Button [I like] [Dislike]

[Kevin Ouellet]

This feature could be handy for different purposes than an alternative to commenting. I don't like the idea of replacing commenting with Like on a forum like this, because the forums get less replies and people spend less effort posting.

However, as a way to help moderators screen troublesome users and as a dissuasion method this was very handy on two other forums about calculators:

1) Since legit users don't want to end up with an high negative karma count, they will be more careful about what they post. Less work for moderators as a result.
2) If admins or moderators have access to rating logs, they'll be able to screen posts that received negative karma.
3) More democratic in the way that many downvotes will often cause troublesome users to stop misbehaving long before the banhammer is swung on them.


However, in order to work that way it would need to:

1) Be restricted to members above 20 posts or something, to minimize risks of troublesome users creating multiple accounts to give themselves upvotes.
2) Dislike should probably be named as "Flag as abusive" or something, to discourage members from using the voting system as an alternative to posting.
3) Board rules should disallow complains about negative votes.
4) Forum profiles or even mini-profiles should display the total amount of positive and negative karma that members received on their posts. Else, this is innefective.

And of course, this won't stop actual troublemakers (the ones who sign up only to cause trouble and have no intention to ever contribute in a positive way), but those are very rare on a calculator forum.