Dislike button for the new forums...

There is a difference between giving players ways to control their own interactions and giving them carte blanch to affect others with detrimental actions.

Just like the "ignore" feature we have right now helps players take responsibility for who they see in these forums or in the games without impacting the other player. The "dislike" button will impact the other player.

I, for one, am among the many posters who have ticked off others and am not well liked. There are 3 posters on these forums who are constantly nasty in their reply's to my posts even when their reply has nothing to do with the topic and adds nothing to the topic. So I am sure I will accumulate many many "dislikes" as just those 3 have others account names they post under also.

We will see if they have a responsible way to utilize this action.

If you were named DogsPaws, then you wouldn't have any haters.

Now, we don't want to go down that road.

Downvotes don't belong on a forum. We're not 5-year-olds.

It also tends to marginalize different points of view. Lots of changes to Everquest were initially disliked. Allowing one to med without a spell book open, OOC (out of combat regen), mana potions, defiant armor, shrouds, monster missions. All of these were, overall, good additions to Everquest that helped maintain the playerbase. But many of these suggestions and changes were initially aggressively disliked by many within the Everquest the community.

The Everquest community has always had a problem with making the game more accessible for latecomers for example. "I used to walk to school in the ice and cold, so should you, anything less than that is unfair". Eventually people do turn around and accept that some things in the game might need improvement.

Forums that allow marginalized opinions to be downvoted, or even collapsed after downvotes, restrict different opinions. It makes it much less likely that someone will try to address problems with the game.

Angeliana is a real person, I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. But she doesn't have time to read every single post. She pays closer attention to posts which have been flagged using the Report function. If there were to be an AI component to the software, and it was using the Report function in an automated fashion, it's not clear she would be able to tell the difference. Many of us saw what happened on the Aradune server in its early days, when there was a dedicated GM and the act of petitioning alleged abuses to the GM was weaponized.

Say what?

Well, if there is a Point System based on Likes/Dislikes, perhaps a minimun amount of post would be required to have access to those buttons. It will be easy to see "new" members if someone wanted to spam dislike buttons.

Microtransactions are the answer. Pay to post, pay to Like, pay to Dislike. Would stop about 95% of the forumquesters.

I'm in support of a dislike button. Its cathartic to see serial dumpster posters get drowned in dislikes everytime they share their nonsense.

I think we should also get "Spelling infraction button" since some folks like to correct other's spelling errors so much.

After so many infractions you cannot use a word longer than 4 letters.

I don't like the idea of a downvote when there is no restriction to the forum. Anyone can make an account (or many accounts) and mass-downvote at will.

I also don't like the situation that exists in some forum software where you don't see the number of upvotes (+1) and downvotes (-1), but just the final number (+3) as it obscures just how engaging a post might have been (+33, -30).

It might work if there the forums could limit an account to ONE downvote per day, so that if you see a bunch of downvotes on a post, you know that there's something going on.

I've always liked Slashdot's moderation system wherein highly-rated posts earn the poster moderation points that can be used to add +1 to insightful, interesting, informative, etc. If something like this is possible, consider which terms are used. Something like "funny" sounds great and normal, but may also be used as a substitute for "dislike" thereby mocking the poster.

others'

Your post will serve as the dislike button. Everyone will "LIKE" your post if they dislike dislike. =)

Yup, and people already do this with likes.

EQ forums circa 1854:

Going to have to strongly disagree. Slashdot is the worst forum system ever invented. It is a forum system where forum posters can brigade and take down any post.

People who have a different opinion than the hive-mind mainstream get ruthlessly downranked into oblivion with forum systems like Slashdot.

I remember someone pointing out on Slashdot that fire departments dousing Electric car batteries with water during fires, is an environmental nightmare. That opinion got ruthlessly downranked. The prevailing opinion was that Electric cars were green and clean, any opinion to the contrary was blasphemy. A few years later a Swiss study actually studied the toxicity of the water runoff when fire departments put out EV fires. Well, what do you know, EV water runoff is full of toxic substances, PFAS, forever chemicals, heavy metals, etc.

Confusing and ultimately meaningless. A perfect metaphor for this modern age. But, should I like to dislike this now?

Shrug.

I rather have a discussion about potential ramifications of something and maybe have some guidelines implemented or whatever.... then say/do nothing and see what I fear come true.

You could be right, and all of this possible potential will be for naught. Or you could try to log in four months from now and find yourself banned from the forums cause your post amassed so many dislikes from four random players creating hundreds of accounts just to spite you because you killed a mob they wanted to in game. Or some other silly reason.

The opposite will also be true. Those nonsense posters will go through and dislike ALL of your posts, and ALL of my posts, and ALL of the posts of ANYONE who has EVER disagreed with them or dumped on their suggestions.

And that's how forums turn into ghost towns, where only those nonsense posters ever post anything because the rest of us don't want to put up with their juvenile behavior. We can put them on ignore, but they'll still go right on disliking everyone's posts ad nauseam.

Simplest way to prevent that is to not put a Dislike button on the forum in the first place.

I liked your post thereby showing my liking your liking of the liking to dislike dislike.

It seems clear to me.

I too disapprove of the mod-down aspect of Slashdot which is why I only promoted the "mod-up" for category in my post.