[2020] Please Wait 9 Hours to Give More Likes :psyccp:

Good morning everyone! So, this is what I get for pushing buttons at midnight and going to sleep

To explain a bit about what’s going on: Discourse (this forum software) offers a lot of tools and power which we haven’t been making use of. I’ve been talking about experimenting with taking us back a bit closer to the default recommended settings to see how things will go. This means enabling certain things like trust-levels and placing a limit on likes.

I will admit I didn’t intend to open the floodgates last night, apparently tweaked the wrong setting which enabled you guys to jump up in trust levels really quick. While this wasn’t intended to happen just yet I may just leave it for a while and see how things go, spinning dials as necessary and stressing out the ISD staff.

So, a few points from the above discussion.

Likes: Likes are intended to be limited and highlight that content which you feel is valuable. I may have spun the dial on this a little too low and the cap can be tweaked. Part of the reason likes are limited is because they factor into trust level rankings, so your rank needs to be properly earned by making quality comments (as much fun as the like and get likes thread is). We’re not going to police how you guys use likes, but there will be a cap to keep in mind. Higher trust levels get access to more daily likes than lower trust levels. It’s actually been a consideration to potentially wipe all old likes from the system to start fresh with this in mind which may or may not happen at this point.

Wiki: I’ve turned this off for now - I’m interested in hearing discussion if you think such a feature would be valuable. What this does is allow high trust users to make their post a Wiki which can be editable by anyone who’s at trust level 1 or higher (can be changed). I’m not sure it was obvious enough what was going on with this however which is why I’ve turned it off.

Badges: Some new badges are popping up. These are default ones that simply had never been enabled, I’ve turned them on simply because they looked like fun. Not a bug, just some freshly enabled default badges which had been turned off.

As far as all of this and forum settings go I’m happy to hear feedback. This may wind up being only a time limited experiment or perhaps we’ll keep some parts and not others - but I think there may be some value in trying new things here and myself and the ISDs will keep a close eye on emerging issues so we can hop on those as they pop up. If anyone at a high trust level wants to abuse the system we will just lock you down to trust level 1 and you’ll lose the ability to climb the ranks again.

I just renamed the Regular title to Veteran.

We’re not going to tell you what a ‘good’ like is or isn’t. And I may increase the cap a bit here to be less restrictive.

The idea is that volume is limited so you have to be more selective about quality.

We don’t, but higher trust levels are gated for recently approved flags so those likes won’t boost someone up over to the next rank.

Check out this article to explain it in a bit more depth than I’d be able to do here without copy pasting: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/

Moderators have tools to control this, like locking trust levels, and approved flags are factored into whether or not someone is eligible for trust level 3.

Right now this is just an experiment, if you have issues please bring them to my attention. If brigading becomes a real problem it will be a fair bit of work (due to the rather high requirements) and easy to lose as we can lock someone down with a click.

If there have been over a certain number of approved moderation flags within the last few months then you may be gated out of trust level 3 by the algorithm. It can still be earned, but takes time. It can also be lost if forum activity dips or anything along those lines.

Thanks for the detailed feedback, it is appreciated. We’ll see how things go for a bit and I’ll make tweaks as needed.

I’ve just tweaked the cap to be a bit more forgiving. Base number is now 20 and it goes up from there with trust. If people still feel they can’t like all those posts that really deserve it after feeling it out for a couple days at this level I can increase it again.

An indicator would be great, I’ll see if there’s anything in the system for that.

We’re not going to define that for you, that’s up to the individual. But having a cap just means that someone can’t ‘like’ every post they see and may need to think about those they feel deserve it most.

If we like a post by accident or just find posts more deserving of our limited likes a few minutes later, can we go back and “unlike” the first post and get that like back if we’ve hit cap, say? or will we still not be able to “move” that like to another post at that point?

I’m pretty sure you can remove it and put it on a new post. That said I’m hoping to find a spot where it doesn’t feel like you’re having to constantly think about this.

Whoops, sorry for the spam - I’ve disabled some of the worst offenders for the notifications. Missed the fact that these were per event - and apparently discourse decided now would be a great time to read through everyone’s history and grant them retroactively.

Clicking them gives a 404 now because I took those badges out back and… dealt with them.

Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll have a look tonight.