Originally Posted by
plunet
Our of interest
SanDiego1K Joel from IB often points out that the Likes system on FT is custom/unique and hence it's hard to persuade the techs to do anything significant to change/update/fix it. He also says that FT has a custom Likes system because the community didn't like the forum standard offering. But do you recall what the issues were with the standard offering that caused a custom solution to be developed?
There's obviously some technical debt already ingrained in the custom code for Likes, and it's only likely to get worse. Is it worth reviewing if there's s chance to escape back to forum standard Likes?
It was regrettably the opposite. We developed a Likes system for FlyerTalk, then the main VB team dveloped their own "PostThanks" independently, which became standard. The biggest issues for that here were that it keeps tracks of likes you've given and received across the site, but the biggest one was that when a post is liked, it creates a mini sub-post that takes up much more screen real estate. So it was an interface/UX issue. I personally think people overreacted a bit, but definitely understood why it was frustrating, especially coming from a system that doesn't do that.