4d ago

Restrict the Restrict Feature

As a host, I don’t believe I should have to mediate interpersonal issues between members in order to keep my session accessible to the community I’ve built. More importantly, it concerns me that one member’s decision to restrict another member can have such a significant effect on a session hosted by a third person. I absolutely understand and support the need for members to have tools to protect themselves and control who can contact them. However, I think the Restrict feature should primarily prevent direct interaction. For example, restricting someone could prevent that person from: • Sending you direct messages • Sending or accepting friend requests • Initiating other one-to-one contact I don’t believe it should automatically prevent either person from seeing or attending a session hosted by someone else. Members already have the ability to unregister from or leave a session if someone is present whom they do not wish to interact with. If there are situations involving harassment, threats, or other safety concerns, those should absolutely be handled through ShareWell’s safety and reporting processes. The current system, however, allows a restriction between two members to unintentionally become a restriction on an entire community. For established groups in particular, this creates a difficult situation. If two regular members restrict one another, which person effectively gets access to the community? Does the person who registers first determine whether the other person can attend? Should the host have to cancel and recreate the session and coordinate registration order? Should members begin creating alternate sessions whenever this happens? None of those seem like reasonable outcomes, and they put hosts and other members in the middle of a conflict that may have nothing to do with them. It also creates the potential for a member to be unintentionally isolated from an established community simply because another member has restricted them. In a community like Create & Connect, where many of the same people interact across multiple sessions hosted by multiple members, the effects can extend well beyond a single session. Hosts put significant time and effort into building communities on ShareWell. Once those communities develop regular membership and relationships of their own, the platform’s safety tools should protect individual members without allowing a peer-to-peer conflict to unintentionally disrupt the larger group. I hope ShareWell will consider changing the Restrict feature so that restrictions primarily apply to direct interaction between members rather than access to sessions hosted by third parties. I believe there is a way to preserve the important safety and privacy protections the Restrict feature provides without allowing a restriction between two individuals to determine who can participate in an otherwise unrelated community.

Pending