How About An "Incognito" Player Status?

[Niwashi]

What I was against is to make a status which block all /tells outside of your friendslist which got suggested in some pages later or to make ppl appear offline/no fc log in notication/hiding players char.

I think part of the problem is that you didn't specify at the outset that that was the part you were arguing against. You just argued, and people assumed it was the topic of the thread (which is the Player Search part) that you were arguing about. That's why some of your earlier arguments (like being unfriendly to newcomers) didn't make sense. To people thinking in terms of the original suggestion, it wouldn't have much impact on newcomers, but a "no /tells outside of your friendslist" suggestion could.

So let's break it down:

The main suggestion of this thread: An Incognito mode that prevents your name and info from showing up in Player Search. How do you feel about this one?

Personally, I think it would be quite beneficial at times, for all the reasons the OP listed.

Having that Incognito mode also make you appear offline in Friend/FC/LS lists and block FC login notifications. How do you feel about this one?

My own view on it: It has a more limited applicability than the Player Search part, because hopefully neither RMT spammers nor stalkers are in any of those groups, and people sending out blind invites are unlikely to do so from there either. But it does still have one nice effect for people who want a little privacy from their friends to play on their own for a while. Although it's only got the one purpose rather than several, that one is perhaps the most widespread. Lots of people want to be in highly social groups, yet still be able to have some quiet time to themselves now and then when they don't feel like making themselves available to those groups.

That's common enough that most implementations I'm familiar with combine the two, making their incognito or anonymous mode hide you from both friends and strangers alike. But if it was two selections, one for whether you want to be Incognito and not appear on Player Search, and another for whether or not to extend that to Friend/FC/LS Lists as well, that would be even better.

Hiding our actual characters themselves from other players in our vicinity

It's possible I'm wrong, since tone can be difficult to determine from text in a forum, but I'm pretty sure this part was just a joke suggestion, made from taking the incognito idea to an extreme.

Restrict /tell to Friends only

This used to be suggested a lot back before the right-click report feature pretty well got rid of RMT /tell spam. I was always against it, because it blocks too much useful chat between strangers and further segregates people into cliques (which is already a bit of an issue sometimes for new players and I'd rather not exacerbate it). Back when this was a popular suggestion, I usually conceded that it could be considered as a last resort if nothing else could get rid of the RMT /tell spam. (It's still better than using /busy for it after all.) But now that the /tell spam issue has been handled fairly well, I think we can quit considering such intrusive remedies for it.

The odd part here in this thread, is that although you've argued against it, I'm not sure who you're trying to convince, because I don't recall seeing anyone really arguing for it here. (Some might approve of such a feature, but it would be a bit off-topic in a thread that doesn't really pertain to chat directly.)

And are there any others I've missed? ...