I’m not catching on here – what exactly are you trying to do?
I’ve seen this in other forums – rather than scrolling the topic with lots of new posts saying “wow, thanks man, that link was exactly what I needed.” people can opt to click a button/link on a post to register a “thumbs-up” / “vote of thanks”.
The template would then present these “thank you” votes in some form – perhaps a bar across the footer, or just below a given post, or in the meta-information somewhere. The presentation could be a simple count (“35 people said thanks for this post”) or maybe a list of names.
Putting the “thank you” bar between posts lends itself to the forums that host ads in that space also. In most bbPress themes, I’d (personally) add the thanks message in summarized form to the space left of the post, under the poster’s name.
It wouldnt be hard to collect the data (in the post_meta) table, or to add a link to add my vote of thanks to a given post. The challenge would be to modify the various themes – to “thanks enable” them – to display it correctly somewhere.
Oh I see – I had a feeling it was about this.
It’s really a nice idea – adds a little ‘social network’ to the forum. Would it not maybe be an idea to make a plugin that requires a small template edit for now?
I think, in general, it would be a good idea to have the ‘thanks’ responses to the left of the post, or wherever the poster’s details appear. That way, most templates would pick it up.
I spent a little while looking at this at the weekend. There’s a nice ‘action’ that I can hook into for generating the voting links and output. A little more tweaking on the back-end (AJAX processing of votes) and I’ll be ready to let this out for a beta test.
@paulhawke – sounds great, can’t wait to see it. 
Now, are you going to be making it a “like” this post, or a “thank you” for this post plugin?
I had actually created this sort of plugin once for a forum, but didn’t release it publicly. When I get time, I might extract out that part and release it.
Edit – If Paul doesn’t do it first 
Please share if/when available! Been looking for this some time…
@Michael R – I am creating an admin page to let you change the voting text – it will let you say whatever you like. Out of the box, it will say “Add your vote of thanks”, and “# said thanks for this post”. The admin page will let you purge all votes, choose if you want the thanks div to appear before or after the actual post (to aid in CSS styling) and some prefix / suffix suffix text (to aid in CSS styling).
Note: if you enable the plugin you will need to tweak the CSS of your forum template to style it. That goes way beyond the scope of the actual plugin itself though!
Sounds great Paul – love the way you go beyond with plugins. Thank you for that.
That wouldn’t be a problem; I’m always tweaking my theme files to make it all just look better.
@gerikg – it’s more of a ‘like’ plugin.
I just committed files to SVN … the “thanks” plugin is a reality and available to test. I’m waiting on the refresh cycle of the plugin browser for it to appear on the site now.
Hi Paulhawke
Great plugin thank you very much. I was wondering would it be possible to add usernames to the thanklist?.
Cheers a bundle
Hi Paul
Just another thing i noticed. I can say thanks multiple times on the same topic. I know that the votes are not counting, but would it not be better if the user got a message like “you have all ready voted” or something similar?.
Thanks
Just installed it, here some feedback.
I’m using bbPress 1.0.1:
Some feedback:
– After voting on a post, it still shows the text to vote for that post (right next to the number of votes it has already
this should change into ‘who has voted already’ and if the person who voted on that post is reading, should NOT see it asking him to vote again on the same post, even if that isnt possible)
i love this plugin btw, vbulletin has this feature, and i always wanted something similar
Great feedback, thanks!
I’ll modify the plugin so that if you’ve already voted I’ll have it take away the voting link.
I’ll also look at writing out a list of who has voted “thanks”, but by default that output will be turned OFF. You will need to enable it via the admin interface.
Is anyone running this plugin on the 0.9 branch of code? I see no reason why it shouldnt function, but someone has asked if it does. If someone can give me a yes / no on that I’ll amend the “Requires version” tag accordingly.
i’ve created a screenshot on how this is on a vBulletin forum board, hope this helps a bit also:
http://i628.photobucket.com/albums/uu8/npoeran/danke.jpg
Thanks for your effort
Version 0.6 has been released, with the features mentioned in my earlier post: no voting link if you’ve already voted, and an optional list of users who’ve voted “thanks”.
As always, let me know what you think.
Hi Paulhawke
Thanks a bundle, it works like a charm 
). I have only one thing left which is very minor.
Would it be possible to use Ajax when you have voted, so the vote appears right away, instead of having to reload the page before it appears?
Bingster
@bingsterloot … “ask and ye shall receive” (to quote an age-old saying). Version 0.7 of the plugin has been released and votes are now immediately refreshed via AJAX and the old static “thanks” message removed from the admin area too.
@ Paulhawke
I rest my case ) works perfectly now. Thanks a lot for your fast updates.
Hello,
Bumping this, and wondering if it’s still available, as the link does not work :/
I really would like this feature on my WP/bbP
