Cycling UK Forum

On other forums there is the ability to "thank" someone for their post, which can either be used as you would think, or allows for an expression of agreement without clogging up or sidetracking the thread. Could we trial having it enabled on CTC website?

My forum has a 'Like' feature (nothing to do with facebook) which is quite popular.

Others have 'recommendation'. Posts with the most recs appear in a 'Best of' listing in order of popularity A thumbs down feature would be good too.

Al

I'm a moderator on another (non-cycling) forum and this was suggested there. That forum has a thread in the general section for people to thank other members, but it isn't much used.

We were of the opinion that a "Points System" could cause more trouble than it was worth. The correct place for thanks seems to me to be in the relevant thread.

Brian R Pateman wrote:We were of the opinion that a "Points System" could cause more trouble than it was worth. The correct place for thanks seems to me to be in the relevant thread.

i agree. if you can't be bothered to type out a message, then it's not worth much. the suggestion is just dumbing down stuff.

The "thanking" terminology is used on the diynot forum, I assume this comes from the phpBB software itself. Although people do use the thanks button as a quick way of thanking people for taking the time to make a helpful response, which I take to be a politeness rather than a dumbing down, in threads that are more of a discussion it is used to tag posts in a "hear hear well said" kind of way, without interrupting the flow of the thread or cluttering it up with lots of requotes. Note that it all happens in-line, there is no separate thread, Brian R Pateman.

There's no points system, no competition, no best of thread, no real headcount, no thumbs down, no negative flagging. The only totting up is you can see how many times someone has been thanked out of how many contributions, which gives an indication of how prolific and/or how helpful that person is. But that is no more to be feared than an ebay score.

I would suggest that whether or not a thanks button works in practice depends on the culture of the forum, which of course is down to the people who post. In the main the CTC forum is a friendly, constructive place, I would imagine a friendly, constructive usage would evolve.

Vorpal wrote:http://forum.ctc.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=43650&p=353627

Thanks

hufty wrote: Note that it all happens in-line, there is no separate thread, Brian R Pateman.

You may have misunderstood my comment. The thread to which I referred, is on the other forum (which I moderate) not on this one.

The "thanks" MOD for phpBB3 (see https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/thanks_for_posts) looks rather complicated, and I don't think it would be particularly useful for this particular Forum. I'd rather keep the Forum as simple as possible, without adding lots of modifications which need more work to maintain as time marches on.

I hope this is an appropriate place and time to mention the friends and foes feature.

My first point is more of a question in that I'd like to know if the friends button does anything at all.

My main point is to query whether there is any scope for the foe button to do more. In his moderator capacity, si recently suggested that rather than accusing somebody of trolling, using the ignore button would be better. It's a feature I use very rarely, but it is more useful than I originally expected. Short of singing "I'm ignoring you, oo, oo, oo" it would be useful if there were to be a more low-key way of getting that across.

admin wrote:The "thanks" MOD for phpBB3 (see https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/thanks_for_posts) looks rather complicated, and I don't think it would be particularly useful for this particular Forum. I'd rather keep the Forum as simple as possible, without adding lots of modifications which need more work to maintain as time marches on.

That doesn't look quite the same as the one I've seen, but it may be.
I'm sure it's no more complicated than any other mod for someone who understands the software (not me).
Whether or not it would prove useful or popular is the nub of the issue! What reasons do you have for thinking that the users of this forum wouldn't find it useful?
Agreed simplicity is often best, but it's not always a good reason to stifle change. Would there really be a massive additional overhead maintaining this particular modification?

[EDIT: picture here - obviously not a useful thread but you get the idea and it's not in Russian.]
http://i1112.photobucket.com/albums/k49 ... hanks1.jpg

hufty wrote:That doesn't look quite the same as the one I've seen, but it may be.

I think we're comparing different versions of phpBB, and possibly also different MODs.

hufty wrote:Whether or not it would prove useful or popular is the nub of the issue! What reasons do you have for thinking that the users of this forum wouldn't find it useful?
Agreed simplicity is often best, but it's not always a good reason to stifle change.

I'm sure a few Forum users would find it fun to be able to "thank" people, but the scoring system seems overly complicated, and the percentages added to every post may well result in confusion for some users. A simple post saying "that was useful, thanks" would probably work in most cases. There needs to be a good reason FOR adding complexity, as opposed to adding lots of features that might be useful unless there's a reason NOT to.

hufty wrote:Would there really be a massive additional overhead maintaining this particular modification?

Yes, a small amount of extra overhead as new versions of phpBB3 and the mod are released, but potentially a lot of work for a major update to, say phpBB4 (perhaps even not having the MOD available for the newer major version of phpBB). Then work to answer the inevitable questions about how the scoring system works, whether thanking people is important, what a thank means, and so on.

Experience of running this forum over the years, and through a major version update from phpBB2 to phpBB3, tells me to avoid installing MODs unless they're really needed. While MODs for phpBB appear to be like "plugins", they aren't at all, they're more like patches to the core code. As such they have to applied carefully, often break if applied to later versions of phpBB, and the scope for unintended bugs is large.

hufty wrote:[EDIT: picture here - obviously not a useful thread but you get the idea and it's not in Russian.]
http://i1112.photobucket.com/albums/k49 ... hanks1.jpg

That looks rather like phpBB2, from both the look and the HTML code generated. I wouldn't be surprised if the "Thanks" MOD for phpBB2 was quite different to the one for phpBB3, nor if that MOD had been discontinued for phpBB3.

I'm very happy to spend extra time installing and looking after MODs where they provide genuinely useful functionality. We have two MODs installed here currently: one to provide a more spam-proof CAPTCHA for the registration form, and one to handle timezones (and especially daylight savings times) better. The latter MOD needed quite a bit of careful work before it would reliably work with the latest phpBB code, but the ability for timezones to handle DST automatically made it worth my time fixing it.

Do keep the ideas coming, but I can't promise that we'll be changing much here.