Dear Friends, Our technical team reports regularly about a significant quantity of useless and empty messages, comments, recommendations. Sometimes, such messages are not only annoying, but also are harmful, especially while they repeats themselves multiple times in the stupid attempts to earn additional "likes", as looks like. The "Dislike" button in the forum works only to remove an already given "Like". We propose to implement a "Dislike" button and a member "Dislike Record" in the forum, which can be put with no relation to any "Likes". Thank you. Regards, Alex Sapiro
A +/- system could be useful, but the downside to a downvote function is that sometimes/often when a post is downvoted it can create more noise than the post itself; if it's anonymous you often then get more off-topic response to the downvote, and if it's not anonymous it can create tiffs between members easily. One thought is that if someone offers bad advice, it's better if someone replies and provides better advice rather than simply clicking a downvote button because it not only provides more information but also is often received better by the person whose post was rebutted, to have higher quality information given in reply rather than just a downvote. I wouldn't rule out something being tested in some future year, but there is value too in the simple request that if you see a reply that's not great and you have better information, please just post the better information so everyone can learn from it.
Dear Admin, You are trying to implement the sweet democracy here, it is destructive. The life is more real. It is very difficult to keep any topic on a true way, while a significant amount of "liked" messages are absolutely out of that topic or out of correct suggestions/reactions, concentrating only on the "likes" and total messages scores earning, often. Remove "Like", if the "Dislike" is so dangerous here. The forum is more unprofessional than professional now, because the forum stimulates and invites the rude incompetence. We are leaving the forum as to technical discussions, unfortunately. Regards, Oleg T.
If anyone sees a topic where a higher quality informative response could be offered to the person asking the question, please post a higher quality reply with information you feel would be helpful to the person asking the question. It is greatly appreciated when people share their knowledge and professional experience. And certainly when you read high quality answers, please hit the like button on those if you want the existing like system to encourage high quality posts and give a quick thank you to those who spend their time to share their experience and knowledge. It is appreciated.
Many, many, many years ago we experimented with a reputation/post feedback system similar to the request in this thread. The intent was to have the equivalent of both like (+) to encourage quality posts and dislike (-) to discourage low quality posts. However, the negative caused issues. A simple dislike button that shows who disliked the post creates animosity between members, whereas someone posting "better information" in reply keeps the focus on the information being presented. If the dislike button is anonymous, it prevents tiffs from forming between members, but then it can be worse, giving someone a bad feeling if they take the time to share their technical experience and get a downvote from a member who might not understand the post. Somehow getting a dislike after taking your time to try and help creates a real sinking feeling. So while it can be useful overall, it creates specific problems. We tried to solve this by using weighting based on the feedback a person's posts have received (e.g. only allowing someone to dislike if their own posts were strongly liked and even weighting the dislike based on someone's own like score, so that new members who don't understand something don't cause a major impact but dislikes from someone who is well regarded based on the quality of their own posts has more impact on others when they click a dislike button) but then this can also create a feeling of inequity that also causes issues. We tried adjusting the weighting to take into account likes/dislikes received, post count, and membership duration to try prevent random or inappropriate dislikes, but having a dislike was itself a very disliked feature overall at that time. Maybe a future experiment would be to allow someone to set their own viewing threshold, and then have the dislike only control that visibilty, so someone could choose to view everything, or hide all post that had 1, 5, or 10 dislikes for example. But then that creates an issue with context, whether to show replies to hidden posts or on the flip side whether quality posts get hidden because they are in reply to a hidden post, whether a thread would make sense with or without a low quality post that itself wasn't great but caused the thread to take a new direction for example. The like button isn't perfect as you may get someone liking a post that doesn't merit a "like" because they simply want to thank the person for replying, but overall implementing a dislike button without creating problems by doing so is difficult. We'll see what the future holds, but for now, you can manually ignore anyone who you feel never posts things that you want to read. Click on a username and click Ignore. And for anyone reading this, if you use the like button, please use it to encourage high quality posts and posters that really answer a technical question well. Many thanks!
