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**This change is live as of October 10.

Still working on / not implemented yet:

• Member badges
• Channel block**

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Goal

• Make it clearer what happens when you are replying to a cast in a channel
• Give channel owners control

Problems

• Friends are below the fold — Alice and Bob follow each other and interact a lot. Alice is a member in /channel but Bob is not. He replies to a channel cast and is below the fold and feels bad.
• People are used to replying to anything in their feed — the reply button works on all casts. There’s no indication that you won’t be above the fold.
• Channel owner editorial control — prior to recent changes, a top request from channel owners was “I want to control who can reply in my channel”; less of an issue now because of members, but the current implementation allows cast authors to bump replies above the fold, even if the channel owner doesn’t want the person replying to appear in their channel

Proposal

• Make replies more permissive with member replies appear first with badges indicating membership, followed by who the author follows / engages with, followed by Warpcast spam filtering.
• Channel owners that want to have a user always appear above the fold can add that user as a member—which will override Warpcast spam filtering for replies to casts in the channel.
• Introduce channel block — which allows channel owners / mods to prevent non-spammy but trollish users from replying to casts in their channe.
  • Note: block is not for dealing with spam (not scalable, too much work, Warpcast and other clients will handle), but a more targeted tool for non-members who are ruining the channel experience.
  • There will be an API. Hide and block being available via API should give developers the ability to help manage replies via channel mod bots.

Logic

Rough UI mock up