Combating Like abuse

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.
 
Maybe an addon system that makes a user have to use a captcha type of form in a pop-up overlay under the conditions of:

If user is not in ("exempt user groupIDs") &&
Liking 10 posts of ("X"=userID ) within ("Y"timeblock)
Liking 20 posts of (any registered user) within ("Y"timeblock)

then disallow_likes for ("Z"timeblock) && sendmessage from admin notifying of situation/warning

If a user persists in making what any specific admin would consider "like-spam", a further feature of a system like this could be :

If userID has had disallowed likes ("I"instances) then move to "like_ban" usergroup

or some variation of that....I have no clue how hard something like this would be to do but it might solve some peoples problems. I don't really care if it get's implemented however personally. I just wouldn't want anything built into the like system in the core releases that can hinder liking as I wouldn't discourage it personally and for that reason would consider it bloat where some users can use it. Some thing like this would have to be made as an addon.
 
I am not worried about instances where someone signs up with second accounts just to pad "likes". Nobody I know has time for that, and it's not important. The only thing I'd be concerned about are some overzealous members who "like" everything. I think it depends on the membership also--different age groups or types of topics may lend themselves more to the types of members who would abuse it.

I guess I'm saying that I'm not losing sleep over it.

We did have an issue with post counts on the big board I still run, but we dealt with that by changing permissions for that forum section to not be included in post counts. Members got mad, a few threatened to quit...and here it is several years later and last I heard, they were all still active and posting.
 
LOL, 'like spam' !!

Kier, don't say I didn't tell you this would happen !!

PS: Anthony Parsons, that term 'likeaholic' is as hilarious as 'like spam', this is what I was doing simply to prove a point to Kier, and guess what happened then....

I was like spamming to show that one could get a live link back to their profile simply by liking every post out there, so the solution is to give forum owners the ability to keep likes without the live link, this would be an option only, forums that want to keep the live link could.
 
Just another idea to throw into the pot and let stew:

Perhaps an option could be added that would allow us to set a minimum message character count for a like to 'count'. An admin could set the character count at, say, 150. If someone likes a message that contains more than 150 characters, the like is awarded to the poster. If a message of less than 150 characters is liked, the like would display on the message, but the poster wouldn't be awarded the like.

This obviously wouldn't discourage likeaholics, but it would limit the likes easily gained from "lol" posts and such.
 
Unfortunately there's nothing you can do about it.
As soon as you introduce any kind of ranking system or awards you will get this sort of behaviour.

It's almost as bad as those who post things like "This" or "+1" or "I agree" just to increase their post count.
Which ironically is what the Like system is supposed to prevent.
Actually that is not true. You will always have people try to game any kind of ranking system but, for instance, Reddit.com does an excellent job stopping gaming of their system.

Sure, you might not want to dedicate time into an advanced algorithm to combat Like abuse, but it can be done.
 
Mikel, I like the concept of your idea but then "quality over quantity" comes to mind.

IMO, if this were implemented it would be an optional and selectable setting. One admin might set it to 150 characters, another might set it to 5 characters, and yet another might choose not to use this at all.

Judging by the flow of this thread, the ultimate solution is probably a layered approach. This would just be one of the layers available.
 
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