Blocking people actually doesn't block them completely

Cmdr Blackbird · Jun 13, 2019

Not sure if this belongs in question or discussion but this is the issue, but I really want to get this issue sorted for my brothers sake.

My little brother plays Xbox One, often with this 'friend' of his. Now this friend in particular is... well... very attached, and often just spams my brother with messages and party invites, even when my brother is playing games with my family, he just doesn't
seem to get the message. We don't want to report his friend or get him banned, he just doesn't seem to understand that he can't have my brothers attention all the time.

Now my family including me have told my brother that whenever it gets out of hand or he doesn't stop, just block him and add him back later. Sounds simple enough right?

Actually no... you see, there's a flaw in this system. Apparently when you block someone, they can still add you as a friend and this removes the block completely, so the whole thing is just cancelled out! There is literally no other option and often at
times my brother just avoids his Xbox altogether because of this! I tried adjusting his privacy settings so he can't be added by randoms, but THEN for some reason when I do that then he can't play games with us online or can't use the party chat system when
we all play games together.

I won't go into full detail about the situation for privacy and security reasons, but that is the issue that we're having. All I know is that both of these systems are flawed and that's actually frightening because it means anyone could abuse this system.

All I'm asking is for Microsoft to please look into the issue, at least the blocking people and having them still able to add you as a friend. If a person wants to unblock you, then that should be up to the person who blocked them, not the other way around.
It's very a small issue that I'm sure could be solved with a few little tweaks.

He can't just not have him as a friend as it's a very complicated situation that I can't go too deep into. I've dealt with people like this before who claim to be friendly but then just don't leave you alone and I have a policy where I don't bother with
them.

Again, if someone at Microsoft could please spare sometime to look into this issue, or if anyone has better solutions to this issue, I would be ever so grateful.

:)

Njal the Blue

He could use the offline status in his profile. Also if he must block a friend, it is also best to mute them too and not send any messages to the blocked account, as this removes the block.

Allynon

Whenever they do this appearing offline can help or going into settings and turning off notifications.

Cmdr Blackbird

Hmmmm, I didn't think of that. I'll make sure to watch what my brother does next time we try blocking 'him' and see if this works.

EDIT: It doesn't actually fix it. The problem is still the same, he blocks his friend and then said friend adds them back, and it's back to square one. We didn't try it but while subtly asking my brother, he said he never sent any messages while he had him
blocked. I wasn't really certain about this as my memory's a little fuzzy sometimes. I will ask him to mute him as well and see what that does, but I'm assuming the outcome might be the same.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

Cmdr Blackbird

We've tried that though sometimes he'll just spam messages anyway when he's set as offline. It's like he knows. Only the other day when we were playing together and he logged in as "offline" and suddenly he was getting spammed with messages.

And some games don't allow you to invite people that are "offline", which makes that solution even more difficult.

I appreciate the suggestion though.

Widget1979

Worse case scenario, if its family game time or if he just wants to play without being bothered, just go into the settings and set his status as offline. Therefore the friend in question won't see he's online and your brother can be happily gaming without
hassle

Blocking people actually doesn't block them completely