On the user side of things, I work at a large academic institution where I occasionally get unwanted contact (overly invasive, won’t stop messaging even when asked).

I totally get that at an office workspace, the solution here is HR. But this is a loosely federated place, and even in my own opinion the conduct doesn’t merit such a response. I just want to be able to mute people.

Slack's refusal to add a "block user" option is beyond frustrating. Short of the nuclear option of disabling the account, there is no way to prevent a bad actor from pestering you. Yet this condition seems to be a deliberate choice of Slack's.

Because Slack's product assumes you have an HR department, and that's an HR issue.

True story: at a former employer, a colleague made an HR complaint that in reality was well founded due to abuse. At one point in the investigation, HR told the two people not to interact with each other directly, but for unavoidable work reasons they were still in the same team-related Slack channel.

A mute or ignore feature would have been great to lower the victim's anxiety level during that time due to HR's unhelpful handling of the situation. The victim's finances and general life circumstances did not make "just quit" a good resolution.

(Oh, and the end result: HR fired the victim, with some severance paid, and kept the abuser a while longer. The abuser eventually got fired but probably not due to this incident.)

Discord has a block function, and it's virtually identical to (if not better than) Slack (IIRC, it has better text -- and code -- formatting).

Sure, it's "chat for gamers", but it works for anything.

I've myself set to Offline permanently on Slack to try and deflect some of that. It seems to have worked for the most part.

I recently evaluated a number of options. I was surprised to realize discord has by far the best moderation / permission / access conctrol management. Plus unlimited webhook and boy support.

Granted, it has to handle gamer communities.

I'm hoping you meant "bot support". :-)

hot damn, thats a good typo. ROFL. thanks for catching that :)