I for one like the fact that blacklisting doesn't work on articles posted to the forums, and I've never thought that an article posted to the public forum should be accepted with commenting disabled. If you neither want nor can handle comments, the article has no business on the forums in the first place.
For too many years a small handful of asshats have abused the blacklist feature, throwing stones at those who could not reply. This did more to fan flame wars than I think many people realize, because the only option then available if one wanted to respond to allegations, defend against attacks, offer clarification, or simply tell the attacker to piss off was to write an article in response.
This drew more people into conflicts that very well may have been contained to the thread that started it--because while we share many readers, each of us has a slightly different core. It's no secret that trudy and I dislike each other, for example, yet we each have a different set of 'regulars.' If she says something crappy about me on one of her threads, only her 'base' is going to see it. However, if I am unable to respond at the scene and start my own thread....well....now her readers AND mine are exposed to the unpleasantness.
Since many of my regulars are also victims of trudy's blacklist, some of them will then post their own thoughts on it...on THEIR blogs...and on it goes.
I'm sure jennifer could cite some examples too, just prior to her (temporary) exile, I think there were a good dozen threads active in regards to the situation--it was all over JU and few regulars managed to remain uninvolved. The fight might have been contained on a single thread if so many hadn't been blacklisted and unable to respond to that thread.
If we are tripping down JU Wish List Lane, I'd prefer to see the blacklist feature disabled on ALL forum posts...we seem to get along better as a whole and the fights that have occurred since the BL took a shit have been short-lived and pretty much confined to where they started, instead of spilling over onto unrelated, third-party threads or generating spin-off flames.
If you want to talk trash about someone where they CAN'T respond, those threads shouldn't be posted to the forums to begin with, and if confined to your own blog they won't get as much exposure--exposure they don't deserve in the first place.
On the other hand, if JU could just provide us with an 'ignore user' feature (like SO many other forum sites out there do) none of this would be an issue at all. I occasionally use voodoochat and they have a really cool feature in addition to 'ignore.' It's called 'shun' and it prevents the other user from seeing anything YOU post as well. That way, not only can you prevent their words from reaching you, you can make sure yours don't reach them, so they've got nothing to talk about.
Does it cause a little confusion for the shunned individual? Haha, yeah. So what. But what it really does is put every tool possible in the hands of the user, allowing them to remove annoying or infuriating individuals from their chat experience, and with the double-whammy of the 'shun' feature, it removes you from theirs, too, which eliminates 'stalking.'
The only way to 'shun' an individual presently involves setting up a 'custom audience' which is a royal pain in the ass if you only want to prevent 2 or 3 people from reading your blog. It should be set up the other way around, with some way to exclude a couple of people instead of building a custom audience of hundreds just to keep them out.
As far as the anon comments go, good riddance. JU is free and only takes a few minutes to join. If a person is too lazy or too busy or too stupid to figure that out, is their commentary really going to add that much in the first place? I've really enjoyed not being blindsided by regulars launching attacks as anons because they're huge pussies and wouldn't dare say the things they would as anons.
