Suggestion to change the display of likes in SMF 2.1

Started by jsx, December 08, 2021, 09:52:15 AM

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jsx

@Arantor

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I'm glad that there is a liking system in SMF 2.1 at all, but I just noticed that other software have it a little differently and I wanted to add such a suggestion for 2.1

You surely know ElkArte and have you seen how they have it done there? After clicking on the icon with likes, is displayed Like by: here the names of the users are displayed.

Is that also so heavy for the database? ElkArte is based on SMF 2.1

Arantor

Well, they're done in different ways; SMF's likes is designed to support things that aren't just message likes (it was intended that the underlying functionality should support mods too if they wanted to use it), ElkArte's is explicitly for messages.

But ElkArte's approach is to load the list of people who liked a post on demand, which means instead of making it expensive to update a display name, it makes viewing topics with likes more expensive on the server.

Thing is, they also did other things that were more about 'if your problem is a rubbish host, get a better host' - the requirements for ElkArte end up being higher in practice than SMF's.

They also collate the number of likes given and received on an account, something I purposefully never did mostly to avoid it being gamified by users, but also for a similar performance consideration (adding another query every time something is liked... isn't good)

Of course, the world has changed in the last 8 years since both projects first implemented likes. What was then more expensive could be changed now but it's still going to be awkward on lower-end hosting environments no matter what you do (because the lower end just piled more sites on to the same servers rather than giving everyone essentially a free upgrade).

And note that in both cases it's a database consideration not a PHP one so the improvements of PHP 7.x over 5.x don't help here.

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