Block User

Feature Requests
62

Some general advice for those who may not be aware:

Most importantly, do not rely on this forum for action if you are concerned at the harassment you have experienced. Whether that be due to its nature or severity or a fear of escalation. Unless you are simply asking Zwift to add a feature to their wishlist you MUST make a formal complaint of harassment to Zwift support. Otherwise it will not be acted upon with the speed and sincerity it may require, if at all.

If you receive a follow request from someone that you are avoiding just ignore them and leave it sit there. While it is active they cannot send another request. If they retract the request and then send again make a note of the action you have taken, ie, deliberately ignoring and leaving it active. The sender’s repeated retraction and resending will be stronger evidence that they know exactly what they are doing. This may serve you well if you need to press the issue with Zwift HQ or, heaven forbid. law enforcement.

Under Settings > Privacy in the companion app you can turn the Private Messaging toggle to ‘on’. When turned on you will only receive private message from people you follow. That way, if someone you are avoiding wants to try to communicate in game they will have to do it in open chat. If they are bold enough to do that then you can screen shot it and it is likely that others will see it too.

If you run Zwift on Mac or PC you can access the log files for your 10 most recent rides and see a full transcript of all chat (open and private chat) that can be used as evidence if you need to approach Zwift or law enforcement. I don’t use Mac, but on PC the folder location is C:\Users"your name"\Documents\Zwift\Logs. If you show the date and time stamp in your file system it’s easy to find the log file you want.

If you want to Zwift with no other users to do a workout or whatever and avoid the a holes and creepers you can login and start your ride, then disconnect from the internet. For many people that will mean disconnecting their Zwift device from WiFi. Leave it disconnected for the duration of your ride and then reconnect before you finish your ride. Make sure you are connected before you exit the ride and the usual upload process should occur. Then close Zwift as normal or do another ride. Follow the process again if you want the next ride to be by yourself.

You can, of course, set your profile to private, but that doesn’t stop the unsolicited follow requests. Just makes it a tiny bit harder for the mouth breathing pond life to keep track of your movements.

As has been mentioned in this thread already, going private is undermined somewhat if you are friends with people who have an open profile. In this case changing your profile name doesn’t help as anyone paying attention will notice a change of identity among a consistent following or follower list.

There are a number of ways to discover your Zwift ID such as the above mentioned ride logs and in Zwiftpower to name two. So messing with your own profile by constantly changing name is a waste of time against a determined harasser. Just makes it harder for your legit friends to tag you for meetups, etc.

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63

Let’s just say that the standard to be met for having someone permanently removed from the platform is extremely high (or low depending on your perspective) and not without much prodding from those affected and silence from Zwift HQ. There’s revenue on the line after all :roll_eyes: A process worthy of it’s own John Grisham novel.

@Ray_Ruyack_Cryo-Gen Strength in numbers for a complaint like this. Seen it, surfed it, bought the t-shirt. The frequency with which you poke Zwift is less relevant than the number of other people who poke in a simultaneous and co-ordinated fashion. If you can, get each complainant to reference every other complainant and find as many people to join the complaint as possible. And complain very, very loudly within and outside of Zwift! Zwift are tone deaf.

Prove that the harassment is deliberate and ubiquitous with the above approach using chronologically ordered examples. Ride details, screen shots, copies of ride logs and testimony relating to the impact it has had from those affected. No, I’m not kidding. As I said above, it’s a process worthy of its own John Grisham novel.

Show Zwift that they have more to lose in the possible exodus of good users than they will lose by expelling one or a few bad users as money is the only thing they understand. And even then they’ll want the above evidence to cover their butts in case the bad user fights back. Zwift are an invertebrate organism and do not have users best interests at heart.

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64

Thank you Jason. I appreciate the message. Maybe I’m fortunate, or maybe controls are in place and working, but my days are free from the creep. I still have my accounts on lock down, which isn’t my preference, but whatever. I’ve moved on. I feel for those still dealing with people. It’s annoying. I’ve been on Zwift since 2019 and this is my first situation like this and was actually surprised there wasn’t a block in place. It’s on every other app.

As I’ve stated before I think a block would work in most cases. The super persistent and creative could be managed as 1 offs by notifying Zwift with the details.

See ya in Watopia!

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65

Please note that this is not directed at you, or at this response. This is all great information; thank you for providing it for the folks that need to deal with this.

But it’s sooo disheartening that you needed to write up that much information, and that we put the onus of dealing with this on the people who are being harassed. They are already dealing with being harassed; they shouldn’t then have to jump through this many hoops, further impacting their experience, to try and prevent it! It would be so much easier if we could all just say, “Hey, MFers, don’t be jagoffs!!!” and have them actually respect people.

The Internet is good.
Social Media is good.
User Forums are good.

But a few selfish asshats get onboard, and make it a hellscape.

