MGSteve
Well-known member
I can see this being abit of an issue on my forum as well. Where ever there is kudos or points to be gained, either real or imaginary, some people will agree to work out a way to abuse it. It happened with reputation under vB, which really completely neutered the whole point of reputation.
So there are possibly three routes to take;
route 1 - limit a user to liking a single user's posts x number of times. Any likes given after that limit has been reached do not count. This would stop 2nd accounts be created solely to like-spam.
route 2 - cope with it through the admin system. If we can see a report of the users who have given the most likes to other users (i.e. how many times UserA has liked UserB's posts) it would immediately flag up any possible problem users. We could then investigate and see when the likes were clicked - this would help identify a user (say UserB) who has searched for UserA's posts and clicked like in quick succession. If we can indentify them, we could easily reset all the likes for the users concerned through the admin system. - So, this route in effect would be via the warning "abuse the system and the penalty is that all your likes get wiped out. (Of course you would have to know it was the same user and not someone else trying to get someone's likes nuked!)
route 3 - Set it as a usergroup permission so likes can only be given out after a postcount has been reached.
Personally, I'd probably opt for 3 by default, but 1 would be ideal and 2 as a fall back.
Although I acknowledge 1 and 2 both have pretty significant data footprint requirements to enable these options. That said, who liked which post is currently stored, so it may not be too much harder to do 1 & 2 require.
So there are possibly three routes to take;
route 1 - limit a user to liking a single user's posts x number of times. Any likes given after that limit has been reached do not count. This would stop 2nd accounts be created solely to like-spam.
route 2 - cope with it through the admin system. If we can see a report of the users who have given the most likes to other users (i.e. how many times UserA has liked UserB's posts) it would immediately flag up any possible problem users. We could then investigate and see when the likes were clicked - this would help identify a user (say UserB) who has searched for UserA's posts and clicked like in quick succession. If we can indentify them, we could easily reset all the likes for the users concerned through the admin system. - So, this route in effect would be via the warning "abuse the system and the penalty is that all your likes get wiped out. (Of course you would have to know it was the same user and not someone else trying to get someone's likes nuked!)
route 3 - Set it as a usergroup permission so likes can only be given out after a postcount has been reached.
Personally, I'd probably opt for 3 by default, but 1 would be ideal and 2 as a fall back.
Although I acknowledge 1 and 2 both have pretty significant data footprint requirements to enable these options. That said, who liked which post is currently stored, so it may not be too much harder to do 1 & 2 require.