I once had to manipulate the HTML on a page to make the submit button on a site work. The company I was trying to contact didnt have any visible email addresses available and their contact form had a “Slide to unlock” thing to enable the submit button. It would not slide all the way to the right so it would never let you submit. A quick dig through the html and changing it to enabled and all of a sudden I could contact the company
Thanks! Sadly I’m tired of the current sensitivity. And seeing persons I’ve come to respect on the forum getting trolled is tiresome. I have learned to deal with the world on a local level. I strive make change happen in my community. Hopefully someone will have the energy to carry it forward.
I hear your noble ideals but would counter by saying that this isn’t a community in the traditional human sense. Communities tend to be small and localized. This forum, albeit small for a forum, is still way larger than the traditional notion of “community”. To me this means that there are going to be differences (in attitude, in communication style) that may not be worth actively resolving, but are best handled by ignoring the other person. Sometimes ignoring a person is very hard, a noisy jerk is difficult to abide. (he says, feeling like he’s getting blocked by people right now)
I make no judgments about how or why someone might use this CSS trick. I just wondered if it could be done, and decided to look into it. I haven’t blocked anyone yet.
If I were to use it, it would be to keep me from replying to some person’s consistently difficult behavior. Every now and then someone just has your number and you can’t resist getting into a pointless tarbaby of a discussion – this would protect me from myself. I wouldn’t be pretending he or she didn’t exist, I’d merely be choosing not to listen to him or her and using technology to help me do the job.
Sure, that’s fair enough. There are sometimes unresolvable issues where the best solution is just to disengage.
I just feel a bit uncomfortable with the idea of ignoring any part of a community that I value. If harm is occurring then I would rather know about it and have the opportunity to respond.
All that aside, showing people that they can modify the behaviour of web pages to better suit their needs is quite helpful