I have no idea why some, ahem, intellectual outliers concluded that "I got a death threat, please bring back Ignore" means that I'm afraid of said threat -- but then, I don't possess their unique brains. When a sane person is afraid of a threat, they either acquiesce or ask the authorities to take actions against the offender. For a person who's genuinely afraid, shutting down a source of self-volunteered advance warnings would be counterproductive!

The point of this thread is that GOG's chat system sucks and needs work. What we have here is the best case -- a user who has held a grudge for two straight years, to a day (!!!), waiting for a chance to bypass the ban and send a string of decidedly unwelcome messages -- and yet it didn't occur to said user to simply create another account, what with already being in the business of tosbreaking. And by the absence of further enlightened communiqués I assume they were successfully persuaded into following the rules by the mods.

I believe the best private messaging system for most public forums is one without correspondent whitelists (except some abuse protection / spam prevention measures), and the recent flood of friend requests threads is proof. Some communication does not present public interest and does not belong in a public thread by dint of that. "Hey Vicklemos, are there more games like Pier Solar????" doesn't need to be its own thread and doesn't need to be a post in an unrelated thread. And whitelisting is bad practice -- not only "friend" is a charged word, but the practice of requesting people to enter a long-term relationship (however insignificant) is bad design by itself, and mutual vetting wastes valuable time under asynchronous conditions. I don't want anyone to agonize over the decision to add me as a "Friend" just to ask about a puzzle in SOAT and overthink unfriending me later ("aww, but what if they notice and take offense?!? what if they straight up refuse?!!! holy shit!!!"). Back in the old days of chatroom games, I started a civil war over what turned out to be variant word use. Human communication doesn't need extra stupid.

I don't believe in conducting abusive communication via private messages. If I expect someone to find the message unwelcome (which is typically true of messages containing insults of the recipient), it has to be sent publicly (to lend voice to an expression of collective disapproval) or not sent at all.

Obviously, a request to cease unwelcome conversation can contain insults and in many cases such a request can be more effective than a polite one. But you know what's more effective than either? A fucking chat ban.

There are many private reasons to ignore users, none more valid than others. Some users are spammy, some are stupid, some are evil, some write posts that are physically painful to look at. There's that one user who made a career out of promoting irrational belief and tried to prove to me that, just because he gets paid for it, said belief is logically True. I haven't been more angry with anyone before or since. But "hey GOG, this fuck spouts pseudoscience, please ban him or something, I don't want to read his posts anymore" probably won't find much sympathy with the GOG staff.

There's also the question of GOG's technical security. GOG has seen attacks by career spammers and disgruntled macro users and had to fight them off with raw clickpower. Now imagine what an alt-universe Mrkgnao-with-a-goatee can do... congratulations on not sleeping at night ever again. And yet, GOG seems pretty blasé about it all. The chat system is particularly deprioritized, because it's not in plain sight, so various nasty fuckery can continue, with each particular user being told to "just ignore" their personal daily batch of bullshit -- while in practice it'll be no different from the forum being flooded with spam.

So me getting blatantly laughable death threats is, in its own peculiar way, awesome, because while this particular offender clearly lacks the brainpower and resources to harm GOG or me in any way whatsoever, death threats are a no-no by social convention and will hopefully provide the motivation for GOG to allocate additional programmer-hours to restore and implement some advanced message curation/filtering options, which will be a win for everyone.