The What?
This evening, I'm turning on a long overdue feature that allows members to quickly react in different ways to discussions and comments. You'll see a set of buttons under each comment that can be used to highlight interesting discussions, suppress abusive comments, flag abusive members, and create more nuanced reputation profiles.
The Why?
We're always looking to create a better experience for our users, with the aim of making the site more pleasant and productive. There are many scenarios where one might find themselves agreeing with a post but unable to reinforce that with support in the form of a comment. Often, good content is met with a nod of the head, but nothing more and this has an effect on the kinds of comments that flourish within the group. This means that more negative and provocative content has the chance to dominate the mood of the Forum. This new feature will mean that members can give feedback to things they "Like" and find interesting etc. without having to actually verbalise their support when that is not possible or desirable. Likewise, members will be able to "Flag" unacceptable behaviour for the attention of moderators (Important Note: this is not to be used for content you simply don't like or agree with, but is reserved for content that violates the terms of service e.g. abusive behaviour)
There are other elements that will be used in combination with these new reactions in the near future as we begin to develop new ways of managing the community and providing a more pleasant and productive experience.
The How
As mentioned, you'll now see the active "reactions" under each comment. It's easy: the "Like" button works just as you'd expect based on use of social media platforms like Facebook. When a user's comment receives support they will be rewarded with CL points. These points will help to feed their reputation score and will help us to generate an engine for surfacing the best content (i.e. content with the most points) as decided by members. You'll be able to scroll through content that has earned support from members in the "Best of" gallery, which is to be found in the control panel to the left. Likewise, members will lose points for being "Warned" by admin or having their content "flagged" beyond a certain threshold of users.
Any questions, just ask!
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Comments
Very simples and you can't mark yourselves all tho I'm not sure if I flagged myself ..... Don't think you can LOL and Like its one or t'other and you can't Flag an Lol or like
Just a shame you never thought about an Unlike button. Just look at it as an opportunity missed and learn from it I suppose...
; )
#teenager
On the other hand if it helps admin and the mods out in any way then we all have to support it don't we.
The forum has stayed unchanged for two years now, so we always aim to try and freshen it up in certain ways occasionally.
At the end of the day mate, if it makes your job easier and leads to an improved site for the majority then crack on and those grumpy old farts like me will just have to get used to it :-)
I think I might get into trouble!
If oofing people off the forum is to be based on such criteria then diversity of opinion could quickly disappear down the tube.
Gutted
Good stuff btw