To be fair though, some of the people who use the status bar are worse than a lot of the people in spam.

I think the problem has less to do with an issue with the feature itself or its visibility, and [i]far[/i] more to do with there not being enough active effort on the part of the staff to get rid of or deal with the toxic people here. I've actually been considering leaving this site permanently for months now, mostly because of how disappointing I consider this specific problem on the site in a general sense.

Really, the overarching rules of this site only apply to people posting in the threads and PM system (and even then only if problems are reported, if at all), because generally speaking it seems like very little is done outside of those things to keep trolls or other idiots from giving people a hard time or generally being assholes to total strangers for no reason other than what I presume to be their need to compensate.

The feature itself has a lot of useful applications, so it's more a problem with the community itself. Granted, the exact same applications of the status bar could actually be replaced by including a 'user status' thread and/or forum alongside the introduction area - where people could post if they need to leave the site for a while (my old forums I created had such a feature, but overall they were a far more civil community than this one is) - but then people [i]should[/i] be keeping people up to date on their presence in their respective threads anyway.

Mahz [i]explicitly[/i] said not to abuse each of the systems on this site; in fact, [i]it's blatantly included as a note directly in each feature[/i], but it seems people can just ignore that without consequence here for the most part. Like I said, the only places that people have to be civil or they get punished are the actual main threads, and I'm quite confident that if those were all that existed on this site then you'd very quickly see [i]most[/i] of the idiots here leave. I'm not suggesting the other features be removed, but it just shows this place isn't managed well.