Thanks to the help of the Moderators at Pat at Mr. Snuff, we’ve added a “Like” button to the message board.  Pat was enormously helpful.

I was not here on the old board, so I can’t compare the new “like” button to the old system.  I’m vaguely aware that the old system was more complex.  But, my best bet is just to describe the new “like” system.

Essentially, there is a “like” button by every post on the message board.  There will a “likes” total that shows up on each post.  And then there is a total for all the “likes” that have been clicked in each discussion topic. 

The “likes” are not totaled on your profile page, and they don’t earn you points of badges.  But, it does allow everyone to give positive feedback about a post that they enjoyed or liked, without them having to post.  It also gives feedback to those posting that people are reading and enjoying a particular post they have made.

Use and enjoy the “like” button, and let us know by posting here if anything isn’t working as designed with the “like” button.

We’ll be adding more functionality over the next few days. 

Thanks!

Mark

Hey, look at that…someone “liked” the announcement about the “like” button!

Mark

Thank you.

Sweet deal, thanks for your efforts Mark, Pat and moderators!

When I joined Snuffhouse, it was a .net website, and people could see who “liked” a post.  Any chance that will happen with these like buttons?  I hate to ask as I sit here doing nothing for the cause.

Not with this particular “like” plug-in.  I do not write code…or better said, you don’t want the code of this message board in my incapable coding hands.  LOL.  I am choosing very stable up-to-date plug-ins to add to this version of Vanilla, making sure that the plug-ins won’t “break it” or cause any code conflicts, etc.  I’m following a “do no harm” approach.

There is a much more complex reaction and badge plug-in, which is probably what you guys had on the old Vanilla board.  But it does not appear to work well (actually, it doesn’t work at all) with this newer version of Vanilla.  As they advance Vanilla forward, and release new versions, the various plug-ins (which are mainly written by volunteers) stop working with the newer versions.  And that reaction/badge plug-in doesn’t work.

That was a long post, but I figure I owe everyone a very complete explanation of any changes I’m making, so they can understand what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.

What is cool about these plug-ins, is they can be switched out fairly easily.  So, if a complex reaction/badge plug-in is developed by one of the volunteer code writers at Vanilla, we can unplug this simple one and plug in the working complex one.  But, I would not hold my breath on the complex one being fixed.

Mark

Cool, good to know.

(That was me that “liked” your comment first.) 

I am happy progress is being made Thank you for sharing your experience to better our community ^:)^

Thank you, @basement_shaman. 

Mark

Liking all the comments in this thread. Likes are fuel to the fire. I think it will stimulate a lot more activity on this forum.

If you can find a “quote” plugin it will do a great service too. Hard to do it under the current setup.

Currently, I copy and paste what I want to quote, hightlight it, and hit the “indent to the right” button in the editing tool bar.  That is a little cumbersome though.  I know of a quote plug-in that will take a little work.  But, I’ll give it a try and we’ll see how it goes, @cpmcdill. 

Mark

cpmcdill said: If you can find a “quote” plugin it will do a great service too. Hard to do it under the current setup.

Well, I made the quote plug-in work, and I used it to quote you…but its working sort of buggy.  I’ll keep working on it.  Is should be really simple…but, its making me sort of trick it into working.

Mark

Well, its a damned if you do damned if you don’t situation…or a choice between two bad choices.

None of the Quote modules or functions will work with any of the WYSIWYG editor plug-ins (those formating buttons at the top of the post-writing text area).  So in order to have a working quote function, we would have to hand-code the formating on all our posts.  Or we can have nice editing buttons, and no quote function.  Kind of sucks.

I’ll keep an eye out for a fix to this, but I spent about an hour seeing if anyone had resolved this and made a quote function that works with WYSIWYG editors on this version of Vanilla, and there’s nothing out there that works yet.

The things I had to do to make the quote function work in the post above this one involved about six convoluted steps, and even then it was buggy and just a mess.  The best way currently to quote is to copy and paste, and distinguish the quoted material with a different colored text, highlighting the text, or the indent button.

Sorry about that, @cmpcdill.  I tried.

Mark