I suppose I should elaborate that it’s just a minor peeve for me on social boards, specifically, although I see the clear value in having it implemented for an array of other purposes. My preference would be to default it off on such a forum, but hey, it’s not the end of the world! Maybe I’m just really OCD about checking conversations I’m a part of anyway, haha.
@Dalans That’s because these boards are still pretty dead. =) Now I’m going to spam a bunch of @ Dalans posts to make you pay. Good to know that general replies don’t do that automatically so that makes me happy enough.
Without knowing any better, I simply do not feel right when the options presented to me are to give up what I believe are the useful features of the forums (read: the only things from getting me utterly lost in this format) before I get to the point I can shut off notifications. While I’m sure they intend for the notifications to be helpful reminders, it feels as if the developers are telling me I couldn’t be useful without being pressed to jump back into the conversation immediately.
As Jungard said, forums like these are something I do when I have time to sit down and relax. They’re not really in the same strata of things I use e-mail for. While I’m not opposed to receiving an e-mail from someone on the forum, at least back then the content had to be important enough for someone to take the extra step to explicitly message me. Now all it takes is for someone to reply, direct their post at me, or even just mention me with an @ in a portion of their post.
That said, I did play with preferences and disabled e-mail notifications, but does it really take me playing with options in two different sections to get what I want?
I think its debatable if this is really an issue worth fixing or even can be fixed. While simply liking a post would be useful for a support board to clear the clutter (like marking a review/post helpful, etc.), on a social board, the one-liners serve to quantify how much one likes the post for the author. If all my feedback was coalesced into a heart or a thumbs up, how can I really tell if it was a mindless like, a slightly amused like, an emphatic one, or that I sexually aroused Klocker? Then again, as with stuff like Facebook, you may get the like and the one-liner regardless.
a) The number of likes the post received (which is displayed inline), and
b) The promotion of said liked post into the “Best Of” view when the topic gets long and unruly.
Again, this isn’t a question of “can it be fixed”…it’s fixed. Now, it is an educational issue. Once people retrain, the quantification will return.
The one-liners shift the signal-to-noise ration way to the noisy end of the spectrum, and making finding the answer you’re looking for that much more difficult.