Yeah, title basically says all. I just checked some badges of forum members, and was curious how mine look… and recognized I have given just 5 likes… Because those five where red hearts. I chose to give purple hearts because… EndevourOS? But hey don’t count for badges likes - can this be “fixed”? Fixed as “not a bug, but…”.
3 Likes
I hate to admit it, but my initial reaction when I read this was something like “who cares?”
After giving it some thought, I realize that isn’t really a fair reaction; even if I am not personally very invested in the badges and gamification features of Discourse, I do appreciate that they are effective ways of increasing community engagement.
Then I started thinking: this isn’t actually just an issue with badges because the “like” count is also tied to user trust level. I’m not sure what the actual requirement is, but for a user to maintain TL3 they need to give and receive a certain number of likes over the course of 100 days.
This means if people are giving and receiving 
and 
and 
instead of 
, they could potentially fall short of this requirement and lose the ability to recategorize/rename topics, create wiki posts, hide spam posts by flagging, etc. The metric by which community engagement is being measured has kind of been skewed in this way.
I took a look to see if emoji reactions can be counted as “likes”, but it seems to be a feature that has not been implemented yet. There is a discussion about it here: https://meta.discourse.org/t/reactions-count-as-likes/238546, which is somewhat interesting to read through but doesn’t appear to have resulted in a feature being implemented or changed yet. The last comment was a couple weeks ago, so I guess it could still be considered an active discussion.
I did see a sort of different feature mentioned here: https://meta.discourse.org/t/change-the-like-icon-to/87748. This allows the “like” feature to be tied to a symbol other than (the EOS forum “like” could be changed to or , for example). It still doesn’t really address the problem of other reactions not being tracked in a way that is relevant to TL levels and forum badges, but kind of a neat idea I guess.
Anyway, all that to say: @milkytwix your request doesn’t seem like something the Discourse software can do at the moment, but I do agree that it would be better if other reactions contributed to this metric somehow. If you are motivated enough, you could create an account at https://meta.discourse.org/ and voice your support for the feature on that thread I linked above.
Update (over one year later):
Discourse fixed this back in February (I only actually noticed recently). Now all reactions except 
count toward the “like” count (for engagement metrics) the same way that does.
13 Likes