So i've heard, but it was ancient history even back when i joined

Huh, six years already? Time just flies by.

We don't have one because nothing good can come of it. There are already enough people spamming wanting to get their post count up. Having people comment looking for likes would be an awful addition.

There have been some interest articles coming out commenting on how things such as "Like" buttons actually poison discussion and make communities more toxic. We are probably better off without them.

I agree with the first part. I see a lot of people (I do it doo) simply writing "this" or "+1" when I want to say something but someone already said more or less exactly what I wanted. I don't know why I do it, but I know I'd much rather simply "like" the post.

As for the second, that would be a totally useless counter imo, just like the post count one. When I see someone having two times bigger post count than me that joined last year I, frankly, don't exactly find that to be a good thing. Hell, I'm here since 2007, and I think my post count is bigger than it should be.

I would be all for a "like" button, but only if there is a "dislike" button as well. I mean, some posts are absolute crap and some are absolute gold. If you're going to reward for greatness, need to punish the opposite.

No lets not have a "like" button. People abuse it on other forums, it will be done here as well. People will create multiple accounts just so they can "like" and "dislike" people's posts. As pointed out it will just kill conversation. People will just try to out do one another. Instead of reading all the posts people will just look for the most liked posts. So the conversation won't go anywhere.

It's just a pointless feature to feed people's need for approval. They can get that pretty much everywhere now on the net.

Those are even worse. I remember how the upvote/downvote system contributed to the toxicity of the DDO forums. People would do random crap like downvoting every post a user makes just because they do not like them, no matter the content of the post. Then you got whole squads of people acting like cheerleaders, upvoting everything someone popular says, no matter how ill-conceived and rude. It starts feeding on itself after a while. Decent discussions were still to be had, there, but it was very difficult.

100% agree with you. That's why there is no need for either.

I dunno, from what I heard of how it went down removing the feature was the least they could do. It's because of people like those that we can't have nice things. (And frankly I find picture sigs obnoxious.)

I don't think a "like" button would be bad, but IMO it's not a good idea to keep a running score/ranking of users with the most "likes" or up-votes. In my experience, that leads to people doing a lot of posting to try to up their score/rank, which can get pretty unproductive and spammy.

You say "lazy"...I say "efficient." Businesses make a lot of decisions to control costs and make things more maintainable/manageable. That's not "lazy," it's smart.

I'm also in the "image signatures make forums hard to read" camp. I prefer they stay disabled. There are certain forums that I use that are pretty annoying to read because of the visual onslaught of huge signature images everywhere.

Edit:

Oops...meant to add that to my previous post...sorry!

Yeah, no thanks to like-[censored]. The moment more people would come here - for instance when they start some major hype for a new BGS game - this entire forum would just devolve into unfunny meme-spouting and "witty" bs so that they can get more likes to feed their ego.

I don't want a like button. Or a dislike button. Or a rep or thank you or kudos system. I just want the same thing from this forum that I've wanted the past nine years on it - decent discussion made up of posts with relatively decent grammar and spelling. I don't want images spammed everywhere, giant .gif signatures, threads eight thousand pages long, and all of those other things that make forums crap.

I think facebook spoiled teens and advlts on the Like feature. For example we come across things like this, which is why I no longer have a facebook.

Literally people will make a comment like this and hundreds of friends " people they don't know in real life" will spam the LIKE feature resulting in spam.

I'm confused, do you want one or not?