What I think makes sense:
- Ignores of specific users that only affect whispers and not regular chat messages
- A way of not showing the whispers in the chat, but a seperate window or area of some kind
I’m not sure if the other suggestions make sense to be implemented into the general site though. Maybe it would be a good option for a third-party client, if you really want something like that, but in general it would be confusing.
Restricting whispers to a channel would mean the whole system isn’t for global private messages that you can receive in any chat anymore. Switching a channel would stop you from continuing conversations and possibly make you miss important messages. It might work for some applications like talking to a bot in the channel you are in, but for other applications (that are not restricted to a channel, or where you want to converse with a bot while not being in the same channel context) it would be equally as confusing as having to follow someone so you can receive their whispers or adding them to some other kind of whitelist.
Stopping users you timeout in a channel from whispering from that channel is clearly not a good idea. A mod shouldn’t be able to prevent users from sending any kind of private messages just because they have a certain channel open.
Stopping users you timeout in a channel from whispering to that channel is also kind of weird. For one, how do you decide a whisper goes to that channel? A user might be in more than one channel. Based on where it’s send from? That has the same problem as in the paragraph above. You could maybe sort of guess what channel a message is associated with, but for blocking messages I don’t think that really works if it’s intended to stay a global messaging system between users.
I appreciate the problem of preventing spam via whispers while still allowing legitimate messages, but I feel like adding these options would make the system way too complicated to understand. Allowing whispers for everyone or a whitelist, and then ignoring users that spam you (maybe also based on keywords) seems like the most sensible way right now.