Ok, I've brought this up before, but we apparently have a new form of trolling going around, and I think it's a good solution.
If the Bungie.net site had two tiers of accounts, verified and unverified, it could prevent individual (or small groups of) users from being able to take advantage of the global mute/hide features.
A verified account would be an account that's uniquely identifiable to an individual person. An easy way to do this, would be to send a text containing a code to the user's phone number.
It's much harder, and much less cost effective to sign up for additional cell phone lines than free email accounts. You'd need a way to filter out things like Google voice or other "fake" numbers.
A more robust system would be to use a credit card. You wouldn't have to actually charge anything, it would just be used to verify a unique person.
However it happens, only mutes/hides from verified accounts would be used to calculate whether or not a thread gets globally hidden/muted. Unverified accounts could still mute and hide like they do now, so nothing changes for the users who can't verify for whatever reason.
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Edited by dazarobbo: 11/27/2013 5:03:39 AMIn addition to what's already been said, here are some more things to consider: 1. Although I'm not completely sure about this, I don't believe there is a way to guarantee a credit card number exists and is bound to an account without going beyond simply checking its validity. That is, contacting/communicating with financial institutions the account the number belongs to. 2. Credit card numbers typically just need to pass the [google]Luhn algorithm[/google] test. They don't have to exist. 3. Unless there is some kind of enticement for verifying an account (extra features, perks, badges, credits, points, bonuses, etc...), nobody is going to do this. Nobody is going to verify their account solely for their mutes to have a global effect. And if people are forced to do this when they create an account, it's just going to become a hassle for them that really shouldn't exist. 4. To not include as many people as possible in the calculation of global mutes runs contrary to what the community as a whole wants on the site (within the ToC/CoC, of course).