Having lived with both "Did you find this post helpful?" and "Thanks" for a while now -- to see how the concepts settle -- I'm still uncomfortable with the lack of "orthogonality"; there's an overlap between the two.

Why (apart from being a black-hearted, ungrateful scoundrel) would you not thank someone for a post that was helpful?

The other case -- of a post that is not helpful but is thankable -- is useful when the poster made a special effort but what they posted did not help.

Do I correctly remember seeing this exact post in another (LQ Suggestions & Feedback) thread? If so, why the repost?

You recall well, Sir! I did write something similar in the thread started (by Jeremy?) for feedback about the idea of a "Helpful" button.

What is different now is that I have lived with it for a while and it still feels odd. Sometimes things that feel odd at first feel right after we have lived with them long enough for our habits to change. FF 3.6 "open new tab" is a good example. Initially new tabs appearing amongst existing tabs instead of at the extreme right was strange; having lived with it for a few weeks it feels right and the old behaviour would seem unhelpful.

Leaves falling all year round used to feel very odd as did cows mingling with other road users ...

But I ain't got used to having both "Did you find this post helpful?" and "Thanks". Doesn't stop me sleeping.

Having "Did you find this post helpful?" and "Thanks" does cause confusion; here's from a recent LQ post: "Thanks for the thanks. Like you, I'm fairly new to LQ but I think the Thanks are supposed to be reserved for cases where someone has helped you solve a problem. In this case, I think responding Yes to the Did you find this post helpful? would be more appropriate. I'll know soon enough if a moderator jumps in."

IMHO the "thanks" should be clicked for any post that was trying to help you even if it didn't solve the issue. Often in IT just getting clues to research has value. OT posts or those that simply say "google is your friend" or clearly show the poster is one of those trolls that seems to be on forums just to show how annoying newbies are to them shouldn't be thanked.

In fact it might be worthwhile if there was a button for "not worth the bytes it took to post".

1 members found this post helpful.

+1!

We already have it-- the "Report" button.

The moderators are like the Maytag man, they get very lonely if no one is reporting rude or offensive posts.

Cheers

Well, a post can be of no help but not offensive or agaist the rules.

True, there are many shades of gray in that area, but unless the poster is at least attempting to be helpful, I find it rude and irritating that they bothered posting at all.

But that's just my opinion, and you know what they say about opinions...

Cheers

Some things I do sometimes (if anyone's interested):

--If I happen to come across a post somewhere, just while browsing around the forums, that I find to be particularly helpful/informative to me and that I know will help me do something sometime, or that answers a question I have in my mind but have not asked, I will click the "I found this post helpful" button.

--If someone takes the time to provide a thoughtful, informative reply to a question I have posed, but their reply does not help me solve the problem I have asked about, then I may "Thanks" them (This is equivalent to saying in real life, "Hey, thank you for trying to help me out, even if/though it didn't fix it."), but I won't necessarily click the "helpful" button.

--If someone takes the time to write a thoughtful, helpful reply to a question I have posed, AND that reply directly helps me solve the issue about which I'm asking, then I click both mysterious buttons for that person.

Sometimes a combination of, or deviation from the above, happens too, but unless you send me to a psychiatrist for while, we'll probably never figure out why or when this happens.

And as for my own statistics/personal POV? Sure it's nice to be thanked (verbally, typed-outedly, or otherwise). But, I'm not here specifically to have my buttons pushed, or to rack up statistics. Frankly, I think I enjoy more seeing an OP type a written expression of happiness, satisfaction, relief, thanks, understanding, or "Wooohooo!!! That fixed it!!", than click a button for me and go away.

In related news: I've seen a few posts around wherein ratios of posts vs thanks, posts vs helpfuls, helped vs helpfuls, etc., are bandied about. From what I can tell, such ratios are fairly meaningless, at least in so far as comparing one member to another:

Scenario #1: Let's say we have two brand new members, one is a very 'expert' Linux user, and the other is a total 'newbie' Linux user. The newbie asks 100 questions, and the expert answers those 100 questions. The newbie thanks the expert 100 times, while the expert thanks nobody. Now, we have two members: one with 1:1 posts/thanked ratio, and a member with 100:0 posts/thanked ratio respectively. Not an accurate representation of things generally, as they cannot be reasonably compared.

Secnario #2: Let's say we have a member (ABC) who has been here 10 years, made 10,000 thanks-worthy posts, but has only made 100 thanks-worthy posts since the thanks system came into being, so has only 100 thanks. And we have another member (XYZ) who has been here 3 months, and has made 100 thanks-worthy posts, for a total of 100 posts, and been thanked for those 100 posts. Now, we have two members, ABC with 100:1 posts/thanked ratio, and XYZ with 1:1 posts/thanked ratio. Again, these members cannot be accurately or reasonably compared to one another.

Anyhow,
Sasha

3 members found this post helpful.

WOO HOO! Thanks Sasha! Just for good measure and out of complete boredom I also hit both buttons!

@GrapefruiTgirl

That seems like a pretty good system.

I posted long before the "Thanks" and "Did you find this post helpful" buttons were available. However, since on line reputations like real life ones are nice to have once the "Thanks" button happened I added a request for hitting it to my signature. Since it didn't really seem to help I removed it.

Thanks and helpful might be more meaningful than number of posts. There was one "Guru" in a thread that made a fairly ridiculous claim that I and another user both pounced upon. (We originally were answering the OP.). If you saw a "Guru" that had never been thanked it might make you wonder. The flip side of it is that many of my posts were before the buttons appears so my ratio of thanks to posts is fairly low and as we all know not everyone clicks "thanks" even if they say it in the thread.

Like Gg I like to see the thanks in the thread but unlike her I'd prefer the click. However I can live without both - what really gets me are the number of newbies that never respond to their own thread after OP so you have no clue whether they solved the problem or died some horrible death while waiting on replies.

Hi. I'm new here. Could someone shed a little light on why the "Did you find this post helpful?" prompt shows on some posts and not others?