Pardon me if this has been suggested before but...

Suggestion:

I see that certain other forums on the interwebs have this feature where you can 'thank' a post for being useful.
It looks something like this =



- 'thanks' button on the bottom left corner
- collapsible bar at the bottom showing the names of who thanked the post
- "thanked posts" counter right below your "total posts" counter.

Reasoning:

1) Personally, in the other online forum that I participate in, I use the 'thank' button quite a lot -- sometimes because a post is excellent, and at other times, even if I don't reply to their posts, I thank them to let them know I read/liked their post.

2) Secondly, this feature would potentially reduce spam! If people realized that constructive posts will be "thanked", then it encourages posters to think before they post, and not just post one word answers to get their +1's. On a related note, this would potentially reduce server costs for njag since more spam = more server load.

In summary, I think that this would make d2jsp a better social environment. This is pretty much a Facebook "thumbs up" button, but since the purpose of Facebook is to keep in contact with your friends, a forum 'thanks' button isn't quite the same, since forums are online communities for having meaningful discussions on different topics.

This post was edited by Juanderful on Aug 29 2012 02:21am

While you have mentioned the "pros" of such a feature, you should have also included some "cons" as well, because there are some cons that come with such a feature. For example: this feature could promote bad posting habits. I've seen this on numerous forums. A user will post a distasteful comment or a flame, but some users will agree with this remark and "cookie" or "thank" the post. What this is really doing is it's promoting bad behavior; essentially being rewarded for distasteful commentary. Now this is certainly not the case for some forums, but a good number of forums with this feature have this problem.

I've voted no. I believe this feature is not needed and it would promote bad behavior across the board, simply because a user wants a cookie/thanks. Also, I don't like the thanks/cookie feature because it gives improper incentive to post constructively. Users should post constructively on their own terms, not because they're going to get a cookie/thanks.

And I do believe this was suggested before in the past. The thread was closed, if I recall correctly.

No. i agree post#2

This is exactly the same as "Like".

Voted no.

i dont like this idea, its kind of facebook

In theory, a type of feed back button (whether it's a "thanks" or "likes" counter) is a great idea. Sadly, when it's implemented on most forums, it looses it's real purpose over time and can be abused. Some might go around "thanking" posts that weren't helpful at all, even ones breaking the rules. Some people could go around offering fg or asking their friends to "thank" their posts so they have more +rep. As it was stated in the second post, this has been suggested in the past and turned down.

I agree, it could potentially be extremely useful and beneficial for the site - but the con's out-weigh the pro's of it.

This post was edited by Fault on Aug 29 2012 03:00pm

Yeah, what was I thinking suggesting this idea on d2jsp...... bunch of spammers on here who probably don't see the utility in this feature anyway.

This feature works plenty fine on the numerous other forums I participate in, but the age distribution on those sites are closer to 30+ years old, which is probably double what the d2jsp average is.

Regardless, spam on!