I would vote for having a ‘Thank you’ button.
Sometimes you just want to show your appreciation to the author for a particular thought without actually typing a reply.
Typing ‘Thank you’ is sometimes silly and sometimes simply impossible because the discussion went a couple of pages further while you were doing other things.
BTW, is there a RSS feed for the most recent posts? It would be great to be able to read it in something like Feedly.
“Thank you” literally is far less silly than lightheartedly clicking a whatever button. At least it shows litteracy.
And, if one is late, whatever sign of appreciation is little relevant, but a “Couldn’t agree more” can be preceded by “@author:”
To be frank, I don’t even like “AGREED” messages even though I have posted a few myself. Either add something new (and relevant, and preferably clever) to the discussion, or add nothing at all.
OTOH I agree an RSS feed would be a nice thing.
One could argue this both ways.
Frequent posters would accumulate a lot of Thank You points. And we have a number of those, and most of their posts are informative, interesting, etc.
But only about 1-3% of the people who read EuroGA are contributing. It would be nice to increase this. It’s not easy, partly because it’s the nature of things that most people prefer to just read and partly because EuroGA is seen by many as being “too IFR”, “too high up”, etc – at least those are some of the comments I’ve heard. We could use a lot more VFR type of content – it’s no less interesting.
And I think seeing a forum where a number of people have accumulated a large number of Thank You points might put off a prospective contributor.
It’s also unlikely to make the existing good contributors write any more.
Regarding RSS – this area of web IT isn’t my speciality but I am told that RSS is going out of fashion. I did use RSS years ago to read some other web forums – either because most of the posts on them were non-informative one-liners and it took up less time via RSS, or because in one case of a “private” (annual subscription) forum there were hardly any posts so web-browsing periodically wasn’t worth doing. But I had loads of trouble with getting RSS to work properly; I tried several clients which kept messing up the PC. Also it didn’t work properly with sites which sometimes had graphics within the postings.
Jan, I think you’re contradicting yourself a little bit here.
“Thank you” literally is far less silly than lightheartedly clicking a whatever button. At least it shows literacy.
So you’re saying better write “Thank you”, “Agreed”, etc rather than clicking that button with a random label that you seem to dislike so much.
To be frank, I don’t even like “AGREED” messages even though I have posted a few myself. Either add something new (and relevant, and preferably clever) to the discussion, or add nothing at all.
And now you’re saying writing “Thank you”, or “Agreed”, or “Me, too”, etc. is useless clutter.
I’m in favor of your second opinion. The flow of reading a lengthy thread/discussion is better if it contains more substantial content and less “clutter”. That’s why I think a button (“Thank you” seems much more fitting than the facebookesque “like”, although I predict it will be used in the fashion of a “like” button) would be such a nice little addition to the forum. It won’t add much value, but it also doesn’t hurt anyone (and IMHO it won’t keep new posters from posting if they want to post) and it is an unobtrusive way of signalling agreement/appreciation.
I guess it depends on where you’re coming from, too. I’m a pretty active facebook user and I’ve come to understand the dynamics of “likes” as a way (among others) of expressing oneself. If I like something A LOT (say, a really nice trip report), I’ll certainly write that down to thank the author. But in some instances I might just want that short-hand function to quickly signal appreciation, hell – and if it’s only for a good joke!
The farther away we are from the social network paradigm, the better. In fact, I don’t even understand why they call them “social networks” – these networks are fairly antisocial, reducing real human communication to a handful of formulaic canned emotions.
I strongly disagree with the second sentence. A very substantial part of my local friends that I spend my (real) time with have grown out of a network of people I had met somewhere else before, re-gathered through social networks and we use those a lot to organize (real) activities that would just be bothersome to organize via phone calls or emails. Without social networks, I wouldn’t have known these people were around and I wouldn’t have met some of the wonderful people that I now call my friends (in the literal meaning of the word, rather than the online friend that is a “contact” at best). Social media is a tool that can be used for the better or for the worse, it depends on what you make out of it.
Having said that, I agree with you that Euroga does not need to be like that – because it’s not what it’s made for.
Rhino, you seem to have missed out on the “even” bit. In other words, my first statement was a stab at compromise (not my strongest side) 
, the second is my true and deepest feeling.
And yes, I do dislike clickable labels such as “like” , “nice”, “yummy” – you might wish to consult Tim White’s “Merlyn”, specifically the chapter about the Wart’s visit to the ants, a community where only two values exist: “done” and “not done”. Fearsome!
I have a feeling that a lot of people who “have a life” drift into and out of social networks – usually these days that means facebook.
A number of pilots I know were all over facebook at one stage and now they are hardly ever on it. Some haven’t visited their profile for a few years.
I would hope EuroGA lasts a bit longer
Over the 14 years I have been flying I have made a huge number of good friends from pilot forums (starting with Usenet in the old days) but I don’t think facebook will do anywhere near the same role – there is very little “concentration” of interests on it.
Peter, it is en vogue nowadays to bash Facebook and I am with you on it but it has nice features as well. We have a couple of very active Dutch aviation groups on Facebook and I really like reading them. I’ve met a couple of very nice people there which I couldn’t meet otherwise and it is always fun to read well-illustrated trip reports as well as general aviation news there.
Just to resurrect this issue, notwithstanding the apparent objection to becoming too “Facebook-risqué”, I think a simple like button could serve a number of purposes:
I don’t see a downside. I agree with Peter that there is no need to have the concept of a “Likes received” counter…
Since you can’t “like” my post, if you can’t be bothered writing a response, please indicate your agreement with a “+1” or “-1” for disagreement!
-1 Seriously, I don’t see the relevance. It will create a group mentality, “in” or “out” kind of thing, people klick on “like” for a number of different reasons, often it has nothing to do with what is written. If we for some odd reason want to know where the “group” stand on things, I would think a poll would be much more to the point.
