how many messages yyou need to rank up, what they are an etc ?

never seen a forum base it off likes before. thats kind of dumb. i have no motivation to post here anymore now.

Papfr said:

never seen a forum base it off likes before. thats kind of dumb. i have no motivation to post here anymore now.

I don't really see a difference between ranking up for post number or for likes. In both cases, there will be people who post only to rank up instead of contributing anything useful. (If anyone remembers the old CheeseForMice forum... they had "trophies" that users would get for posting and for receiving likes, which led to people making lots of pointless posts, and some users even logged onto alt accounts to like their own posts. Really pathetic.)

I'm not sure ranks or likes do anything good on a forum at all. It should be a place for discussion, not a popularity contest.

I have been a member on forums with and without ranks and likes, and generally, I found that the ones without such "status symbols" tended to have more productive discussions going on. Ranks based on post count encourage some people to produce useless messages just to increase their post number. The effect of likes is subtler, but it can cause users to write posts based on what they think will get them the most applause, rather than what they find relevant to the discussion.

(At least this forum has no downvotes. On sites that do, one can usually see the communication become entirely dysfunctional: users who want to be part of the community post only what the masses will approve of rather than their actual opinion, trolls post the opposite of that to collect downvotes as some kind of trophy, and the few who write something nuanced and thoughtful are picked on by both sides.)

In any case, I think it is better to base one's own contribution to a forum on whether one actually has an interest in a discussion and finds it worthwhile, and not on a desire to "level up". Posting on a site that one isn't really interested in seems like a waste of time.