That suggestion makes good sense to me. (Thanks for using this thread, BTW.)

I see Loyce isn't happy, so I'll explain why I think this suggestion tracks:

(*) My impression, after digesting many posts going back a long time, is that there really is some kind of ergonomic/usability issue with people accidentally tapping on things from the left-hand-side of their screens as they're scrolling (accidentally ignored users, and accidentally locked topics).

(*) While it's true that confirmation dialogs tend to be ignored out of habit after a while, in this case that's perfect: When you mean to actually ignore someone, then you'll expect to see the dialog and can quickly click-through without stopping to think about anything. But when you're not trying to ignore someone, and accidentally hit the link while scrolling, then that dialog will be completely unexpected, and will make you stop and think "Huh? No, I don't want to ignore so-and-so".

(*) Ignoring someone isn't as frequent of an action as (let's say) sending merit. If someone can make the case that they ignore people at a rate that would be meaningfully impacted by a confirmation dialog, then I'd be curious to hear it. (And in that case, what I'll do is add a new setting to let people disable the new dialog, but I really don't think that additional complication is worth it: having to persist a new setting turns this from a very simple change into something that theymos will have to review much more carefully.)

It's a nice thought experiment to imagine any given change as already being present, and then try to think about how a proposal to remove that thing would look/feel. There's a difference between things that were carefully designed and should be left alone, and things that people are just used to. I'm pretty certain that if the SMF mod that (I think) the user-ignore feature is based on had included a confirmation dialog from the start, then any proposal to now get rid of that would probably be met with "What are you doing? Leave it alone!".