Barkeep
Posts: 1788
Joined: Saturday, 29th June 2013, 16:52
Thanking Now Restricted to OPs
For now, instead of removing Thanks altogether, we'll be trying another one of the toggles we found, which only allows Thanks on the first post in a topic. It's the perfect middle ground for a trial run; comparing popular OPs to popular replies will provide good data on how effective Thanks are at preventing "me too" posts while simultaneously removing most of the avenues for thanking behavior that has frustrated people in the past. Unlike removing Thanks altogether, this is also relatively painless and easy to reverse.
Naturally, if we find that we really miss Thanks for replies, or that removing them creates more problems than it solves, we'll bring them back. I'll be happy to post a follow-up thread in S&C in a month or two to reassess. I expect there will be posters who disagree with Thanks removal, and they should feel free to register their disapproval here or via PMs to the mods, but I encourage everyone to give this experiment time to produce results before demanding the return of Thanks buttons.
While I'm mucking about in the forum settings, I've also taken the liberty of removing the "ratings" display, which has always struck me as misleading visual clutter. As a reminder, we've already removed the Thanks list in users' profiles and the Thanks "ratio" display in the sidebar; you can still view that ratio on a user's profile, and unless I'm mistaken, the entire Thanks function would have to be removed to get rid of them.