racketboy.com

One other forum I am on has the ability to like posts (just says who liked it and stores the info on a per-post basis). There’s no reputation system or karma or anything. And liking isn’t anonymous. It’s also not very frequently used, interestingly enough. But I agree. If there are ways to incentivize posting that’s the way to go.

marurun wrote:One other forum I am on has the ability to like posts (just says who liked it and stores the info on a per-post basis). There’s no reputation system or karma or anything. And liking isn’t anonymous. It’s also not very frequently used, interestingly enough. But I agree. If there are ways to incentivize posting that’s the way to go.

That's how Doomworld works and it seems to be fine.

Yeah, there's a forum I browse that has a like system similar to that as well and it works ok. Strangely tho, people there give likes AND reply. Here, we have a situation where people are reading but not posting. Adding a like feature wouldn't help with that, in fact it may make it worse.

So I just reread through this thread. It seems we were mostly agreeing that instead of having a like system we should try and encourage more posting. Well, we haven't done either LOL. That said, now that some time has passed, I think we should do both.

I think we SHOULD implement a simple like system. Each post would have the ability to be liked, and will display the likes it received at the bottom of said post. The other forum I referenced earlier in this thread works like this: The first few people to like a post will be listed, like "Ziggy587 liked this post." I believe up to 3 names will be listed, but after that it'll just give a count. For example, "Ziggy587, marunrun, o.pwuaioc and 3 others liked this post." And it's a link, if you click on it a popup shows you a list of all the people that liked it. Which I think is preferable since you wouldn't want a long list at the bottom of a post. When a post is liked, a bar at the bottom of the post displays this info. It's not so obtrusive, yet sticks out enough so you can noticed the post received likes. It has a little blue thumbs up icon to make it more noticeable. On this particular forum, each member has a post count as well as a like count. But I believe here on Racketboy, we should tally the likes per post but not per member.

And I think we should still try and encourage more posting. Now there's two ways I can think of to do this, and I think we should do both. One is to outright ask, and this is easy to do (we just need to actually do it). The other is to lead by example. If more of us start posting "like" comments in this way, others will see that and it might encourage more people to start posting in this way as well. When everyone else seems to be doing something, you feel more comfortable doing it. You walk into an office party and there's a buffet table but no one is getting food from it and no one is eating anything, you would be unlikely to take any food. But if you walked into the party and there were plenty of people taking and eating food, you would feel comfortable doing the same.

After spending more time on another forum with a like system, I think that's the way to go! I appreciate seeing posts I make get liked.
And I think the system Ziggy outlined would work well!

I would like a Like feature as well. I want to post more (I really do) but there's too little time nowadays. A Like feature would allow a user to at the very least log in and interact in some way.

Now all we have to do is see if that’s something Nick can do.

Just now seeing this

Just me personally, I don't see it adding a lot of value and I see some of the potential drawbacks others have mentioned.

But those concerns aside, I guess the main thing is if there is an existing, reliable extension/plugin for phpbb for this purpose.
To have the functionality you are probably looking for, the extension would probably need to tie into a lot of parts of the system, which also open more potential break points.
It's way over my head to create something myself and I don't have the budget to hire somebody out for it.

Not saying I would 100% go forward with installation, but if you all want to look at what's out there: here's some projects around the goal:
https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2423931
https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtop ... &t=2246576
https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/exte ... or_posts_2

My main concern against a like system was if having it caused people to make less replies than they already do. But really, if someone was going to hit a like button and not make a reply, they probably were never going to make a reply even without a like system. At least with a like system, those people can still give useful feedback for the few posts that are being made.

I feel like a like system will help certain people to post MORE. There's quite a few examples of threads started that get thousands of views but little to no replies. Are people enjoying them? Who knows!? When you make such a thread, and get little to no response, it's very deflating. It discourages you from making more content like that. But with likes plus views, you can gauge if your content was actually well received or not. That would not only encourage you to make more posts, but help you to know what kind of content will be more popular with this audience.

I kinda get that.
While I don't necessarily want/expect a whole bunch of people to simply post replies of "cool, thanks!", one or two in a thread can be helpful in these situations instead of only posting when you have something substantial to say.

But as somebody eluded to before, guests wouldn't be able to "like". And same goes for commenting. A thread could potentially be helpful to somebody that is just passing through (I know I have gotten useful info from other forums like that). It's just one of those things you just kinda have to think about as somebody that is posting content.