I love Gamejolt. It's been the one and only social media, besides YouTube, that I have used for half of my life. I met a lot of really good friends through here, I respect the creators and developers of the website, I honestly agree with most decisions they take, like Gamejolt Creators or Quests, to name a few...

But the Block button is an aspect of Gamejolt that desperately needs to be revisited, as its current use is horrible and counterproductive to making a healthy social media.

What It Does

The Gamejolt Block button, as of right now, essentially does three things:

• Prevents the user you blocked from leaving comments, shouts or liking anything related to you.

• Your posts won't appear on the blocker users' "For You" page.

• Prevents the user you blocked from receiving any notification regarding you. (Besides new comments in a third party comment thread)

And also the evident if you were friends you lose that friendship and cannot message each other, but like it's obvious and the norm so there's no point in bringing it up.

The first two functions are pretty good and normal, you don't want someone who you blocked to be able to continue contacting you, because of obvious reasons, nor for them to continue seeing your posts...

However...

What it Doesn't

Here's a few things Gamejolt's Blocked button doesn't do!!

• It doesn't prevent the user you blocked from seeing posts from yours or anything like that, they can still fully see your stuff and everything and anything you do.

• It doesn't prevent them from posting about you.

• If you're the one who blocked, you don't even get a message stopping you from checking the blocked user's account. That only happens in Gamejolt Mobile, so what's even the point.

It doesn't really prevent any indirect interaction to happen.
Sure, if I block my alt I cannot talk to it directly, but I can make posts about him, I can talk to my followers about him, etc.

You probably know what I'm going to talk about by now...

What it Encourages

I have a huge respect for Gamejolt for how against harassment and bullying they are, they take action immediately and seriously against any report.

However, they absolutely missed the mark with the Block button.

Remember the last point I brought up in the "What it Does" section? How you don't get any notification regarding the person who blocked you? And remember what I mentioned in the "What it Doesn't"? How you can still indirectly talk about them?

...yeah. It's a deadly duo.

If you block a user, you can freely make posts about them, criticizing and encouraging all sorts of harassment against them, even mentioning them by their @, and they won't know you're doing so unless they check your profile.

This creates an extremely toxic environment where, if you have beef with someone and they block you, you're now stuck in a loop of every once in a while having to manually search for their profile to see if they made a new post about you, defaming, lying, inciting harassment, whatever the case is.

It's just a horrendous situation that's created by the loophole Gamejolt has provided to people, the opportunity to trashtalk someone and incite your fans to do so too, or worse things that I won't mention, and force the user to go into a paranoia of "Oh god, did they mention me again?"

It's a horrendous situation I have been put into and really do not wish on anyone.

How to Fix It

If you're reading this, @gamejolt , which I strongly don't think so but there's a chance, here's a few ways I would attempt to remedy and fix this issue with your site:

• Any and all mentions notify the user, no matter who the user that mentioned them is. If necessary, just make it an option, "Do not notify me of them mentioning me".

• Disabling the making of a post mentioning someone who you have blocked, maybe bring up a "You have blocked this user and therefore cannot mention them." screen or small pop-up message.

• The laziest and worst one yet somewhat effective, make it so any and all mentions towards someone the poster blocked get deactivated. It doesn't entirely fix it but its a starter I suppose.

It's a really stupid issue that desperately needs fixing if to keep this website safe from the threats of harassment, bullying, and other dangers of toxicity.

Thanks for reading, I hope the post was written comprehensibly, and remember not to fucking harass anyone.
If you have beef with someone, take it to private, resolve it quickly and peacefully and move on with your life.
I promise you, no one wants to see JackTheDualSwordWielder make posts about AmyStacyCupcakesMaker about how much he hates her and shit. (Fictitious people, lol)

And until my next post,

That's been all.

Signed, Rafa.