Originally Posted by
amunter
this type of implementation was what I was envisioning when I read the initial proposal. It would act as a means of indication to the poster without being a broad signaling mechanism to the community (beyond the reading of that specific thread and coming across a message that had a ton of likes). In theory, we would get a somewhat Skinnerian positive behavior reinforcement without the explicit ill will to others of a negative indicator (an "Dislike", for instance). Gamers or political likers could click to their heart's content with little systemwide consequence (spuriously making some posters feel good - the horror!), but some of the +1'ers would feel this is a good substitute and others who are silent (ahem, me) would click in support.
You could have saved us a lot of time in finding the answer!
I have really enjoyed this discussion. I feel I have learned a tremendous amount about what could go wrong with all the fancy scoring schemes that I once thought were so promising.
The consensus here seems to me to favor:
1. A Helpful button that shows the total count for a given post.
2. Per-member totals of votes received are NOT viewable by the public.
3. Total of votes received are NOT viewable privately by the recipient.
4. Vote count has no effect on thread display. I.e., no filtering option.
I consider the preceding features to be mandatory. Feature 5 would have made that list too prior to
this recent post.
The next two functions are a trade-off between value and implementation cost, and I don't yet have any information on the latter. So these will take time to research:
5. The Helpful button should be able to be turned on and off by forum.
6. Members should have the ability to disable all display of the new functionality.
Remaining questions to be discussed further here:
7. Should voters' handles be publicly viewable? I lean to Yes on this.
8. Should per-member totals be viewable by moderators? (This might not be an issue within TalkBoard's scope, but there's no harm in talking about it here.)
9. Should there be a post count and tenure requirement for access to the reader feedback functionality (like access to OMNI)? This might tie in with the implementation of item 6.