[Enigmaticz]

People are able to follow’ you without you knowing. I think you should be made aware that someone is following you. If you have players on ignore they can still see you and check when you’re on line . May seem trivial but actually both are stalking. Think there needs to be something put in place to make you aware if you’re being followed even if it’s someone you have on ignore

[shyams]

Hello and welcome to the forum.

There are two separate ideas co-mingled in your post.

1. "You should be made aware that someone is following you"
I think there are previous threads on the same topic on this forum. If I recall, the consensus was that people's choice to follow you or ignore you is a personal and private one. Consequently BBO did not feel the need to build this feature. You may disagree with their stance and you may want to pursue this further, but to the best of my knowledge they have no plans to change it.

If you want to know whether one of your infrequent partners is following you, there is one way to test it. Choose to follow them (temporarily). If the text changes from "follow" to "friend" (it barely takes seconds to do so), you know that the other player is following you. You can then undo your "follow" action.

2. "If you have players on ignore they can still see you and check when you’re on line"
I agree with you completely on this point (including your reference to stalking). Indeed this should be a feature added to BBO i.e. you should become invisible to anyone who is on your ignore list, even if they choose to follow you. Also, such people should not see an alert when you login.

I hope BBO can take up this request seriously. Barmar, Gerardo or other "yellow" posters might want to add their views.

[pilowsky]

Unfortunately, sometimes people are rude or abusive. Instead of 'ignoring' these people I now 'Follow' them and make a notation next to there name about what happened.

A second good reason for the Follow function is that you may want to follow an excellent player so that you can Kibbitz them when they are online.

Directors may want to Friend you so that they can pick you as a sub.

You can always choose to play anonymously if you want to.

I would be opposed to changing the current system.

[shyams]

pilowsky, on 2020-July-26, 04:29, said:

I would be opposed to changing the current system.

I find the tendency of opposing useful ideas when they are clearly good ideas very strange.

It is particularly strange when I know that these characterisations are being made by extremely helpful people that do not work for BBO.

[gbb483]

At least 20 members of my club are active on BBO. If I'm having a friendly session with 3 of them,I don't need to know about the other 17, but I don't want to lose their usernames. So I 'follow' the 3 I'm playing with and 'ignore' the other 17. At the end of the session I'll switch the 17 back from 'ignore' to 'follow'. It can be inconvienient to lose the chat facility with them, so I may need to revisit the policy.

[Vampyr]

gbb483, on 2020-July-26, 07:45, said:

At least 20 members of my club are active on BBO. If I'm having a friendly session with 3 of them,I don't need to know about the other 17, but I don't want to lose their usernames. So I 'follow' the 3 I'm playing with and 'ignore' the other 17. At the end of the session I'll switch the 17 back from 'ignore' to 'follow'. It can be inconvienient to lose the chat facility with them, so I may need to revisit the policy.

Why do you find it necessary to ignore those 17 people?

[Enigmaticz]

Vampyr, on 2020-July-26, 12:02, said:

Why do you find it necessary to ignore those 17 people?

Seems a bit unkind to ignore them and they will know you don't respond,

My issue remains total stranger following me for no reason....I'm not a renowned player or a player with flair worth watching.
So why ?

[shyams]

Enigmaticz, on 2020-July-26, 12:47, said:

My issue remains total stranger following me for no reason....I'm not a renowned player or a player with flair worth watching.
So why ?

There could be various reasons that people "follow" other regular people (by regular, I mean not a Star, a renowned player or such). Allow me use a personal example to provide one.

I used to often play with pickup partners on BBO tournaments. If I discover that my partner's play is good and I sense that he/she enjoyed playing with me, I add them to my follow list. It then becomes simple to message such a person the next time I want to play a tournament. Typically I would send a message like "Hi, hope you remember me. We played together (3) days ago. There's a (12)-board (MP) tourney starting in (10) minutes. Are you free to play again with me?"

Many of these people I follow would have been complete strangers but, through repeated playing together, they become BBO friends.

IMO, there is nothing creepy about "follow"ing someone -- I'd be surprised if any significant number of "follow"s are done by stalkers/creeps.

[barmar]

Enigmaticz, on 2020-July-26, 12:47, said:

Seems a bit unkind to ignore them and they will know you don't respond,

My issue remains total stranger following me for no reason....I'm not a renowned player or a player with flair worth watching.
So why ?

The reason for the current design is that lots of people follow renowned players, just so they'll know when they can watch them play. It would be annoying to them if they were notified about all the hoi polloi following them.

So we'd have to make the notification a per-user option, and we've been trying to keep options to a minimum.

[mycroft]

I do think "ignore trumps follow" is something to think about implementing.

I would have to think that, of course, given my comments on stalkers recently.

[Huibertus]

It's just like unknown people kibitzing in real life. I don't mind.