simsim314 wrote:I'm not sure I'm really happy with the like option - but some fast and information low response that encourage people to continue in their direction, without writing a whole message that says "I really like where you're going, you should continue this direction" or to the opposite - "this is another spam message, you better post something more informative", could give better feedback and encourage collaboration on more promising directions.
Very interesting point! Personally I seem to have a minor aversion to "like" and "dislike" options in most forum situations -- for whatever reason, I seldom use them. I guess usually neither of them is exactly what I want to say.
However, "like" on conwaylife.com would probably be used for the same purpose as a "Nice work!" or "Very cool!" post... and that might be kind of a good thing to have.
At least it would reduce the number of times that I click on a notification of a thread I'm interested in, hoping for some fascinating new developments -- only to find it's a "Great job!" post that I really didn't need to rush out and see.
Now, other than that detail, it seems to me that the way things work now is fairly reasonable -- personally I'm fine with just leaving well enough alone.
@EricG, thanks for the good perspective. Not sure how to coordinate using the Sandbox for congratulations -- seems like the messages would be likely to get lost and never seen by most of the people being congratulated.
On the other hand, if the basic idea is to identify some messages as primary/informational and some as subsidiary/congratulations/etc., then maybe it's possible to add one-line messages to the thread, that are in a different category that doesn't trigger email notifications. And maybe they don't take up as much vertical space somehow. (?)
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On the negative side, a 'dislike' option seems a little too general -- it would be hard for over-posting newcomers to learn much from a pile of dislikes, but easy for them to get to feel unwelcome. An 'offtopic' flag might be good to have, and also something like 'please go read the forum rules'. 'Offtopic' of course reminds me of Slashdot, with its rating system -- 'insightful', 'informative', etc.
One part of the forum rules is about how to avoid posting very old rediscoveries, or maybe-new-but-trivial stuff. Maybe that could be expanded to a separate entry in the forum-rules thread, especially if there's a way to link some of these hypothetical feedback messages directly to an explanatory post. "Wheel re-invention" and "there are gazillions of these" are two types of feedback that I've seen the most often here.
This all might have gotten too complicated to actually implement, though!