When this thread was moved about a month ago, an admin pm'd me about the move, because I had participated materially in this discussion when I first joined.

Part of the experience upon which I drew my former advocacy for a like post button here came from my residency on other boards owned by IB, running software identical to FT's, but with the like feature enabled.

Since FT'rs never really had the opportunity to truly test this feature, let me briefly describe how it works:

When a reader clicks the like icon, a pop up window appears, enabling the reader to type a brief message to the poster about why they liked the post. When the poster logs back in and checks "MyFlyerTalk", the message appears, along with which post was liked. In this particular IB iteration, the specific number of likes is not shown to other users, but the accumulation of likes is reflected in the number of "bars" showing under the poster's name.

Everyone starts with one good reputation bar. Every 100 likes adds another bar up until 5 bars, after which it takes 200 likes to earn subsequent bars, and perhaps 300 or 400 more likes to earn the final 10th bar, after which no more reputation bars can be earned, regardless of additional likes. Believe it or not, when one reviews the contributory content of users with the full 10 bars... those bars are for the most part well deserved, because the likes cannot all come from the same people. Here's why:

Suppose Jackal genuinely liked my post on this thread, and clicked the button and told me so, and then Jackal also just so happened to genuinely like another post I made on another thread in a different section of FT. Jackal would be prevented from liking me again, until he liked enough other posts by other users first. This prevents friends from liking each other back and forth over and over.

So what if the post I made in the other forum is of more helpfulness than the post made in this forum? Too bad. Jackal still cannot like it, because he already liked one of my posts once, and cannot like another one of my posts again until he has found other posts by other users on the forum worthy of liking. But if my post in the other forum was really that helpful, Jackal woudn't have to like it, because presumably other people who found it useful would like it, which is how the system balances itself.

That all being said, after being a resident on FT for going on two months now, I no longer believe a like system of any kind should be introduced on this forum. I made a new friend on this forum, an experienced flyer who pointed out to me that people who fly a lot are typically A type personalities. They are outspoken. Assertive. Aggressive. That's why the companies are paying them to go wherever they are going all the time.

This is certainly one of the most fractious boards I've ever participated in. If I made a post commenting on how many times UA has changed the color scheme of their airplanes over the last 10 years, eventually someone is sure to ferret an argument out of the comment, myself included. But unlike a lot of other boards, the arguments made here are more often well considered, informative, and engaging, rather than just name calling. I appreciate the tension between differing ideas, and find this very thread to be one such example.

Another distinguishing feature I've found with the FT forum is the TalkBoard... a panel of persons that appear to have a role that is somewhat different than "Administrators" or "Moderators". I'm not entirely sure what role the Talkboard plays in the guidance of this site, but if the virtues and values that are self evident in NSX's posts and handling of the discussion of this issue are of any example, then we are in very good hands. Thank you NSX!