admininstration team on this Earth is going to solve every problem of harassment or abuse proactively - it isn't going to happen. So this, yes, does seem to indicate we should be relying on reports, doesn't it? Except no amount of victim-blaming, shaming, or calling people whom don't want to deal with this "dead weight" shirking their reponsibilities to their fellow players is going to change the fact that the average person playing a video game for their personal enjoyment does not want to deal with a reporting process to not have their tells spamming with homophobia for two hours, or whatever other disruptive trolling you may imagine.
Moreover, even the most excellent administration team is going to take time to properly arbitrate these reports - time during which an ongoing scene is being disrupted, time during which the harm is happening, clear and present, and no one can take any meaningful course of action to stop it.
I cannot shut off my tells, at the present time. I cannot turn off PMs if someone decides to spam me with 1000 messages of their dong. It is not something I can do. In that time I am powerless. And that harm is present and ongoing for as until the DMs do something about it - often days, sometimes weeks later, which is not a tenable turnaround.
If you leave players feeling powerless for long enough, their action is going to be "play something else" - which, you personally may not consider a problem, hey no more reports, right? Don't have to deal with May whom you often disagree with if she sods off somewheres else. And that much is true, as sardonically as I may express it, I do mean it genuinely. This
is a path you can take - but I feel it is a non-constructive one. Sweeping issues under the rug hasn't worked in the past for POTM and I don't expect that something so rank as this is going to change that fact.
Much of the argument against having a block functionality seems to be made coached in the language of free speech, of an ideal that we should be reasonable adults and communicate freely, however I would point out that there is no freedom of speech without also freedom of association: whom I choose to associate with, and whom I choose not to associate with, are in and of themselves speech that I make or do not make through ommission, and it is, as William Roberts, suggests, the adult thing to do, to try to avoid players with whose personality you clash. If you adopt a position where you have to talk to all players at all "honest dialogue" points, then what you have done is adopted a position whereby people whom already feel they cannot express themselves are squeezed out of the environment. Perhaps you do not consider those people a loss, but I have lost good roleplaying partners to just this discomfort - my own
IRL partner doesn't want to play here for just that reason, as one pointed example - as have other players, such as Limine, as related in their thoughtful post.
Mab, you and I haven't seen eye to eye on many things but I think you're an intelligent and caring enough person to realize that this position is the reason, at least in part, for the poor reputation POTM has among some players that you have posted in complaint of sometimes. Whether the administration cares to rectify that is a choice you make, and all I can do is to try to persuade you towards paths that I think are more helpful. And to be clear, respectfully, I don't think "just deal with it" or "leave" are reasonable options to put on the table when people feel uncomfortable.
We seem to have drawn lines between the perennial "everything is working okay for me" argument and those to whom it hasn't; and I would posit that some self-reflection as to why that it is the case, and how to address that failure, is more viable than persisting in the unhelpful refrain "works for me!" No one has ever fixed a problem by stating "works for me!"
I believe that giving people tools to regulate their environment and set their boundaries is only a healthy thing, and this is something I know very well from experience, both as an admin on countless MUDs before now, and also from my experience developing social networking software. Expecting everyone to get along and the admin to deal with everyone who won't is niave, and it's a niavete I myself reflected when I first started work on said social networking software. I learned this the hard way, and I am begging, pleading for you to learn from the negative outcomes I have myself faced in other projects.
