You could add a system with 3 choices. somehting like

[^] [-] [v] (liek, meh, disliek)

So you can give neutral votes

Though even changing the color would make it not-facebook. The dislike button is red, couldnt the like button look a bit greenish?

Likes are meh. Bring back the good old seal of approval I say.

I like the threshold idea: You need a certain reputation before being able to vote at all. Your reputation should influence the weight of your vote.

I think down votes are important because it makes people think twice before posting some nonsense.

If you want voting and permissions done right, look into how Stackoverflow handles it.

Voting Up (requires 15 rep)

Voting Down (requires 125 rep)

Slashdot had an interesting idea in that the amount of votes you had was very limited - it forced you to use your votes wisely, rather than voting up and down everyone depending on your view (though even there, on Slashdot, down moderation was often abused).

Would be cool if you had this system but it allowed more votes based on existing rep.

The "like this button" always struck me as something that could confuse someone new to the forums. It's similar enough that you could assume it's somehow linked into Facebook.

I think I may have seen something similar in another, much older, post but I have never quite understood the reason to just have a like and dislike style button on their own. Why am I/others liking/not liking this post? tends to be something I think to myself when I click the buttons or see a posts rep. It would be great to see a reason (even if it's from a list of single worlds) why a post is good or not.

I too was very confused when they took the simple, green "+" button and replaced it with a FB replica. I actually didn't use the "thumb" to up a few posts only due to me thinking it would go to Facebook (to be honest, very few apps/webpages don't do that nowadays).

So yeah, introducing something less confusing would be appreciated.

EDIT: Unless Gamedev is being friendly towards the illiterate blobs that inhabit the deep space of Facebook -- those that cannot handle real-life without hardwired translation into FB chatter. Nice move.

EDIT2: Also, seeing which of my posts got "liked" would help a lot. Sometimes, I'm not entirelly sure a post I thought was relevant got upped, or was it an older off-topic one that was just witty...

The most likely future is that we will shift to a system where you answer the question: Was this post helpful? Yes / No

It will not be turned on for forums like the lounge.

This. I want this. No thumb/hand and no "Like".

Also, I too would be in favor of being able to see which posts got ++'d. Maybe just make a tab, similar to the Recent Post's tab in someone's profile, but in this tab just filter it to only include ++'d posts and sort by most recent.

[quote name='Michael Tanczos' timestamp='1317949393' post='4869938']
The most likely future is that we will shift to a system where you answer the question: Was this post helpful? Yes / No

It will not be turned on for forums like the lounge.

This. I want this. No thumb/hand and no "Like".

Also, I too would be in favor of being able to see which posts got ++'d. Maybe just make a tab, similar to the Recent Post's tab in someone's profile, but in this tab just filter it to only include ++'d posts and sort by most recent.
[/quote]

That's a pretty good idea.. if anything to find the gems of the forums a little easier. I think in our next iteration we'll try to a lot more on our end to make it easier to help each other out. My students use this site actually.. so on the XNA site I want to see us doing a lot more. We've got some really great things coming down the pipeline in terms of how we organize the site and how we make it easier to publish content.

The original idea behind this site is to make it easy for people to help each other to become better game developers. That's really what we're about.

[quote name='Michael Tanczos' timestamp='1317949393' post='4869938']
The most likely future is that we will shift to a system where you answer the question: Was this post helpful? Yes / No

It will not be turned on for forums like the lounge.

I like this.[/quote]LOL