Periodically I'm shocked when I go to use an ordinary, expected safety/moderation feature on Discord and discover it's just not there. There's no way to mute a user or block notifications from a particular user. If a user @s you 300 times in a server, there's no way to dismiss all those notifications, you just have to click X 300 times or else resign yourself to your notifications list being dead. You have to wait for that server admin to get to it, but it pollutes the list for *all* servers.
The way I use Discord is I join lots of servers casually and never leave them in case I need to talk on them someday, and then I have like 3 servers that I actually regularly monitor and post on. Discord seems to be designed as if they're assuming you're exclusively doing the "3 servers I'm on seriously" thing and my "joined a lot of servers I don't care about" thing is a surprising, unsupported use case. But since everything is a Discord now it seems like that can't possibly be unusual.

UPDATE: Okay so it turns out I *can* block the user and then it removes all their notifications. I thought you can't block users on servers, only users in the DM window, because I checked every menu and didn't find it. It turns out you have to, specifically, *right click* on the *username* and then THAT menu has "block". Oops

...though this is another problem with Discord, which is many safety and other important features seem to be in "hidden" menus such as this * _ *

https://unstable.systems/@demize/109434290009852518

demize (@[email protected])

@[email protected] does blocking a user not stop them from pinging you? I know that blocking users on discord is a bad solution to every safety problem but I didn’t realize it was *that* bad

unstable.systems Mastodon (Glitch Edition)
Also, interestingly, blocking a user removes their notifications from the notifications stream, but does NOT remove the notification bubble from servers or channels until you click on the channel. So now I've got a server where, until the admins notice and delete the spamflood messages, I have multiple phantom notifications in every single channel that will disappear immediately if I ever click on the channel, which will never happen.

@mcc right click the server icon and mark as read can clear all pings and unreads from a server. Works per channel too.

But yeah there's a bunch of wacky stuff around pings. Editing a message can't change the ping (say if you @ the wrong Max) and deleting a message doesn't remove it.
Been that way for years

@mcc if someone sends a message then deletes it, it also doesn't clear the "channel unread" but. The technology just isn't there yet.
@mcc the way blocking is implemented on Discord is the worst possible option. Their messages aren't gone, just collapsed, their messages still trigger channel/server notifications for you, and I'm not 100% about this, but I think they can still mention you, too. 

@mcc ohshit THAT is probably what's causing the weird "phantom" notifications I've gotten on Discord for a while now. I never made the connection.

As someone who runs a small Discord server for fandom purposes, do you know if there are any particular settings I might change to mitigate this? We don't often have problems with trolls or users with irreconcilable differences, but the former are quickly ousted and the latter has happened on occasion, would like it to be a more comfortable place for them to remain by just blocking each other.

@luna_m I don't know very much about Discord.
@mcc no worries. Thought I'd ask just in case you'd noticed something else that I didn't!