How About A "thanks" Option For Good Advice

[aitchy21]

How about adding a "thanks" button on every comment someone makes, if you look at this forum post from an iphone forum I am a member off you will see the button at the bottom of every post next to the "quote" button.

[URL="http/www.modmyi.com/forums/general/62459...lease-help.html"]http/www.modmyi.com/forums/general/62459...lease-help.html[/URL]

If someone thanks someone it is then displayed under the comment/post that helped, there is also a counter at the top next to where it tells you the information like when that member joined, how many posts they have made etc this counter counts how many times they have been thanked.

In the link i provided if you look at the 3rd or 4th comment down someone has thanked someone, you will see this under the comment,
The Following User Says Thank You to hevey For This Useful Post:
then the name of the person that said thanks.

I just think that its a cool option, and in my opinion make the forum better.

What do you think about it? And sorry if posting this link is against house rules, but I feel I never explained it very well. And I just found out they have it on another popular UK tropical fish forum

 

[shelaghfishface]

link dont work, and anyway, most people take the time to write thanks

 

[aitchy21]

link dont work, and anyway, most people take the time to write thanks

Strange the link works for me

Its just easier than having to write a new reply, plus someone viewing old posts might find what someone has said to be helpfull to them and wish to say thanks without have to reply on an old thread,

 

[shelaghfishface]

haha.. i know of at least a few of the lads that will be browsing that by this evening was a very long convo about them last night,
ok, u win, good idea

 

[seffieuk]

I'm liking the idea

Seffie x



would be nice if everyone said thanks for helping, but of course they don't - but maybe if they only had to press a button instead of writing a reply they might!

 

[Bignose]

The link doesn't work right because it has "..." in the URL. This sometimes happens if you copy and paste from a posted link because the forum software will replace long URLs with ... for brevity. Then, when you copy and paste it, the forum software recognizes the http/ in front of the text in the post, but won't fix the part that was removed for the ...

Anyhoo, the question is on that other forum, is the amount of "thanks" reported to anyone other than the user? I.e. if you check someone else's profile, can you figure out how many "thanks" they have gotten?

The reason I ask is that is just becomes another number to compete with. In almost always bad ways.

Friends will "thank" each other just because they are friends and helping each other rack up a score. Even worse people will make sockpuppet accounts to "thank" themselves to increase their own score. It becomes little more than a popularity contest, and we've had issues with stuff like this in the past, and we aren't eager to go back down that path.

And, what will happen is some people will judge the quality of someone's answer based on the amount of "thanks" they have. There is already enough of that that happens because people with high post counts are sometimes given way too much credit simply because they have a high post count. High post count or a high "thanks" count does not mean that they are right. The quality of each post should be based on each individual post.

All in all, I don't think that it adds anything personally. I am involved in forums that have things like this and forums that don't. I don't have a strong preference either way. It still takes effort to hit a "thanks" button, and if there is one thing that it a universal truth is that people won't go out of their way to do stuff they don't have to a good 99% of the time.

 

[seffieuk]

When you put it like that Bignose, I can see your point in particular the point about popularity contests/perceived knowledge etc

Seffie x