[wp-meta] [Making WordPress.org] #1381: Trac could have a "Thank You" button or link

[Making WordPress.org]

#1381: Trac could have a "Thank You" button or link
-------------------------+---------------------
 Reporter:  pdfernhout   |       Owner:  (none)
     Type:  enhancement  |      Status:  new
 Priority:  low          |   Milestone:
Component:  Trac         |  Resolution:
 Keywords:               |
-------------------------+---------------------
Changes (by chealer):

 * keywords:  needs-ui =>
 * priority:  lowest => low


Comment:

 Replying to [ticket:1381 pdfernhout]:
 > **Prior art:** There already exist like and dislike buttons in many
 systems (even WordPress addons). However, liking is not the same as
 gratitude. I don't know of any system with a "thank you" button. There
 might well be some such systems somewhere perhaps, and I would be curious
 to learn of them. In any case, this post serves as public disclosure of
 the idea to make it harder for others to patent.

 Fear not; MediaWiki has had
 [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Thanks an extension to allow
 thanking for wiki page edits] since ~2013.

 ----

 I beg to disagree with this having "lowest" priority; sure, solving has a
 significant cost, but the benefits would be important.

 ----

 Thanking is relative; “Thank you”, “Many thanks”, “Thank you very much”,
 “Thanks a million” and “I don’t know how to express my gratitude.” are all
 different.

 Sites from the Stack Exchange network allow voting each post up or down. I
 frequently find myself wondering if I should upvote a post which I found
 useful despite it being far from perfect, or if I should downvote a post
 which contains misinformation, but which remains better than other
 answers.
 I find -1, 0 and 1 to be a restrictive option range.

 I would rather have the possibility of rating posts. I thank you for your
 report, but I would rather be able to rate it as something like:
 Clarity 7/10
 Conciseness 2/10
 Accuracy/agreement 8/10

 Utility / value is even harder to quantify, but we could roughly qualify
 it also with a number, like 7/10.

 This would indirectly thank you, but more precisely, making it clearer
 that there is room for improvement. Before you ask why I would not rate
 your ticket higher, that is because this tracker often conflates issues
 with suggested solutions; while I very much agree with the issue
 underlying your request, I am a lot more skeptical of the suggested
 solution(s).

 Gratitude is contextual; I can be thankful to a 2-year-old for telling me
 that they just pooped, while being disappointed that a 15-year-old peed in
 their pants 5 minutes after asking me to stop the car. In other words, a
 post’s perceived **quality is not directly proportional to gratitude** it
 attracts.

 So, there is a case to be made that both expressions of gratitude and
 ratings could coexist and be complementary.

 In the specific case you mention, there is extra complexity; you are
 thanking not so much for @nacin’s  comment, but for the action his comment
 reports. Rating his comment positively may not help so much in that
 situation. In this case, the ideal would be a way to rate his commit
 instead.

 There will be actions which cannot be rated though―for example, someone
 announcing that they bought the domain name which a ticket had requested.
 In this case, I think replying as you did is just fine. It allows
 qualifying your thanks, and supporting rating would allow other grateful
 people to simply rate your reply with high Agreement to strengthen your
 thanks without causing extra noise. That thanking reply could also be
 rated as low utility, so Trac can try avoiding unneeded emphasis.
 Supporting threaded replies would also help minimize the pollution.

 There could be a specific thanking feature for these cases, but it would
 not always work, notably because the contributor reporting an action is
 not necessarily the contributor who performed it. I suppose the best way
 to handle such miscellaneous actions would be to have something like a
 discussion forum associated to each contributor (similar to
 [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Talk_pages#User_talk_pages
 MediaWiki’s user talk pages]), and allow posting a message with thanks
 there (which would minimize noise in the ITS).

 Emoji reactions would be better than nothing, but I find them quite
 ambiguous. Should we assume a message with 3 red heart reactions, 1 blue
 heart, 1 green heart, 1 orange heart and 4 thumbs down is a rather
 valuable message, or is it mostly unwelcome because there are more thumbs
 down than any other reaction?🤔
 A major advantage of **ratings** over your suggestion and emoji reactions
 is that they achieve a lot more than providing feedback; they **facilitate
 collaborative filtering**. Slashdot and Stack Exchange demonstrate how
 powerful even basic rating systems can be.

 The other major advantage, as I described earlier, is its **much greater
 expressiveness**. Large-scale CBPP projects like WordPress generate a lot
 of disagreements. While unavoidable, making gratitude as visible as
 possible can make it a lot less likely that these turn into conflicts, due
 to an emphasis on negativity.
 At the same time, contributors are often unvetted, and many require even
 more feedback―either positive or negative―than the best of us. Expressing
 disagreement―even without explaining―is often needed, yet sending a reply
 which merely does that triggers flamewars way too often. Structuring the
 whole spectrum of feedback would make our communities way healthier.

 As you mention, this challenge is not specific to trackers. Ticket #5006
 requests allowing marking forum replies as helpful. The purpose is
 filtering, but the requester also mentions reducing tensions.

 ''This comment and any other from myself on this ticket is offered under
 the terms of CC0 1.0.''

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/1381#comment:6>
Making WordPress.org <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/>
Making WordPress.org