Wikipedia:Muting difficult users

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This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.

The unfortunate truth about editing the online encyclopedia where everyone can edit is that there are difficult users who act like trolls. If you encounter one, it is best to avoid them, but simply ignoring them is not always easy. You may try to avoid them, but you may keep encountering them over and over, because they are following you around, or you have an overlapping topic of interest. It is a good idea to report them to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents, but if that is not applicable for whatever reason or they do not get blocked from editing, it is a good idea to just mute them so they can not continue ruin the fun of editing Wikipedia for you.

You might find it helpful to redact the username of a difficult user. There are several browser extensions that allows you to redact certain words or phrases, but this guide does not list any specific extensions as extensions vary by browser, and an extension listed here may have become unavailable by the time you are reading this.

This is may not be a particularly good idea as it means that if you have to participate in talk page discussions with or about that user, you will not be able to see the username.

One problem with difficult users is that they may follow you around on to other articles and you will see them on your watchlist, or it could coincidentally happen. Either way, you may not want to see that user in your watchlist. The script Watchlist User Mute help with this. See that page for instructions on how to install it.

There is also a script to hide talk page discussions that the problematic editor has participated in, and a script to hide their edits on page histories.

With or without the difficult user's username redacted, you may accidentally click on their user page, talk page, contributions list, etc. To avoid this situation, you may find it helpful to prevent your web browser from opening it. Find a browser extension that can block certain URLs, and add the URLs of the user pages. Make sure that the extension can block certain URLs rather than entire websites—you want to block the user page, not Wikipedia.

If the user mentions you, thanks you, or joins discussions that you are a part of often, it may be a good idea to just block notifications from them. To do this, add the difficult user's username to the box at the bottom of your notification preferences

You will still receive notifications if that user talks to you on your talk page.

If the difficult user often interacts with you directly, it may be a good idea to report the user at the Administrators' noticeboard and request an interaction ban, assuming the editor's behaviour does not constitute a block.

However, trolls are prone to indirectly interacting with you, by making subtle messages in edit summaries/user pages/talk pages, so an interaction ban does not solve everything. Other methods described in this guide will help you mute these ways of communication.

• Wikipedia:Avoiding difficult users