I know this from another forum, it's a small and slightly non-sensical function.

Under each post is a "thanks" button, when you press it your name appears underneath that post and person who made that post can see a list of all the thanks in his profile.
It doesn't have to mean much, everything from 'that was really helpful' to 'no use to me but I appreciate your contribution' to 'I've read your reply'.

It's not only a nice-to-have for threads I've started but I also come across posts in other threads where someone gives advice I can use and I like to show my appreciation but have nothing relevant to contribute myself. If the amount of thanks a person gets would also show up in each post, the really helpful gurus would be easy to spot and noticed for their assistance/insight.

It has drawbacks of course like more code, more data, more bandwidth and clutter in the interface.

There used to be something like this- Affero. It lets people donate money to worthy causes (Doctors without Borders, etc) in gratitude for the help received. Some members might have a link in their signatures still. It used to be implemented as the "Thanks" button in the old LQ, but it wasn't used much, I don't think. (the default, if you didn't have an account, was the LQ account)

titanium_geek

You can still use Affero to thank your fellow LQ members, FWIW. Also - the default doesn't go solely to LQ, it is split between LQ and a wide variety of OSS projects (ASF, PHP, FSF, etc) depending on which forum you came form.

--jeremy

thanks for clearing that up, jeremy.

TG