Originally Posted by
goalie
I'd go beyond a "perhaps" on a lobbying effort and bet the farm on it
As to a done deal, I would venture to say it is but that's just me and as to likes appearing in threads outside of the private mod and TalkBoard forums, it was pisted by the CD to only like posts in the private forums but some Talkboard members decided to ignore that and play by their own rules
To be fair, I suspect that some TB members noticed the "like" button and either experimented on whatever forum they were at the time or assumed that "likes" had suddenly been enabled either on that forum or FTwide and proceeded to use the feature. I wouldn't assume that people saw the CD's request to only experiment on the private TB forum and deliberately ignored the request, although once the "likes" were appearing elsewhere and attracting some comments, it would have been normal to give a well deserved like to someone who remarked that they felt left out at that point.
It's also possible that some likes were done by accident: As I commented in the private TB thread, on an ipad, the like button pops up when you try to click on the buttons in the lower right corner. To me it was frustrating to try to enable quick reply or quote a post and see the like button appear instead. At that point, it would be natural to click it in an attempt to make it go away, or even in an attempt to unlike the post assuming that the appearance of the like button means that you have somehow already liked that post. we were all guinea pigs with no instructions on how the like function worked.