Too much" thanks!"?

Skulpture

I feel this is one of the best parts about our community if i'm honest.

The sharing and caring posts, not just here but on social media and emails, etc help a lot of people and the fact that someones takes the time to answer another user, share a user actor or maybe share a bug they may have discovered can help others tremendously. Our team is small so we rely on our users to help each other out and being so spread across the globe the only thing we can often do is say 'Thank you'. It takes seconds to read but I can tell you personally, it makes me smile and i'm sure many other smile when they receive a little thank you.

I think it would be wrong for us to ask people to stop saying Thank you, or similar. Whilst it might be a minor inconvenience when you log onto the forum to read a notification and see the reply is short or not exactly a 'meaningful contribution' it is just the way the notifications work.

I'm interested to hear other peoples thoughts, maybe I am wrong, who knows :smile:

crystalhorizon

I will continue to be thankful and express this

Michel

@vanakaru @Skulpture @crystalhorizon

To be honest I share vanakarus' opinion. Having a reaction on a post that only says "thanks" and not a word more is like saying bless you if someone sneezes just out of an habit. But I also understand the others that want at least to show a reaction if someone posts a patch/user actor or what ever. But there are other ways to say thank you.
- You can send the person a privat chat message (why does everybody have to go through severals one word posts to get to maybe somewhere down the thread to the next relevant/important content?)
- You can up vote a post and this is definitely a good way to show a user that you like what he is posting, I think up voting should be done much more, because this also shows in a long thread what part of the post is really useful.

I think saying thank you and then write about how you used a patch or user actor or how you plan to use it is something else, but filling the forum with posts full of thanks, great, awesome is not really relevant and tears the important peaces apart.

Best Michel

vanakaru

@Skulpture said:

The sharing and caring posts, not just here but on social media and emails, etc help a lot of people and the fact that someones takes the time to answer another user, share a user actor or maybe share a bug they may have discovered can help others tremendously. Our team is small so we rely on our users to help each other out and being so spread across the globe the only thing we can often do is say 'Thank you'. It takes seconds to read but I can tell you personally, it makes me smile and i'm sure many other smile when they receive a little thank you.

I agree. I have smiled so in the past many times. And this is the friendliest forum I ever participated in. It just the new up-voting seems to be much more relevant for me. My initial post was coming from todays experience by reading the topic "Mark's Blog" where I was ready to get some serious information, but got just the greetings. So this reminded me old(spanning already from the first forum) frustration trying to scan through tons of posts to find a bit of info I needed. It may take a second to read the thank you note, but in bulk it is not productive.

Reinhard

I agree with @vanakaru and @Michel. It's not about being polite or rude, but the distinction between a Forum or a Chat.

Woland

@vanakaru
Thanks for posting this.

Woland

But in all seriousness, I can see and identify with everyone's point here.

It makes me smile when I'm expressing thanks or being thanked, (and upvotes don't quite have quite the same feel of gratitude)

On the other hand:

Upvotes and private messages are more efficient in terms showing appreciation without "clogging" the forum

My thoughts:

Upvotes are only for people's individual reputation, and PMing could be a fine way to show appreciation, but commenting on a post "bumps" the post to the top, making other users more likely to see the useful/interesting post. In this way, saying "Thanks" could actually be considered more helpful than upvoting or messaging.

Ex. 1) I'm sure more people saw Mark's Blog post and are now aware of its existence because @Skulpture and @crystalhorizon each "bumped" @mark 's post when they thanked him.

Ex. 2) I shared my Keyboard Watcher Up/Down User Actor so that more people could use it, not in hopes of gaining forum reputation or getting PMs. So while I definitely appreciate @skulpture saying "Thanks for sharing", what I appreciate more is that his reply to my post helped to increase its reach a bit and hopefully might get that handy little User Actor into some more people's hands, which was my original goal.

A useful or interesting post with 8 upvotes and no comments stays where it is forever; a post with no upvotes but 8 comments saying "Thanks" a) gets bumped eight times (increasing visibility) and b) lets the community know that post is being thought/talked about actively by other community members. I'd argue that it's not so harmful on the whole, especially since not everyone is on forum every day and not everyone checks every post. Sure it might be a bit disappointing to be expecting more information on a post you were interested in and find only "thanks", but I think the "bump" factor is important, and neither private messages nor upvoting have that same effect. It's not just saying "Thanks" to the OP, it's also saying "Hey, check this out!" to the community, which to me, is an awesome and unique part of the forum. We don't just come here with questions or issues, (if we did, then the "thanks" would be more harmful than helpful), we also come here to share.

So the way I look at it, it doesn't bother me too much that I also went to look at the Mark's Blog post twice but didn't get any additional information, because I know the "bumps" probably led other users to see the post who hadn't originally.

