csearle wrote:I would like to have a way of ranking the topics on that forum by thanks so that I can weed out the really best contributions.
On the subject of thanks/recs, well this had been discussed at various times and places. The thanker's meaning can range from an acknowledgement that a post has been read, through mere agreement, to heartfelt concurrence. ...
And other possibilities outside that range, such as saying "Thanks" for an answer to a question without expressing any degree of either agreement or disagreement with the answer (after all, how can one either agree or disagree with an answer one previously knew nothing about?), or to recommend a post as well worth reading as a well-argued case for a view one profoundly disagrees with.
csearle wrote:... It is this ambiguity that stops some people (not me) from deploying them.
Doubtless that's the case, but that's not the only reason people have for not using the facility. In my case, the recs facility on TMF had a very similar ambiguity (all it missed was the ambiguity about the things it dealt with were "recs" or "thanks") and I used it despite that - I didn't like the ambiguity but could live with it. But I don't use the TLF facility mainly for a different reason: its recs/thanks are not anonymous. Even TMF's anonymous recs could lead to attacks along the lines of "You lot must be a load of idiots to have given this rubbishy post such a large number of recs!" lines and sometimes did... TLF's non-anonymous recs/thanks have the potential to make such attacks personal, and that's the feature I especially dislike about them. I
might just about be willing to use non-anonymous recs if their meaning wasn't ambiguous, but the combination of non-anonymity, ambiguity and the fact that too many people simply don't understand just how ambiguous a rec can be gives IMHO far too many opportunities for misunderstandings to happen.
csearle wrote:PS For all those that don't thank because of this ambiguity I declare that a thank of this post is to be be interpreted as aggreement.
Is that agreement with a touch of aggravation? ;-)Gengulphus