Bulbs

[Boots Raingear]

Hey Gang,

I wrote a forum mod that adds a "bulb" feature, similar to how things worked on PoE News. For those of you who are unfamiliar, it's like a thumbs up/like system you'd find on other boards but with a simple catch. You can only bulb one post per thread. This will (eventually) help bring well-deserved attention to posts that are particularly interesting (good or bad).

Currently, the only thing you can do is click the bulb icon and spend your bulb on a single message in the thread.

In the future, you will be able to see a list of the users who have bulbed a given post, your profile will show your posts with the most bulbs, and there will be a list of the top bulbed posts for the last week or month or whatever. We've also got some ideas for tweaks to how the system works, but we'll wait to see how it works used with this style of forum before tinkering with it.

Please post here or private message if you have noticed any bugs with the feature. There are a bunch of sassy error messages I have put in there, you're not really supposed to ever see them if you're using the site regularly. Please let me know if you see one.

Do not request additional features at this time.  Dealing with the PHP for the above features is enough of a threat to my sanity for the coming weeks that I will likely react to your suggestions with hostility.

[Lemon]

Couple things to add.

• Unpaid members can bulb posts. Guests cannot. And that'll continue to be true. So register if you haven't.
• That bulb icon is going to probably change a couple thousand times until I end up with a design I like, but the icon will always be in the same spot (to the left of all the other forum actions)
• 5 is currently the threshold for a post to become featured. Once a post has more than 4 bulbs, it'll stand out in the threaded view. (as in Boots', above)

[Isfahan]

Cool! Now to go back an retroactively bulb all the posts that need them.

[Lemon]

Two small changes to the bulbing

• Unclickable (grey) bulbs now only show up when a topic has one or more bulbs. So if you're seeing a bulb icon, you can either click it, or the topic has received bulbs.
• Clicking a bulb icon shouold now direct you to the right place, instead of the beginning or end of the thread, which I understand was happening before. if this is not the case, let Boots know.

Eventually I'm going to be restyling the "this got lots of bulbs" square - I don't really like the gradient. But I'm not really sure what it's gonna be just yet.

[Delcat]

I like this system a lot more than the love/hate thing, thank you for taking the time to code it.  If someone's loving or hating you on a catch-all basis, it's hard to know what you're doing wrong, but this provides a good guideline for if you're doing something right.  I dunno what you'd have to code icon-wise for downvotes, dragon dildos?

[Isfahan]

Bulbs don't really work that way. They can only ever go up. It's a feature adopted from Portal of Evil.

Just a reminder to folks that you can't save up bulbs or anything—you're allotted one per thread. If you don't bulb something in one thread, you can't bulb twice in another thread, and so on. So please, bulb generously.

[Notm]

I'm glad we're making things brighter for the whole F Plus community by doing this.