A thumbs up that disappears in 24hrs would be great.
I don’t want to give thumbs up/down rating like Facebook, I’d just like to be able to give a poster know that their post has struck a cord with me and I agree with them.
Just to clarify, Facebook does not have thumbs down–nor does Twitter. That’s Reddit, and I wouldn’t support a system like that. Twitter’s is the model IMO: you can click the little heart, or you can not click it. No other option.
Ok that’s cool. Do you get to see If a person has agreed with your post?
I’d like to know that people on this message board have made a post that I agree with.
I could tell an awful lot of posters here that their posts make me want to scream and call them the biggest prick in the world but I don’t have the time of day for that.
I also have the greatest respect for so many people here, iiandyiiii being one of them, along with Guin and Helena330
Thank you for the compliment up there, Teddie. ^^ 
It’s not silly. I know those feelings and they’re disheartening.
What really bothers me is when a newbie bumps a zombie and people are mean to or make fun of them. I try to post a nice note if I see it, but I don’t recall a single newbie that’s returned.
“Like”
Yup. If you go back and look at something you have tweeted, you can see a heart below the tweet with a number next to it. That shows how many people have “liked” it. If you click that to see more, you can see who specifically liked it.
If we don’t also get “dislike”, “I want to have this poster’s children”, “this post is full of shit”, “meh” and “I like pie” buttons, the whole concept is meaningless and will lead to board oblivion.
I’m afraid if there is a LIKE button, some unscrupulous bot will search for all the businesses that have a product that’s minutely tangential to the subject line and get them to spam me. IOW, the reason I don’t use FB.
How is that not already possible just from searching for posts in a thread?
I just don’t see the point in a “like” button here. Are some of us really that insecure that we have to hope for random, nameless validation?
I guess this is just a drive-by post, and you didn’t read the thread?
I’ve posted in this thread a few times before, and that would at least be a clue that I’ve read the thread. Since you keep pressing the issue of “likes,” I’m guessing that at least one person needs that validation. That would be you.
It’s okay. You can admit that you need a safe space. We’re all friends here.
Sure, I’d like that validation. But more importantly, I’d like to GIVE others’ posts “likes”. I’m probably one of or the most likely on this whole board to quote a post and add an “LOL” or “Cosigned”, even though I know it’s sort of against the board culture.
Your comment that I responded to shows no sign of having read or digested any of the “like” supporters’ arguments, which is why I responded as I did.
What if someone made a browser plugin that injects the “like” feature onto the straight dope message boards? The back-end could be a google docs spreadsheet or something.
So you visit a page, then after the first render, for every post on the page the plugin fetches the number of “likes” from the remote document (or its cache if within X minutes) and displays it as a little number in a heart icon next to the post number. If you click on that icon the plugin sends a request to remote document to add/remove your name from the list for that post. If you hover over the icon for a second then it shows a list of all the usernames who voted for the post.
Authentication might be a problem - the user will probably need a signed-in Google cookie or the plugin should prompt the user to log-in via Google. To prevent abuse the remote document needs a maintainer, and one way to keep things clean is to require new users to ask (PM) the maintainer for permissions on a per-Google-account basis.
Browser plugins are opt-in by their nature so people without the plugin wouldn’t see a difference. This could work without any action by the administration.
But at that point, might as well make the browser plugin into a vBulletin plugin and offload that responsibility on the administration. Right?
~Max
So you have nothing to add but would still like to add something? I think that describes “like” buttons pretty well.
Why so snarky about people who simply want to give a friendly little nod of approval to something they encounter? Do you also believe standup comedians should have to perform in isolation chambers, with their acts being projected up on a screen in another room where they can’t hear or see the audience reaction to each joke?
What part of “This version of vBulletin doesn’t have that feature, and The Powers That Be have indicated they have no plans to update to another version for the time being” is everyone having so much trouble understanding? You can want it till the cows come home, y’all can want it three part harmony, you can want it with a cherry on top, you can want it while wearing rings on your fingers and bells on your toes…but you can’t always get what you want.
Why quote my post (which had nothing about these technical details) and give that response? If you think the point is moot, there’s a little feature called “unsubscribe from thread” which DOES work. Meanwhile, anyone else participating presumably is well aware of this information, and would still like to discuss the merits of having “likes” as so many other platforms do.
I find irony in adding something when one has nothing to add. It’s something of a paradox.
Only if said comedian’s medium of choice was an internet forum. There’s no way of getting around it: you can’t see me and I can’t see you, we can only communicate through the written word as projected onto a monitor. 
I’m not sure if the above quote was directed at my post but it was an accident that I threaded post #134 under #133. I did not mean to respond to you or anyone in particular. I just saw the thread in my subscriptions list and realized that it is in fact possible to add a client-side feature to the board without [DEL]the cooperation of[/DEL] involving the board administrators.
~Max