I see what you are saying.
I guess when you "muted" a user... it would apply only to future posts.
So if he posted... it would just be as nobody replied to him.
I've thought about how to pull this off. Don't have time for a while to play with it... maybe after the first of the year.
I have no idea how much my ideas impact the database.... but:
I had thought of adding a field to the w3t_Posts table... maybe called "Muted" with a yes/no value.
When the user posts.... it checks his profile to see if he should be "muted". If he's muted the post value gets set to yes.
OK - so then when viewing posts etc... the only people who see posts with a muted value of 'yes' are the user.... the admins and the mods of that forum. They would see "***MUTED***" or something on the post so they would know that others wouldn't see it.
Would also need search.php to check for muted as well.
An option could be added to editpost where you could "unmute" that post. Thus a "private moderation" sort of thing.
OK - so I think I can pull that off up til this point... fairly well.
THEN - what about new post count etc.... when I try to think about how that works... I get dizzy. I think just muting it from postlist and showflat & showthreaded.
Maybe all that is way to much server load. I don't know.
But that's the thoughts I have. I think I could pull it off... but people would get confused with the new post counter etc....
Also.. once I "unmute" a specific post... it wouldn't flag it as new.
Just thinking outloud.
(watch out!)