Perhaps a solution could be to have an additional option next to the up and downvotes could be a button that says "Thank [Username] for submitting this post" which also bumps the post without actually creating another comment to read (and doesn't mark the post as "unread"). Though that creates its own issues I suppose... Maybe an option to collapse/hide comments on posts that are less than X words long and have 0 upvotes, so people don't have to "slog" through the "thanks" "great" "awesome" posts in long threads?

Best wishes,

Woland

vanakaru

I agree it be somewhat tricky balance to acknowledge members contribution and "bumping" the topic. To be ignored is the worst feeling when you reach out for or to help. I think I make a note for myself to comment properly something I liked or found valuable.

mark

To All,

First, I'll simply say that I am more aligned with with @Michel and @vanakaru regarding the "thank yous"; my feeling is that they are of course nice, but it doesn't add meaningful content to the thread. @vanakaru makes a solid point by saying he wants the "recent" button to show him what he hasn't ready already. As most of you know, time is my scarcest resource. To be taken back to a thread I've already read when there is no new significant information is not an efficient use of my time.

Still, @Skulpture's point about keeping the good energy going in this forum is something I don't discount. As evidenced in the recent Isadora Werkstatt, this is a really special community. Showing gratitude for the time they take to share insight and techniques is valuable. @Woland 's post above was really thoughtful. He makes excellent points about visibility of important posts, and the way a "thank you" will bump them a post to the top of the recent list. Yet, again, for people whose time is limited, it doesn't help us to revisit a post that we've already read when no new information is there.

I would offer this guidance: the best way to appreciate someone's post is to enhance it:

Submit an improvement or enhancement to the original idea, User Actor, or technique. You can say "Thanks! This is so awesome... and here's a couple of refinements I made to make it even more useful." (I might point out my recent response to @jhoepffner 's "displace" GLSL source code as an example. I thanked him, made some notes to ensure users knew this wasn't a replacement for Isadora's Displace actor, and then posted an new version of Jacque's original code which made it work more like the Displace actor.)
If you have a "use case" that differs from the one proposed in the original post, explain how you would take advantage of the tool or technique in your specific situation.
If the tool or technique is missing something you feel is important, then say so. "It would be so great if this User Actor could also ..." That allows the original poster or others in the community to implement your "feature request."

Basically, if you add more information/knowledge/ways of using what the original poster offered, you'll not only be able to thank the person who posted first, but improve the usefulness of the entire thread.

Three more things:

In response to this topic, I've added a sorting method to the main menu that was not available previously: the ability to sort posts by popularity. This is the new little "fire" icon you'll see to the right of recent posts (clock) icon. You choose to sort include the last day, last week, or month. Does this somehow help us to better identify useful posts based on the number of views?

I found there is a "Sort by Votes" plugin for NodeBB. However, this is only visible when you're in a specific category... it is not global for the entire forum and it wouldn't be visible when viewing the most recent or unread posts. Would help us?

One final idea, which would be available only to the team members, would be to add the tag "top-tip" to the original post. This would be a way for us as moderators to acknowledge the usefulness of a post, to allow the community members to find post like that. It would be like a little "badge of honor" for users who get this tag added to their posts. I am not sure if this would cause the post to be marked as "unread" or not, but it would be easy to find them using the tag search.

A second way of doing this is the "Node BB Topic Badges" plugin. We could add the badge "top tip" to user's posts.

I do not consider this topic closed. Let's keep discussing this until we find a solution that empowers our community but also ensures that those with busy lives can get the information they need as efficiently as possible.

Best Wishes,
Mark

Michel

@mark said:

In response to this topic, I've added a sorting method to the main menu that was not available previously: the ability to sort posts by popularity. This is the new little "fire" icon you'll see to the right of recent posts (clock) icon. You choose to sort include the last day, last week, or month. Does this somehow help us to better identify useful posts based on the number of views?

Unfortunately the popular rating is not how many views a thread has but how many posts it contains.

Best Michel

Woland

@mark said:

I would offer this guidance: the best way to appreciate someone's post is to enhance it:

Submit an improvement or enhancement to the original idea, User Actor, or technique. You can say "Thanks! This is so awesome... and here's a couple of refinements I made to make it even more useful." (I might point out my recent response to @jhoepffner 's "displace" GLSL source code as an example. I thanked him, made some notes to ensure users knew this wasn't a replacement for Isadora's Displace actor, and then posted an new version of Jacque's original code which made it work more like the Displace actor.)
If you have a "use case" that differs from the one proposed in the original post, explain how you would take advantage of the tool or technique in your specific situation.
If the tool or technique is missing something you feel is important, then say so. "It would be so great if this User Actor could also ..." That allows the original poster or others in the community to implement your "feature request."
Basically, if you add more information/knowledge/ways of using what the original poster offered, you'll not only be able to thank the person who posted first, but improve the usefulness of the entire thread.

Thanks for fleshing out this idea further, it was one of the things I really liked about @Michel 's post above, but forgot to mention in my comment. I wholly agree with this idea, and think asking people to do this via a pinned post (if pinned posts are still a thing?) would be a great solution.