Most of the behavior regarding pagerbans is, at the moment, reasonable. In my opinion, it's pretty sensible to have a way to block messages from, e.g., a harasser or to not want to see the messages of a user on the forums you find obnoxious. That's all pretty good.

But being unable to respond to the forum post of someone you have blocked is, in my frank opinion, stupid. Forums are not blog posts: they are meant to be used by the community for discussion and the current approach does a good job at stifling that behavior. If a user has an insight on a another developer's problem, or some design philosophy issue, or they have a critique for another poster's approach or thoughts on a matter, they should not be precluded from discussing them just because the original person no longer wants to see or be informed of posts by a given user. These are things that could benefit the community at large, regardless of the original poster's feelings on a given user, and by stifling the discussion you are in turn being detrimental to the community.

For example, if Doohl were to suddenly find my posts insufferable does that mean I should no longer be able to discuss with the rest of the community about mine and other's contributions on BYOND? Of course, I could make another thread, but why would people use it over the one already being used? And what if I want to remark on another user's ideas or contributions in that original thread? Then I would be SOL.

Likewise, for whatever reason Yut Put has me blocked and so—even though I enjoy writing and playing games, and had things I would like to add to the thread—I was blocked from posting in this thread. Even if Yut Put would gain nothing by my contributions, by preventing himself from doing so at the bare minimum, other developers and game designers could have potentially been helped by my contributions and any discussion that ensued; as it stands now, that is impossible.

I feel this behavior is detrimental to these forums and the way forums should be run, and should be changed. This is not a blog shared by a hundred users, but a forum meant for discussion, and stifling that discussion by a single user's arbitrary whim betrays the purpose of a forum to begin with.