Recent discussion about discussions

[Jakob Ovrum]

On Thursday, 13 March 2014 at 18:04:09 UTC, bossfong wrote:
> On Wednesday, 12 March 2014 at 18:15:33 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev 
> wrote:
>> Which Disqus features would you like to see in the forum 
>> interface?
>
> Although it might sound very much like a Facebook fanboy, I 
> would really like to have a way to agree to a post/someones 
> opinion without having to go through the (to me tedious) 
> process of writing a reply.
> I also think this would get rid of the "+1" posts, which I find 
> to be annoying.

It's probably the most requested webforum-like feature.

I think if we do want to implement it, it has to be done in a way 
that doesn't deprive NNTP users of information. Maybe something 
like the following would work nicely:

Every time a reply uses +1 on its own line somewhere in the post 
(fuzzy match), add the replier's email address to a list of 
"likes" (or whatever) to the parent post. In the web interface, 
we could have an expandable drop-down box showing all the email 
addresses (and/or their display names?) who "liked" the post, 
probably in chronological order. Duplicate "likes" are not 
recorded. At a glance you would be able to see how many "likes" a 
post has, and if you want to see exactly who "liked" it, you 
could expand the list. Meanwhile, NNTP users are not deprived of 
this information (because it's gleaned from NNTP reply bodies) 
although it's harder for them to see the tally at a glance. The 
number of "likes" is limited to the number of replies a post has, 
so it's extremely unlikely to grow out of hand, and it's not 
subject to falsified information without overtly spamming the 
NNTP server.

This still doesn't let you vote without replying, but I don't see 
how that would work without effectively leaving NNTP users in the 
dark.