Why doesn't A2K have an ignore button?

Hey I'm not going to make them you guys are. The whole idea is to give more depth to the site and offer individual's the ability to create their own sub-groups.

So you can make your room how you like it. It has the opportunity to improve both the socialization aspects of A2K as well as the informative aspects.

More outlets for socialization in better settings for them will improve ability to try to keep other topic types (questions etc) on topic.

As you can tell, I really dig passing the buck on the cat herding to the mob.

So, I can put members like me that need a doggie door in my room so we can all run out to pee together. That'll be fun!

This related discussion explains how to install an ignore button in the current A2K realm -- Firefox required.

Sweeeet! I want one of the walls in my room to be purple! A window would be nice too. Maybe a nice couch to sit on... hmmm...

Yeah we can tell Craven. I can't say I blame you though. I wouldn't call it passing the buck. Isn't the goal of this to help relieve you and the others who run this site a little bit? I imagine it would help you all considerably, and I think as members it's the least we can do to return the favor.

To expand a little, the download you want depends on the Firefox version you are running. (To find out, click "Help-->About Firefox" in Firefox's menu bar.) If your firefox version is 2.0.x you want the to install the Greasemonkey extension and a user script based on it. Old Europe's instructions for installing it are here:

[url=http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=2388689#2388689]http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=2388689#2388689[/url]

If your Firefox version is 1.5.x, you want the "phpbb user hide" extension. You can install it using Old Europe's instructions, which live behind the link that JPB has posted:

[url=http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=2340511#2340511]http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=2340511#2340511[/url]

Good luck!

I've been using that happily for a while. Takes a bit of sour out of the bar-mix.

Can someone tell me what ehBeth just said?

Exactly. The problems of 70k+ members are very different from those of 7k+ members and require a different mix of time and attention. 'Twould be nice to expand the attention to more people so that Mods could do what only Mods can do (like get rid of porn).

Sounds like a hybrid of what Orkut uses.

Orkut allows people to create their own communities that have forums. The community creator/owner has the ability to appoint moderators within that community to help with the admin of it for accepting new members, deleting spam, banning spammers from the community, deleting offensive/off-topic posts, banning repeat offenders from the community, etc.

Communities can be public or private. If public, anyone can read the posts and join the community. If private, anyone can read the posts but must have owner/moderator approval to join the community.

Communities are organized into categories of interest. People can read all posts in public and private communities. People people must join a community to post in it. Members can also create polls within the community. Each community owner has the ability to designate the default language of their community. This allows for international groups to have their own communities as well as interact with others in a common language base. It helps the community owner filter posts in other languages if they wish to do so.

You can do searches on various levels: society, people, communities, and within communities.

People collect community icons in their profiles as merit badges to display in their list of communities they are members of as a way to advertise their interests. It is also how you monitor or ignore a community. If it isn't in your profile's list of communities, you have no awareness of it. You have to intentionally insert it into your list to monitor it unless you put links to it in your browser's favorite's list.

People approve requests for friendship and collect friends and their avatars in their profiles as an address book and are able to send private group messages to their friends. The "friends" mechanic features a karma tool in which you can assign weight to various attributes about your friend. The reverse of such a feature might work well as a filter for "undesireable posts".

When you look at a person's profile, it tells you what friends and communities you have in common. When you look at a community profile it tells you which of your friends are in the community too.

The Orkut society as a whole has the ability to report an individual member or community as bogus/abusive/offensive/spammer, etc. There are mechanics in place that, when a certain number of these reports are received, the member is automatically banned/community is closed. A drawback of that is that people pile on to other members/communities as a way to protest what they are about.

Each member also has the ability to ignore other members, meaning they receive no communication at all from that member name.

Each member has the ability to private message others, as well as post public notes in a scrap book.

Each member has the ability to post up to 12 images in their personal album. No images are able to be posted in the community forums or scrap books.

Any internet links that are posted anywhere within Orkut must be validated with one of those "type the letters seen in the box above into this field" security screens to prevent bots.

One of the biggest drawbacks of it is that it is written to allow use of scripts. Scripting has proven to be a huge security vulnerability and various gangs compete with each other to see who can steal the most communities from their owners and claim them as their own before deleting them. To protect their communities, owners create a fake profile for their ownership and use it only for that, while posting other another profile. Also, the bots run rampant through Orkut communities, making most of them a lot of work for the owners and moderators. You either invest your time deleting the spam/porn in a public community or make it a private one and invest a smaller amount of time in approving/disapproving new members. If you don't keep up with the maintenance, the true gems of the community posts get sufficated by the mound of spam.

For me, another of the drawbacks is it is very time consuming to keep up with all the individual communities if they are all active ones. Orkut sorts your list of community memberships chronologically by latest post date, but it is still a lot of work. You also can't get a quick overview of what all is going on in the society as a whole like you can on A2K by just reading the New Posts.

Craven, if you're interested in more details of any of these features/mechanics, let me know and I'll point you to them or you can explore them on your own after I list you as a member in my friends list.

Oboy. I always wanted to be a mob.

I've used Orkut, and all the other social networking softwares there are. Ther groups part isn't modeled on Orkut in particular but some of the social networking components (really just friendlists and degrees of networking) will be there are on Orkut (and any other social network).

I've seen them all but want to do a slightly different take on almost all of the details.

Bookmark!

Only kidding

This sounds like a very cool idea and can't wait to join the mob :-D