Pinterest is getting ready to roll out a brand new block feature. It‘s not quite ready for primetime, but we’ve tested it and there’s a way you can use it right now.
UPDATE (10-18-2012): Pinterest has since officially announced this feature and it should be rolling out to all users over the next week. See the official instructions here.
We are really glad to see Pinterest getting ready to release a new block feature. It’s been a hotly requested feature and could significantly reduce spam and improve content quality on the site. Users have complained about irrelevant content in the their feeds, mainly fueled by Community/Contributor Boards that sometimes have hundreds of contributors. This is a big step to combat that issue, and to position Pinterest as providing a more relevant, hyper-targeted content stream than facebook or twitter.
This should come as no surprise as blocking people from following you on Pinterest has been the top support question on Pinterest since early this year. People have been begging for it…
Here’s how you can will likely be able to block people on Pinterest and remove their pins from your stream.
As of last night, Pinterest profile pages now include a (hidden) flag icon that will allow you to block or report an entire user, instead of just individual pins.
How to find the Block button on Pinterest right now and try it yourself
Yes, it works – You can Block on Pinterest. We tried it out for ourselves…
1. Revealing the Flag Icon
In order to unhide the “Report User” icon, you’ll need to employ a bit of browser trickery, which should be easy with any modern browser. I will demonstrate here how to do it with Google Chrome, but you can just as easily do it with FireFox, Safari and even Internet Explorer.
- Go to the top area of the profile page, right click next to where the name is, and select “Inspect Element”. You should see a frame pop up with html code inside that will look like the below. You want to find the line that says <div class=”report-block-action hidden” authed=”False”> (highlighted in blue below) and click on this line.
- From here you can do one of two things:
- Edit the line to remove the word “hidden” from it (to edit, just double-click on it or right click and select Edit HTML)
- Or, look over to the right of the frame where you will see the CSS styles (see screenshot below). Once you have highlighted the correct line in blue from above, one of the first things you should see on the right is a line that says “display: none !important;” with a checkbox next to it. Just uncheck the checkbox next to the CSS display property.
…and Voila!
(unfortunately, you will have to repeat the process on each page every time you want to unhide it.)
How Does Blocking on Pinterest Actually Work?
Here’s what we know:
- Clicking on the Block button will bring up the following dialogue:
- Notice there’s three buttons there, with the middle one being completely blank (from what we can tell, the middle button does the same thing as the left button – block’s the user on Pinterest).
- Once you’ve blocked someone, the normal “Follow All” button (or “Unfollow” button if you’ve already followed them) now says “Unblock”
- Finally, if you try to like, repin or comment on one of this person’s pins after they are blocked, you get the following message:
- Everything gets unwound:
- both users unfollow each other
- both users are removed as contributors from the other’s community boards
What do you think of the new block feature? Do you plan on using it? Did we miss something? Comment below and let us know!
