I vote for keeping 'thanks' on. No argument that 'Helpful' helps find the good posts, but 'Thanked' adds to the user who wrote the post - helps you gauge the writer. A little reputation of sorts. I'm new, I was kinda looking forward to see how many thanks : posts I could get. (I thought I was doing pretty good too ) It's like a little game that encourages users to go a little deeper into explanation to earn their kudos, which is a good thing to encourage..

3 members found this post helpful.

Personally it doesn't bother me at all the 'thanked' option has been disabled.
Can't say I've got any interest in a reputation system either.

Yes,LQ is a community.But let's not lose sight that it is also still a technical forum.
I think LQ would function just fine without the 'thanks' and 'did you find this post helpful'.

Although looking at the other posts in this thread I'm in the minority again....ho hum.

@the trooper: Don't worry, you're not alone. I don't know about the minority part though, guess not that many of us around

I also think both should never have been implemented on LQ. But we already had that, and related, discussions before.

Just posting to support you and let my "vote" be known

Thanks druuna,appreciate the support.

"Thanks" is gone

Thank you jeremy, I do not miss it at all (though I had "thanks" > 0).

I am with the opinion of the trooper:

I don't personally feel the need for a "thanks" counter. Sometimes the OP says "Thanks, that fixed it", and I'm happy because my post maybe helped solve the problem and I have learned a bit more, but as I have posted before, I don't think LQ should try to be a "social networking" site.

Neither should we, as LQ users, be competing to "be the most helpful this month" (or whatever).

LQ should not set itself up like a supermarket with loyalty or bonus points like some stupid game.

LQ should remain "technical": Q's are asked, A's are supplied as and when we all have the time and inclination.

It has worked very well so far, and I have been here for a while now.

"If it's not broken, don't try to fix it". [This applies to LQ, not my current version of linux!]

Best wishes.

0 members found this post helpful.

yes, i liked the 'thanks' system because the statistics also provided a list of EXACTLY WHAT posts a given user considered useful and also a list of what posts of a given user others considered useful, especially when looking at a user profile

that to me provided a bit more useful information then simply
x/y posts of {user's} posts were found useful

might be too much bother to fill out

as for a reputation system, perhaps it could be based on useful/unusful posts or something straightforward otherwise it could become more of a popularity contest

I think the 'feel good' part of the thanks option has some merit. A little lift for the person who helped and some encouragement to keep up the good work.

The post to thank ratio seemed useful to me. It could be an indication that someone with a higher ratio is more knowledgeable (at least in the particular area being discussed) or is better at explaining than others of us.

I'm not sure removing the thanks option will change the activity at LQ much as far as the involvement of members.

Just a thought, why continue to include the number of posts?

3 members found this post helpful.

Or the "Registered: date", after all, does either one provide useful information?

Well, they do, of course, but so did the Thanks system. Just what the useful information is, is another question.

For the record, I'm not a fan of ratings systems, however useful they might be. Don't we have too much of that with everything else in life?

If LQ is a community, then the idea seems weird anyway. Do you rate all your friends, your neighbors, your family? If it's a technical forum, then the comments stand on their own ground.

1 members found this post helpful.

+1 for extremely disappointed.

I don't care if my post bears the label "this post was useful". Who ever sees it?

The "Thanks" counter was a figure of merit, showing how good the member is at answering other's questions, or how much knowledge of Linux he has. No one ever gets "Thanks" for rambling about what he is doing at the moment or what political views he has. What is left now is the number of posts one has, great! I know people around here with 1000+ posts which didn't have a single "Thanks", merely asking question, hardly ever giving advice, let alone useful enough to gain a "Thanks".

I also think about members like pjvaldez, ptrenholm, jiml8, paulsm4, anishakaul whose "Thanks" ran in the hundreds, and most of all colucix with 800+ "Thanks" IIRC.

Earning a "Thanks" made me just go that one step further to make my post real useful. An utterly bad decision.

jlinkels

5 members found this post helpful.

Wow, till now I didn't know that I too was getting noticed

The thanks system never meant anything to me. I found myself being thanked for trivial things or irrelevant things, while in any number of cases I wasn't thanked for things that I would have charged them heavily for if they'd come to me through business channels.

I have long thought that a reputation system would make more sense, if there was a decent way to implement it. I've even brought it up here myself before.

Even if a mechanism is put in place, the question becomes; "reputation for what?". He who can solve a hardware problem based upon a one sentence description possibly can't solve a security problem. So, it would seem logical to implement a multiple reputation system (for instance: hardware, business software, system software, games, virtualization, this language, that language, etc etc etc), but where do you stop, and how do you keep it under control?

I still think that "caveat emptor" is the best thing for the visitor to keep in mind.

I agree with you except for one point.

On more than one occasion, I have come across someone answering a question incorrectly. Sometimes this doesn't matter; sometimes it does.

The N00b is trying to figure something out, or is in trouble, or is about to lose data, and here comes the person with many posts to his credit offering worthless (or sometimes actually harmful) advice. And the N00b can't tell the difference.

It has been three years ago now. I one time ran across this exact situation on this board, intervened, and saved a poster from what otherwise would have been a serious data loss. I still remember it because it seemed so egregious to me, and because the poster was very bold about following directions I gave to fix things up, which included manually hex editing a partition table. At the end, it was working again.

Had there been some way for this poster to tell that the person giving the advice was not qualified, then a lot of trouble could have been saved.

This happens all the time around this and other boards, which is why there are constant attempts to come up with ranking systems.

I don't know...maybe it would just be best to set up a number of categories and ask people on the board to self-rank in those categories. Most people won't lie, and those that do will soon enough be caught out, and can be dealt with appropriately (whatever that means...)

For me the "thanks" (I, too, had > 0) was a joke. People got
thanked for ridiculous posts all the time, and valuable posts
got ignored when it would have been a good thing.

As far as I'm concerned it didn't have any actual metrics in
terms of the quality of the posts - if anything it was showing
wits (or lack thereof) and friendliness of the thanking person;
but then again - that count wasn't taken, anyway.

So I, for one, don't miss the "thanks" at all. If someone says
thanks in a post in response to what was given them in terms of
support that's a beautiful warm fuzzy. Clicking a button (for
whatever reason) is not.


Cheers,
Tink

A far fairer system would involve the mod team giving and removing reputation points. Coincidentally, I have a Paypal account around here somewhere...

2 members found this post helpful.

A simple "Thanks" in the reply to a post that helped solve a problem is all that's needed. Post counts can be misleading - mine is higher than many who know a lot more than me ( most members ).