Should this board have 'like' feature?

Over at The Onion they have a “Leek” button.

Annd, with that, we’ll close the thread.

I have some suggestions.

1. Add “thumbs up” and “Thumbs down” to the current smileys. That way, anyone who wants to use the symbol has to use the Go Advanced function or type in several keystrokes, either of which which requires more than one key stroke, preventing the mindless single click Like that some of us fear.

2. Install a Like button that’s not connected to anything. Instead, insert a box in every post that says X VIEWERS LIKE THIS POST. Than have a random number generator insert a number. Every time the thread gets bumped to the top of the forum, set the generator to insert new numbers.

3. The cool kids will get together and decide on a secret code that means “like” but we won’t tell the rest of you.

4. Enable a Like function in the new skin, but not the old skin, so computer-using fossils like me never see it.

Now, that idea has potential.

If we were voting on the “like” button (or something similar), I’d probably vote no. I almost never use it on boards where it’s available, and I like the idea of a text-oriented site without a lot of extraneous doodads.

However, I don’t think it would be a big deal if we did have one. A lot of folks here seem to think it’s beneath our collective dignity, but if we had had a “like” button from day one, I doubt that people would be agitating to get rid of it. It would be just another feature that some people use and others ignore, like signatures or the friends list.

If we’d never had a “like” button from day one, do you think we’d have people agitating to get one?

Technically, Facebook ended up emulating vBulletin with this feature. There were vB boards back in 2002/2003 that had “Reputation” systems where one could +1 or -1 a post. I’m not sure when this feature vanished / became nonstandard.

This was incredibly useful on the forums that I moderated, where people were volunteering their time to give answers to technical questions.

Not all troubleshooting answers are made equal. Users coming into a thread who saw a number of different posts could be saved a lot of time by glancing to see which posters had the most green jewels (positive reputation) next to their name from accumulated +1’s, and try those solutions first.

Or they could look at the individual up-votes each post got in that thread, likely from other people who had the same problem and fixed it using that post, and decide which solution to try based on that. In that sort of environment, the benefits of the “like” system were undeniable.

Now, having a system that’s mostly used to Like pictures of someone’s cat or what they had for dinner, on the other hand, is of course just gratuitous narcissism and arguably a reward-addiction cycle to keep eyeballs constantly coming back.

I have a hard time seeing it as much of a problem in the context of forum posts that are nontechnical, provided no notifications are generated to anyone, just a quick way to gauge agreement/disagreement as you’re scanning a thread without there having to be a poll explicitly put up.

vBulletin reputation system:

https://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html?manualversion=30807606

I can see you’re on vB 3.8.7 - if you have Patch 6 you’re good to go… possibly if not, Patch 6 is the oldest manual I could find on a ten second Google.

We already do. As was pointed out earlier in this thread, it’s a perennial topic here.

Wait what
vBulletin has a built in Karma system you can turn on, and it took me all of 10 seconds to find a “like button” mod.

Patch? You weren’t here when they changed the skin last month, were you? The new skin still has glitches in it they’re trying to work out. It proved to be so unpopular with a large number of the members that they gave us the option to go back to the old one. I’m afraid installing a patch is just too much to ask of them.

Edit: @BPC, you were here for the skin change. Do you expect them to put in a mod after the way that was handled?

At this point I’d be happy if they never changed anything ever again. I feel like if they decided to add a :V emoticon we’d end up with the board down for 3 weeks and an eventual shift to Simple Machines Forums.

Fix the date format first.

A common response to this suggestion seems to be that this is a board for conversation, that anybody who wants to display their agreement with a post can take the time to do so in writing.

In my opinion that is somewhat of an irrelevance. The vast majority of people who agree with any particular post do not and will not ever take the time to write a redundant “I agree with you, thanks for writing that” style of post. They will simply agree and continue reading without saying a thing. Those types of posts exist, +1 posts exist (though rarely just as a +1), but the board is not exactly swamped with polite contentless posts thanking each other.

And so, I do not believe that a Like or Thanks button would make any significant difference whatsoever to the number of posts submitted on this board. It would not replace anything that is currently happening, it would simply be an addition to the board.

Implement it or not, I don’t much care, but the argument against it seems very false to me.

I’d love to see a Post Groan Hack, though.

You want a feature that you won’t pay attention to?

As I’m well aware. My point was supposed to have been a witty comment on (what I thought was) a pointless hypothetical statement. In fact, I had nothing more worth adding to the thread and should have let well enough alone. Old age and legal weed may have been factors.

I’ve spent a lot of money getting a lot of stuff I never ended up paying attention to. Having it is the issue, not using it! It’s the Merkin way!

As with all of the arguments I’ve read here against the suggestion, the idea that it would create some sort of fictional popularity contest doesn’t accord with how the feature is both used and perceived on other sites that I visit.

No one looks at a poster’s stats seeing 10^20 likes and thinks much of anything about it. If they did, it’s something that would get mentioned at least occasionally and it doesn’t. That’s because no one pays attention to that statistic.

It does not follow from that observation that the feature is pointless. Even though I ignore both my stats and those of other posters I still use the feature to ascertain when I’ve contributed something to a forum that someone found useful or amusing. I also use it to convey my gratitude when I think someone has made a useful or amusing post.

The point is that a feature like this will have none of unfortunate consequences proposed because on virtually every other forum on the internet that does have such a feature no such problems have ever materialized. Of course I would welcome any verifiable accounts that contradict this statement.

It’s very easy to imagine all manner of potential issues with an idea. But it becomes difficult to take such prophesies very seriously when no examples of their actually occurring can seem to be found.

I honestly wish my experience was like yours. Mine has been more along the lines of FaceBook but on steroids where people actually used it for/against certain posters. You have sometimes had something like that here; a certain poster gets handed their tukas in a thread and someone starts a thread saying how terrific “Poster X” is. But with a like feature? I hate to think what that could turn into.

Can you be a bit more specific? I’m curious how you would use a feature like this against someone. I’m not even really sure how it would be used to support someone. I’m trying to imagine scenarios where it might be and I really can’t think of any.