So really - can we ever get the option to block threads from specific boards?

This is bound to come up time and time again, but can we please, please get the option to block threads coming from specific boards?

I, like many of us, am trying to black out everything I can about The Witness until I get to play it (I've just started). And already I've had moments spoiled because people can't stop themselves putting non-vague spoilers into thread titles. Things like moments, areas, etc keep popping up. People keep asking for solutions for specific puzzles in specific areas, and while the mods are doing a great job of pointing those people in the direction of the thread specifically made for asking such questions, stuff is still getting out there.

The same thing happened back when Metal Gear Solid V came out.

It'll probably happen in another week or so when Firewatch comes out.

You can easily avoid going into threads based on games you don't want spoiled. You can't easily use the forum at all without seeing a tonne of topics for those games.

I would love this as well. The Metal Gear thing bothered me for another reason. I don't care about that game at all, and for a while topics devoted to it felt like they took up half the forum.

There really isn't much to spoil, you solve puzzles and then solve a few more.

If I had to guess, we'll sooner see a new design of the site before we see improvements to the current one.

Weird. I frequent the forums every day and I don't think I've been spoiled about anything in MGSV or The Witness (or anything else to be honest) via thread titles. I wonder if this is because I'm in the UK so I look during non-peak (i.e. American) periods (when more threads are being created) and the mods have simply caught up by the time I arrive. Though I have trained myself to read the board first and then the thread title so maybe I'm just really good at not reading spoilers.

I miss the whiskey media days. :(

I take it you haven't played the game then. That's not at all The Witness.

@jesus_phish:

Arguably, if you see the post to block it, haven't you already been spoiled?

I'm on this site every day and I've not had anything particularly spoiled for me on the main page. Other than that, if you're trying to avoid Witness spoilers... don't go to the Witness forum.

Does it not seem aburd to want to talk to people about the game, but want the entire world to talk around your personal experiences?

I'm knee deep in the game and I haven't had anything spoiled. I don't go to Witness forums, and won't until I'm done. (Well, that's not true. I had to look up one answer and I'm glad I did. I never would have figured it out myself in a million years.)

@bananasfoster: OP is talking about making it so he doesn't see threads from The Witness forum show up for him at all. I imagine this is Mainly when using the 'recent activity' forum overview, which is the one I mainly use. It's also the one on the homepage.

And it's not making the whole world speak around your preferences, OP is just requesting a feature that sounds quite nice. I certainly want to have the same kind of block on me seeing any Dark Souls III threads when that comes out.

Not necessarily. Some people are so sensitive to spoilers they don't even want to see the thread titles about a game they're excited about playing. Being able to temporarily hide entire Wiki forum sections would allow those users to not even have to worry about it. We make a huge effort to keep spoilers out of thread titles, but sometimes even that isn't enough. Another benefit of a feature like this would be allowing users to hide boards that have a lot of activity...such as when big games like MGSV come out and nearly the entire first page of the forums is filled to the brim with topics about it. It would be a big quality of life improvement to people who just don't care about whatever the current popular game is while still allowing them to see everything else.

Another thing would it would allow users to put Off Topic threads in different Wiki forums instead of forever having them stuck over in Off Topic. We keep threads like the Wrestling topic over in OT so users can hide all non-gaming topics from their feed by deselecting the Off Topic board. If users had an option to hide individual forums, then things like the Wrestling thread could be put back in the Wrestling Ring location page without bothering the rest of us who don't want to see topics about Wrestling. The same goes for anime, gunpla, and whatever else has always been relegated to Off Topic.

This is something we've been talking about and requesting since day one, but you know, man hours and priorities and all that.

Pretty much. I use the forums that way, only visiting 'recent activity' and never going into individual sub-forums.

If I was going into the sub-forums of a game I don't want spoiled then that'd be on me. But I find 'recent activity' is the best way to browse these forums and it's a shame we can't elect to hide elements tied to specific Wiki entries from that. Like @mike said, even from a non-spoiler stand point, if you really don't care about "hot new game" you could hide it so the first page of the forums isn't nothing but The Wrestling Thread, The Anime Thread and then that game.

I wrote a lame Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey script to do this when the MGS flood occured. It's coming in handy for The Witness now.

This is copied from my Firefox/Greasemonkey scripts. I'm pretty sure the one I have in Chrome/Tampermonkey on my home machine is exactly the same.

http://pastebin.com/S5tMRKEp

It would be cool if only for the fact that for the past several days the forums have been absolutely dominated by Witness topics and I'm excited to play it but I just don't have the time right now, and I too am slowly seeing the game unravel before my eyes through thread titles alone. "I'm at the marsh, I'm past the mountains.." Like, I dunno, It's not spoilers per se but I'd say area discovery is a big part of this game.

I'm personally more of a favorite boards guy myself.

@dudeglove: These types of changes aren't out of the question. Right now though, there are a lot of other priorities, so realistically this type of change might take months before we can really get to it. Not saying it isn't something I want to do, so I really like to read the feedback from users here.

@jslack: Thanks for dropping in and at least letting us know it's being thought about.

Hey y'all I've created a ticket in our system for this, it may be a while till we get to it (we have some big stuff on the horizon right now) but we won't forget about it.

@mmmorrowind92: me too! I think it was because for some reason obsessives of the game felt the need to discuss every single thing about that game and that for some reason every single little thing needed it's own thread, it was so bad that I was shocked that half those threads didn't get shut down. It made the boards infuriating to navigate for a while.

What exactly is there to spoil about The Witness? I've cleared every area and am just stuck on the final trophy thing and it sure seems like just a puzzle game.

Well, some of that is touchy decisions that that mods have to make on gut.

In retrospect, maybe a lot of games that got "too many" threads needed to have threads consolidated and weeded....but when it is happening it hard to say.

I wish I knew more about how the GB site is built... In the DB engine I work with in the office it would be pretty straightforward to build a tool to allow users to filter out entire games from showing in the thread list. Though, in my head, the easiest way to do this is to give everyone up to, say 5 games they can blacklist. Support for an unlimited number of filters would be harder.

Anyways this would be a nice feature here! I was a little bummed during the MGSV hype the way people were just sayin OMG Episode 31 as so much of the fun of that game for me was being surprised when a episode was meaningful.

If people kept all the talk to a discrete The Witness (spoiler talk) thread all of these issues would be solved.

I get that everyone is excited about the game, but you don't need 93840934 threads to talk about it, keep it in one.

Definitely agree here, and even I'm not as touchy about The Witness spoilers! Had the same issue with MGSV and Arkham Knight happen. I don't ever go to the forums of a specific game I haven't finished and don't want anything spoiled, but that doesn't help when stuff like what the OP said happens here.

And I'm sure the mods/admin/staff would rather not I just stay off the forums entirely!