The challenges of being muted
Hello everyone!
Please do me a favor and don't just scroll down to the comments and type "nice" without even reading my post. Actually bother wasting 5 minutes reading it. Thank you.
I haven’t made a blog post in like a year, but recently I got muted and didn’t have anything to do so I kind of decided to write this.
Everything wrong about being muted:
For anyone who doesn’t know - I was muted for 3 days and just got unmuted. I don’t want to discuss why I got muted in public, but if you’re curious about it you can send me a private message.
Anyways, back to the topic.
So, when I first got muted, I was slightly surprised. Thankfully, @MGleason (shoutout I guess?) messaged me explaining why he muted me.
Now, to be fair, my first response was “How dare you mute me!!!”
But thankfully I didn’t send that and actually thought about what had happened first.
I realized that I could’ve been muted for much longer, so actually, I would like to THANK @MGleason for only muting me for 3 days.
So, thanks! Not "thanks a lot," since I didn't quite enjoy being muted - but still, thanks for only making it 3 days.
Anyways, if you’ve ever been muted before, whenever you try to post something, you get the following wonderful message:
“You are currently unable to comment with this account.”
Let me just stress how dumb that message actually is.
First of all, it very clearly implies that whoever is commenting actually has at least 2 accounts. Why is that? Well, when you tell someone they can’t use “this account,” you’re basically saying that they should go use another one, which brings us to the next point.
This message also very clearly implies that if you can’t message with this account, you should just go and create another one!!
I mean, why not? If you can’t message with this one, just use another one!
Now, according to the site rules, you actually can’t have more than one account...and I know I'm not the most qualified person to tell you that since as most of you probably know, I do have another account.
I didn’t use that account for a really long time, and I kinda re-discovered it (in a way) during my mute.
Now, to be clear, I don’t play myself from that account or anything - I don’t cheat, I just have it around. I feel like it isn’t exactly the best thing to have another account, but I also feel that I might need it for emergency purposes such as if I somehow manage to get myself muted again.
I also feel that if a moderator sees this, I’m kinda screwed.
ANYWAYS the next thing I want to tell you about is something you probably did which significantly worsened my experience of being muted.
You messaged me.
Asking me if I was muted.
Now, it’s LITERALLY right there in my status - I literally said I was muted. But no! You still message me asking me if I’m muted.
Did any of you stop to think about the fact that if I am muted, I CANNOT REPLY TO YOUR MESSAGES???
PLEASE, being muted is already a pain, but getting spammed with stupid messages that you can’t even reply to makes it so. much. worse.
Now, some of you were a bit smarter. You knew that muted people could talk via the chat feature, so you contacted me via chat.
Asking me if I was muted.
Like PEOPLE, USE YOUR EYES!
PLEASE!
I literally say in my status that I am muted, don’t ask me if I’m muted after I literally tell you I am!!
If humanity is going down this road then I think at this point we should all just be asking each other, “Are you alive?”
But wait, it gets worse.
A LOT of people also messaged me asking me why I got muted. Now, don’t get me wrong, this is actually a sensible question.
But it doesn’t make my life any easier when I come back from lunch to see 20 people asking me why I’m muted.
Now, there are 2 ways to deal with this problem.
- Just don’t ask. It’s that simple. Save me lots of pain.
- Get chess.com to let muted people post a blog post (like this one). I could have saved myself so much time if I had just been able to make one simple news post explaining why I was muted.
I actually realized the next best thing is to explain it in my profile, which I kinda did. I linked my “friends and fans” club and said I’d explain there in the club description.
So, I type all of that in my profile description, and then I click save.
And a message pops up saying “Changes couldn’t be saved.” I realized this was because I was muted!
Now, I started to get mad, but then I realized something.
My profile had actually been saved.
I would like an explanation for that, chess.com. I don't exactly consider that error message the smartest thing I've ever seen.
So, why did I write this blog?
Well, I just wanted to mention that although some people certainly deserve their mute, some of the people who get muted aren't actually bad people. They might have done something stupid, but that doesn't mean they are automatically bad people. A mute is more than enough of a punishment.
NO NEED TO SPAM THEM ASKING THEM IF THEY WERE MUTED!!!
So, if you see that one of your friends is muted, please do the following:
Please do the above.
"But wait, isn't there nothing there?" you might ask yourself.
But that's the thing! I left the lines blank so that there is nothing there! Because if someone is muted, just don't do anything to them!! Sure, message them you're sorry that they're muted and maybe ask for how long, but please don't ask them to explain why they got muted.
Writing this blog was probably a waste of time, to be honest, but hey, maybe it convinced a few of you not to message muted people.
I hope that at least you enjoyed this more than I enjoyed being spammed by you when I was muted.
Maybe I'll start blogging again, and maybe I won't. We'll see how it goes.
Anyways, I'll see you next time!
Oh, and if you're muted right now, please send me a message explaining why you're muted. Thanks!
-LEON
