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Prevent block circumvention

Unlike stated here blocks don't block users, but only pages.


This means that if I ("userA") block "page1" of "userB", "userB" can still access my page from their "page2".


This is a huge problem for people who want to block others on cohost.


The only way to currently circumvent this is to manually block all pages of a user, which is not practical as secondary pages might not be known.


A possible solution would be to make it so that blocks block users and not just pages, but that would introduce the ability to infer a users secondary pages from their block, which is also not ideal.


So a compromise solution would be the following:


Make it so that when a user blocks someone, they are also given the option to block all of that user's pages.


This way, users can still block other users without revealing which pages they have, but it is still possible to block a user with all their pages.


8 people have this problem

 I think this is really important, being able to circumvent a block by just making a new page is making harassment way easier. This feels like a serious user safety oversight.


2 people like this

The main issue with this is we would need to ensure the system is perfectly airtight to avoid leaking page ownership. If you could use this to deduce that someone who owns page A also owns page B, that would be an extremely major privacy violation. 


While that does not prevent us from making a change like this, it is a significant amount of labor to ensure not only that it doesn't leak now, but that no change ever causes it to leak, regress, or otherwise break. 


As it stands today, if someone uses an alternative page to evade a block, that can be reported to us and it will lead to a warning and then a ban. This system is not perfect (i.e. you may not know the evasion is even happening), we think it is a reasonable compromise for the time being. 


1 person likes this

An idea (no clue how easy or dofficult it'd be to implement) on how to show this is to show it on its block list as   "[page you blocked] and all associated pages" and then maybe make a diet block thing where it doesn't prompt the user to "view temporarily" and simply shows the account. That way the blocked user can't see your account from any pages but you can't tell which pages are owned by the account you blocked.

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