A button on posts that are helpful to thank the author - example: AndroidForums.com
 

It would be awesome to have a button on posts that are helpful to thank the author. Ideally, that author could choose to have the # of thanks displayed along with the # of posts. For a solid example, see AndroidForums.com

It would be nice to thank the kind folks who take the time to share their knowledge. I have grown so much because of this site and met great people. Would be nice to be able to spread some karma this way (if not, perhaps another form of recognition?).

Hopefully this is not a re-post. I did search first, but didn't see anything relevant.

I remember when I came out of lurking I got scolded for my eagerness to 200 posts (for access to the CC) for just thanking people. I ended up getting getting dinged 100 posts for just a few posts of gratitude (oops), heh :D
If I'd had this feature, that wouldn't have happened.

I prefer the model of our Free Travel Contests And Sweepstakes forum, where thanks are a given. Saves bandwidth.

Carried to its logical conclusion, your idea would result in a user-moderation system a la Digg or Slashdot, and while I'm not necessarily against that in principle, it would be a huge change in the way FT operates, and you'd need to make the business case for that.

On both statements, how so? The former clicking "thank this user" once doesn't take but a second and I can't imagine how bandwidth has any bearing. Also, how does wearing a badge of "honor" that shows how many times you've been thanked result in user-moderation?

I stand corrected. It is instead a form of user karma-rating. The thanking feature would be subject to people gaming the system. Also, why merely display the user's number-of-times-thanked count? Why not first subtract the user's added-to-ignore-list count thereby calculating an adjusted user-karma score?

Gaming to what end? I suppose someone could do that, but why would they? Interesting point though.

Adjusted user-karma score is interesting as well.

Just an idea... it's nice to be able to do a little something for folks who are helpful.

Good points/suggestions all around. There are a number of solutions that strive to achieve the goal stated in the OP. Some of those we have looked at in the past were dismissed for technical reasons, while others were dismissed for "gaming" reasons.

Some might even remember our short and ill-fated use of vBulletin's built-in Reputation feature when we initially converted to vBulletin. If you don't remember, suffice to say it didn't work out quite like we might have hoped :p

So, while the suggestion is a fair one, we are yet to find a solution that is both technically sound and immune to those who would choose to game it.