This 100%. iPhones have a feature to do this automatically. It doesn’t even ring, and goes straight to voicemail if they’re not in your contacts. It’s so freeing!
An idea I mull over occasionally: what if you could spend your karma points to boost any given post? This would ultimately be another form of paid advertising, except that the currency used would be earned by contributing to the community. Then, allow people to sell their karma points for fiat currency. Companies would buy karma points directly from users in order to promote their self-promotional posts, but those posts would be subject to the same rules and moderation as any other post. That way you're actually paying your best users rather than charging them.
As a user, I've found utility in apps that offer all features and customizations for free, but reset your preferences every time you start the app. It's like a demo except it never stops working and you can see the maximum amount of value the app can provide you.
Hang on a second... You use MS SQL Server and don't follow the practices he describes in this article? Why on earth not?
SQL Server is just plain awesome at this stuff. Schema is all scriptable (it even prompts you to let it script itself if you mess with things in the modeling tools). That means that you get automagic change scripts that tuck nicely into source control and are just waiting to be sucked in by your automated build and deploy system of choice.
Procs and everything else are all just scripts, which get their own files. So just like you have individual files for all 500 of your classes, you'll have 500 .sql files for those procedures. It's not difficult in any way.
It sounds like you ran into problems because you inherited a system from people who went out of their way to mess things up. Messed up things are hard to work with, regardless of what technology they live in. Try not to blame the database for the fact that you can build ugly things with it.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/111106