< /rant>

(It’s possible I’ve only ridden once this week, and wont be able to ride the next two, and the lack of stress relief I get from it could be showing … :neutral_face:)

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66

FTFY :slight_smile: .

But yeah, I absolutely agree and said above–these kinds of protections should be fundamental to apps like Zwift, not add-ons that happen ‘if and when’ we start to see trouble, but the harassed users have to push for them.

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< offTopic>
I couldn’t disagree more with your correction. Social Media as a concept is good. How people choose to interact with it is where the problem lies. The news, movies, television, magazines, social media; they are all reflections of who we are as a society. Do those things occasionally reflect the best of us? Yes! Do those things often reflect the worst of us? Yes. But they are still reflections of us. Best or worst, that’s not the fault of TV or social media; that’s 100% on us.
< /offTopic>

Totally agree with you otherwise. It’s unfortunate that companies need to make that sort of ability core to their product’s functionality. They should be able to just build a great cycling app so people can ride how they want to, and not have to also build in these sorts of protections. But that’s not the world we live in, and more companies need to realize that. It’s well past time that they ensure that policies and capabilities are built into their applications from the get go.

68

Also off topic to say this: :slight_smile: It depends on what you think the concept of social media is. I think it’s the concept of everyone shouting whatever they want at full volume all the time, presented in a way designed to make us think that we have to try to pay attention to all of it all the time. It encourages us when we’re shouting to think of it as shouting into a void rather than at people, while simultaneously encouraging us to think that each person is shouting directly at us. It is designed to make us meaner and more intolerant. It was not designed to solve any particular problems in the world, and it has turned out that a firehose of people shouting at us all the time is not good for us.

Some people think that social media is supposed to be ‘people being free to have conversations with anyone around the world at any time’. But that’s not really what it is. When I have a conversation with someone, say at a coffee shop, I am fully aware that I am talking directly to one person, not to the room, and I am not also paying attention to what everyone else in the room is saying, and thinking that it has something to do with me.

And actually, I think this turns out to be on topic. I suspect that a significant number of people harassing others on something like Zwift would not be doing so IRL. Some would, and do. But Zwift/socials/the internet make it super easy to casually stalk people, at the same time without much motivation to think of them as people. That’s why the protections need to be in place from the start :slight_smile:

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Are you talking about the same person Sarah and I are?

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i seriously had no idea this existed, thank you. i rarely use the companion app, and personally i just respond to DMs in public chat already, which does the trick, for my use case anyway. but it is nice to know that this feature is here all the same

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71

I believe so with the initials from the above comments! I still am getting friends requests after I deleted an :+1: so I know he is watching but he can’t chat for I have my account of private an no one can message me if I am not friends thankfully!

72

Muting people for 1 week would be a good start, and if, on reinstatement, they keep it up, mute them for 2 weeks and if they keep it up, ban them. (Ban their IP address to keep them from harassing people fromt heir home address. It wouldn’t stop people using a VPN possibly.

I have some experience with blocking asses on the internet, and it’s not quite as easy as people seem, but it is possible to give them the idea that they need to move the hell on…

It’s sad that people seem to make trolling others their hobby/occupation. What the hell is wrong with some people. But I’d not like to be ‘punished’ if someone thought I was a nuisance.

73

After I read an article about someone dating their way across Strava, I set everything to private. I don’t need that kind of crap. I came to ride, and look at my stats on Strava, not be hit on like a piece of meat.

Riding should be people’s hobby, not harassing people. I was flamed for my avatar icon. Move along, move along…

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74

Hey Tom,

We are actively working on Blocking now. We are targeting one of the next few Zwift Companion releases. Apologies I can’t be more specific on timing at the moment.

Mark

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Could you also add a way to ride “incognito”?
I can make my rides private, but only after I’m done.
There are times that I don’t want anyone to know that I’m riding, but my followers get notified if they log into the app and I’m out there on the roads fer everyone to see.

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76

Incognito riding mode where others cannot see you at all would be nice sometimes as well.

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77

working from home mode? :smiley:

but yes that’s a long requested feature i would like to see.sometimes you just want to ride alone.

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78

Mark, that is great news–thank you so much for the update. I get you on specific timing issues, understandable. But ‘next few’ sounds very good to me :smiley: The work and the update is appreciated.

79

An automatic pause to a declined follow request, disabling the option to instantly request again, would be very useful, and probably also result in fewer users being blocked. :thinking:

BòóX

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80

We don’t have an incognito or “ghost” mode on roadmap at the moment but it is being discussed. Thanks for this.

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81

Excellent Mark, thanks. :slight_smile:

Not really, just some times you’ve had enough and want quiet riding on your own. I’m quite sociable but sometimes I’m near the point of telling people “please, I want to be left alone”. The incognito mode is a bit less brutal.

My other alternative for that is to load up Fulgaz or Rolla, I have both of those.

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