I get an insane amount of likes from visitors going down and liking every post in a thread it’s crazy and fairly annoying; so much so I just wrote an extension to remove visitor likes from my notifications. Back a while ago there was a thread suggesting they’re outright blocked from doing that but the answer to that was in short “no because a like is too subjective.”
So now my suggestion is to clarify it does not help them at all. Whether through the “how to level up” thread, Discobot, or any other medium, (maybe even a notification t which shows their first time saying something like “Likes are a great way to show appreciation for a post, however they do not affect your ability to gain member.”) the forum would greatly benefit from having new members know that spam liking posts and blowing up notifications isn’t achieving anything. This is a common issue and I think this is a fair solution if disallowing it isn’t one.
A good example is this thread. If you expand the likes, a lot of the same set of hsers are liking a lot of the first posts.
This goes for a lot of the threads in #updates:announcements, you can go down the list and there are a lot of people with grey names or free avatars who are liking a lot of the posts in the first 25ish
Out of all of the likes to these two posts only two (on the bottom one) are from members
The main tell is that they’re liking posts faster than they can actually read them. It’s scary how common it is to spot a visitor in the wild who’s given out 50 likes with only 10 minutes of total read time.
If you have a new-ish thread up on screen, out of nowhere you’ll see post 1 receive a like, 0.5 seconds later, post 2 receives a like, 0.5 seconds later, post 3 receives a like… and so on. And when you check who gave the likes – whad’ya know, it’s a visitor who joined 5 minutes ago… every single time.
I disabled full like notifications a long time ago so I don’t have any great showcases for this besides the posts which I have had exploded by visitors. Currently the only solution I can think of besides outright removing the ability (which I agree is a little harsh) is adding the popup to the like button only appearing once, like this:
