A suggestion for a new message board capability...

                          

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I have long wanted a "like" button (like on Facebook).  A "dislike" button would be great too!

There is a like option.

justbaseball,

 

I Like your topic!   As TPM mentioned, there is a Like button for each topic - it's in the right-hand column of each page.

 

But there is not a Thumbs-up or Thumbs-down type function for a particular post or poster, at least not one that I can find. It's a good idea though, so I'll ask about it!

 

Julie

But there is not a Thumbs-up or Thumbs-down type function for a particular post or poster, at least not one that I can find. It's a good idea though, so I'll ask about it!

I hope you can find it.  I think it will accomplish a couple of things...

 

1) Make us all think a little before using "caustic" language...after all, no one wants to be 'voted off the island' so to speak and 2) reduce the need some seem to have to go directly at posters they don't like.  That is, they can just 'down-vote' them all they want...getting their frustration out...yet not distracting so much from threads.

You would need to be able to see who voted up and who voted down. That holds the voter accountable also. Are you dealing with a negative nancy who votes everything down?  Is it someone that never likes anything you say? Maybe you get several vote up by someone and you might talk to them more. Votes need accountability.

Systems like the one used at slashdot.org allow for "grading" of posts, but the reader can read at any level of post they like, so if they want to see everything including the downvoted stuff, they can easily do so.  That system would be better than one in which the reader is beholden to the whims of others to decide what they can see (I'm not sure if that's being suggested here, not sure what the system being suggested actually does).

 

There are also forum systems that allow the reader to ignore specific other posters so that they just don't see those users responses.  Given that that's also in the control of the reader, it should work reasonably well, though I would imagine it could make following a thread fairly weird if there are several blocked people posting in something you're otherwise reading.

 

I'm not sure either type of system is really necessary given that any reader can already self-sensor by ignoring anything they don't want to read, and anything that rises to a level that would require more intervention than that would probably be best handled by a dedicated moderator than by any group-based system I've previously encountered (this said in the lite of my experience being a moderator of a fairly wide-ranging discussion board with a half million posts elsewhere)

The concept of ignoring what we don't want to read isn't usually practical...especially when some of the knucklehead stuff is spread throughout a thread that has some quality information that others might want to follow.

 

I like the like/dislike idea on an individual post.  Doesn't mean that it will keep people from posting their POV however it would certainly help to know how the brethren on the site feel about what is being said.  Based on some of the coach, player and fellow poster bashing around here lately I'd like to know if I'm in the minority or majority that don't care for the trends that I'm sensing.  

Maybe I've just spent too much time on messageboards over the years (my messageboard life predates the modern internet), but I honestly don't understand this sentiment.  Picking the wheat from the chaff is trivially easy in this medium.

Which is not so say I'm opposed to moderation regarding topicality or decorum, but I haven't noticed that being a real issue, though I don't spend much time outside of the general forum here nor am I particularly thorough about keeping up with that one.