Nailed it, Eric. As a person who Zwifts while female and has unfortunately encountered situations where blocking a user is warranted… this is a very welcome feature.

I’ve experienced it a few times.
Usually an Asian flagged user, name is just a gobbledegook of letters, numbers and characters and every few seconds, they post a message of random characters.

If you go to view the user, they aren’t pedalling but are managing to hold 40kph, with zero effort.

It gets very annoying and tiresome.

I gave a thumbs down to the settings, not to you specifically, Tom.

Whilst I’m very happy to see this Block option, I wish it would extend to the in game chat as well.
Some folks are so annoying that I have to leave an enjoyable ride and go elsewhere.

Perhaps, and that might come in a later iteration. For now, I think this first version is about blocking people who are sending threatening (or otherwise unwanted) private messages. Those same people probably won’t send those sorts of messages via public chat, so I think it’s at least a good first step.

Quite likely, it seems, but I would have expected that the people who need the things Zwift actually added would have also wanted to hide the chat.

It’s quite possible you aren’t the target market for this feature.

See https://forums.zwift.com/t/bot-riding-and-spamming-the-chat/633240 for an example.