I'm confused.. okay so for example. Say someone randomly blocks you. You don’t know this person. You Decide hey! I want to make a suggestion for an upcoming event. You go onto a topic saying the same thing and post. You get a warning.. but why? You ask and a mod says that op has blocked you. You think why not make a forum yourself? You make one and It gets locked by mod saying there already is one. See a problem here?

yes, there are serious issues with blocking. We shouldn't be getting warnings for things the site allows us to do. Other people have noticed some of these issues. You might want to read and/or post in these threads:

Can we not see who blocked us? Things Blocking doesn&;t actually Block, but should

Also the sites "random" feature during events, ie. throwing snowballs at a random user. I have not once, but twice in the same day, thrown a snowball at the same person who blocked me.

Did this happen recently? The snowballs issue was fixed this winter, and we've been making an attempt to cover other "random" areas of the website too so that it does not choose blocked users. Definitely post on Things Blocking doesn&;t actually Block, but should if it's still happening please - and if you notice anywhere else that's been overlooked!

You shouldn't be able to see forum topics made by users you've blocked / have blocked you. If you're somehow able to see these topics, please post on the bug report linked above and we'll work on fixing that!

That said, you bring up a good point. You wouldn't know you're making a duplicate topic if you can't see the first topic, so it wouldn't be fair to get a warning for it. Still, duplicate topics aren't allowed and there's good reasons for that. I see the problem and I think it would be productive to have a discussion on how this kind of situation should be handled. How do you guys think we should handle it?

it happened this winter, but it could have been before it was fixed. I kind of stopped throwing snowballs because I always use the random button, and I didn't want to get a warning or something.

Blocking didn't used to hide forum posts of people who have blocked you, only the other way around (iirc the reasoning has been that if that person happens to make a relevant plot/event thread or something, it's not fair to keep someone from seeing it because the OP has them blocked).

I can see that the rules page has it that way around though. Was that changed recently? Because I can still see posts from people who have blocked me and as far as I can remember, that's always been the case, so maybe it should be mentioned somewhere if that's been changed

I think most forums handle that by hiding the posts and quotes of blocked people so that you don't see the posts of the people you don't want to. Generally I'm not sure you want any given user to be able to control participation in a conversation through manipulating their block list on a public forum since that can lead to abuse. There's also no real reason to prevent the blocked person from joining in since they're not breaking any rules. You only need to help the blocker control what they see.

It also strikes me as odd that posts from someone who blocked me should be hidden from me. I'm not the one who did the blocking. Again, that's something I don't think other forums do since it's probably not hard to abuse. I should be prevented from pinging them though. If they’re subscribed then my post shouldn’t send them an event too.

This is a little iffy, but you may possibly want to allow topics started by someone you blocked be visible. If you hate the person with a seething passion, cool, don't click in and just move on. But if it's a suggestion forum for a topic that's important to you, you may want to check in the thread to see if you have anything to add to the discussion.

(Also the slight problem that not seeing a topic by someone you have blocked can also lead to the dupe topic, deleted thread, and maybe warning issue.)

a person should have every right not to see a certain user - so blocking good. However, if Mary blocks John, she has no right to dictate what he can see or not see. if Mary makes the (one and only allowed) thread on zombie strain tracking, for example, then John should not be blocked from viewing that thread.

If you reverse the situation and John makes the thread, Mary shouldn't see it because she doesn't want anything to do with John. Of course its not fair to Mary to get in trouble for making her own tracking thread because she can't see that John's tracking thread already exists...

I really don't see any way to bar duplicate threads, keep people safe and make sure that everyone has access to important information all at the same time.

Also are staff allowed to block users?

Staff are not allowed to block users.

Would it be possible to not show the name of the person you blocked/blocked you? would that be enough so you can still read the thread, but not see that persons name? like on Masq dancing forum.
Maybe let them read the thread but not post on it? somehow?