I think it’d be useful to be able to gag/ignore a person. We’re getting more people on Wolfery, and I think it’s inevitable that we’ll have a couple of people that just don’t want to interact with someone, for whatever reason.
It’s also a useful tool for the admins, because part of handling reports for any arguments whatever would be enforcing gag rules for one or more parties involved, as sort of an intermediate step before going for outright suspensions or bans.
Users shouldn’t be forced to interact with one another, and they definitely shouldn’t be forced to abstain from the site because they’re not keen on somebody.
If a user wants to suffer through disjointed conversations where they’re only seeing part of a conversation happening in public - they should be able to make that choice.
However, there should be specific rules against people publicly discussing blocking of other users or directly bragging to somebody that they’ve placed that person on block. Users should be warned directly with a pop-up or something so that when they add individuals to block lists they’re asked to confirm and also told they’re not allowed to weaponize the tools for the sake of social harassment against people they don’t care for.
Ignoring/gagging may not be my own cup of tea, but I can surely understand that others may want it.
So… what would be the actual behavior? These are my thoughts about the implementation:
Only characters are ignored
Gagging/ignoring can only be done on character level; you cannot gag players as that would leak info about what player owns what character.
Client side ignore
Ignoring would be a purely client-side feature; who you are ignoring is stored locally, and the hiding of messages from that character is done locally.
Not retroactive
If you add someone to the ignore list, previous messages from that character will still show. Only new messages will be ignored. This is mainly to avoid redrawing of the chat log.
Scope of the ignore
Obvious messages, such as say, whisper, summon, etc. will be ignored. Other messages, such as mail, which does not only show in the chat log may not be ignored…? If so, its behavior must be defined. And of course, communication through text fields, such writing messages using Status, Gender, Species, etc. will not be ignored. Such unwanted communication would go under harassment, and should be reported.
Character visibility
An ignored character will still be visible in the In Room list, and in the Awake list, unaffected by ignore.
Message placeholders
Ignored chat log messages could show as a tiny placeholder, telling the user that a message was ignored. Hovering over it could show the message.
Those are my implementation thoughts.
Feel free to discuss them! 
@Jagrabbit, I agree that weaponizing it should surely not be allowed. Telling people you’ve ignored someone, making that someone aware of it, has very little purpose other than to inflict hurt. This should be classified as a form of abuse, which is against the rules. And to clarify it is a good idea.
/Accipiter
I agree with pretty much everything here, though I’m a little worried that people may still use mail
to try and contact a user with a “why am I on ignore?” message. But yeah, for most intents and purposes, a client-side gag is all that’s really needed here!
Thanks for the response. 
Just had a thought.
The problems that arise with users blocking admins/mods who are trying to do official work should be somewhat obvious and plentiful. We’ll need some way to mitigate this issue so that mods/admins cannot be ignored. Maybe flagging a specific character on the account which is to be used for moderation activity primarily?
Moderators/admins already has a “main” character, used when relating to other moderators:
help set main
Though, this information is only available for your own client, and not for others.
What if moderators had a “flag” that you could toggle?
moderate [on | off]
And when toggled on, the moderating character will be shown in a different color in the In Room list, and everything said will also be color coded (warning color).
The ignore/gag function would not gag any message from a moderating character.
Also, the warn command should never be gagged either, even if the character is not flagged as moderating.
So, I’d like to second this feature, on the grounds that sometimes people are irritating in ways that do not rise to the level of a reportable offense.
I’m down with not weaponizing the ignore/gag; people who announce such things to all and sundry tend to come off as mouthy nine year olds. That said, explaining to person #1 in private that yes, the reason I’m not responding to person #2 is I have them gagged, should not be a problem.
I’m seconding the concern, as well, about mail, which should also be prevented in the case of a gag; there are ignore functions that work similarly, although separately, for actions on FurryMuck that impact mail, page, whisper, throw, hand, and invite, and to the extent that Wolfery has such functions, I would ask that similar features be available, either under a unified ignore/gag function, or as separate commands. It’s rare, but there are people who have certain psychological problems who get extremely creative when attempting to evade a gag. 
In my wildest fantasies, I do like the idea of a per-player gag, but yes, that would lead to a certain information leakage. That said, some people do tend to accidentally disclose their alts through idiosyncrasies of speech and such, and someone who is irritating on one of their alts will likely be irritating in similar ways on their other alts. But this sort of thing has apparently cropped up on FurryMuck; when a wizard issues a “no-contact order” between two people, using an alt to evade it is considered a violation of the order.
I do like the idea of being able to hover over a small blob or something to (temporarily) show a gagged message or something. This would be particularly important for moderators who make use of the gag facility and then become obligated to deal with problems involving gagged text.
Anyway, this is just my two cents’ worth. You can’t even buy gum for two cents here anymore.
Thanks for the input @Tlancaalek!
I will move this request for an ignore/gag feature up on my priority list. It will still be post-launch though. But after that, I will make sure you get some way of ignoring annoying characters .
Regarding per-player gag; I can see how it might be desirable, but I won’t implement anything that may leak alt-info to ordinary users. And I am also very reluctant to do so even for moderators. We have to find some other way.
And gag-evasion will quickly go into the territory of harassment, giving moderators reason to warn/suspend them. So we have some way of handle that - similar to how FM classifies bypassing no-contact orders using alts as a rule violation.