Addressing some PPK Bonus Features concerns
I've been asked a couple times why I made a script for ignoring people. The short answer is that it is a starting point for better things to come. Here's the long answer.
The PPK forums run on a forum software called PunBB. PunBB does a lot of things well and some things crap. As soon as I started visiting the PPK forums I saw that there was room for improvement. Obviously, I, being a typical user, cannot change the forum software. So I'd have to implement improvements and fixes from an outsider's perspective. Inspired by the Something Awful Last Read extension, I immediately went straight for a full blown Firefox extension. I quickly realized that that sort of thing is way over my head, especially without a basis of knowledge in javascript and DOM and nothing to base my work off of. So it got shelved. That was a long time ago.
Recently I decided to give it another go, with a more realistic perspective of my own abilities. Greasemonkey is well known for implementing small changes on the user side that can build up to sweeping changes. I still don't have much of a handle on javascript or DOM but I have google.
So I searched userscripts.org for "punbb". Lo, and behold, a couple of scripts but they were all of the same function: ignore users. That's not the kind of improvement I was looking for, but it's a start. It gives me something to work with. Something I can tinker with and change and observe the results without the painful process of starting the whole thing from scratch and tossing it after an hour's worth of effort.
Now that I had something to work with I started to implement one of the features that I actually did want, moderator flags. Nowhere on the PPK is there a list of moderators. You can stumble upon them by pulling up the user list and sorting by "Administrators" and you'll get most of them. Looking at the index you'd only see VeganMegan as a moderator and that's because she moderates ONE subforum. I'm sure she gets all kinds of insane non-Playground questions because she appears as the first visible authority figure around!
So to me, as someone who frequents other internet forums but has never been a part of the in crowd, knowing who the moderators are is rather important! They're the people who can fix things when they get out of hand and answer questions! It also gives common folk more confidence in the words of people who speak with an air of authority to know that they are actually a person of authority. People are more likely to post when they know who it is that they shouldn't actually piss off.
So let's get to more about the ignore function. Ignored users are ignored locally. The list of ignored users is stored on that person's login cookie. The ignore function is not phoning home and I am not compiling a list of ignored users. I'm not interested in knowing who is being ignored by whom. When you ignore someone, it is a personal decision. No one else knows or needs to know who is being ignored by whom. Personally I won't ignore anyone for any reason. I would even remove the ignore function but that's removing functionality that someone may find useful and I'm not in the business of removing functionality. I will probably even improve upon the ignore function so that it when a post is hidden or a user ignored, the "Show Post" link has a username attached so you at least know who's post is being ignored.
Also, no one is paying me and no one asked for this. I didn't do this to appease anyone but myself. If no one else uses it, I'll be the only one then. I'll keep working on it until I get bored or stuck or run out of things to implement. I've been told by one person, who is a moderator, who happens to be my wife, that I'm personally not allowed to make a post on the PPK about this, no matter how useful it is. If you use this and like it now or in the future, please post about it! I'd love to get more feedback! If you're a moderator and you like this and you're willing to tell Katie to piss off, let me know! I'll be glad to post about this myself.
If you've gotten this far, you deserve a gold star. And a wrap up.
I'm trying to improve things, not cause drama. Help me help you.
OH! And I've put PPK Bonus Features on GitHub! If you're willing to help out, please clone and have at it! Right now the master branch is also the newer-than-new build but once I release a new version, master will freeze and development will continue on a new branch.