To be honest, I'd get rid of every single "leaderboard" feature. Every feature that promotes competition between the users that has no relevance to the forum's topic is potentially harmful to the community. While we are definitelly not going for an iron fist kind of moderatorship, at the same time I don't think we want people spamming useless or badly thought replies just because they wish so much to increase their messages count. I also don't agree with the complete negation of even trying to speak about your own or someone else's likes, they are a thing that does actually exist and we cannot give people a feature to promote a specific person's grade of posts quality and then completelly prohibite people from even speaking about it.
To me, this feels like the only rational response. If you don't make it a competition, people won't treat it as a competition. The ability to like posts, in itself, is not the problem. Making it significant outside of tracking people's opinion of an individual post
is a problem. Contained to only how it relates to a post, discussion of it would even be useful. Someone saying "I have 1500 likes" is just trying to win a popularity contest, but someone saying "
My post has 1500 likes" may actually be making a valid point about the amount of support their ideas have. While being popular certainly isn't the same as being right, in a limited context it can be a very useful thing to consider...for example, in seeing where popular opinion lies on whether a given suggestion would be wanted by the average Terraria player or not.
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EDIT: I should also comment on the fact that
who likes a post can be as important, if not moreso, than
how many people like it. For instance, a suggestion thread being liked by someone with no manners, grammar, or spelling skills is pretty certain not to matter as much as if, for example, Cenx were to like it. Not entirely sure that needs to be said, but it's often helpful to make sure everyone is on the same page.}
The post count however, is an excellent method of seeing how much an individual contributes. The only flaw in that system, short of people posting in suggestion threads simply to boost their count, are Forum Games, RP threads, and Social Groups. Just the topic; and this is only an example; of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has a tendency to whip people into a posting frenzy, and thus, increasing counts in that fashion.
I wouldn't say that's necessarily true either. If someone makes a lot of short posts amounting to "I like this,
Support." or "
No Support, that's dumb." they will have a lot of posts, but they may not really be
contributing anything. Even if there is more to their posts than that, someone who gets into a lot of pointless arguments, or makes unhelpful statements that are only tangentially related to the topic being discussed, will be able to amass posts more quickly than someone actually making insightful, researched, and well-reasoned posts. Also, there's a bit of bias in your reasoning. You list Forum Games, RP threads, and Social Groups, as categories that shouldn't be considered as "contributing" to the community, but isn't that just a little bit elitist? Those sections are a part of the community too, and the people who frequent those threads surely appreciate the involvement of others who participate. Maybe, rather than excluding certain sections, what is needed is to add a Breakdown page, that shows not merely the total posts a user has made, but how many of them were in each section of the forums.
While it might contradict a bit with what I said earlier, if a tight reign
must be put on the likes system, it could even be put to good use. Likes are, technically, a measure of a post's quality. At least, they can be if people are free to use them, and not capped to prevent "excessive liking". Tracking something like the average likes per post could help to identify where people's contributions are most appreciated. Though, I am leery of suggesting that, since it gets back into "popularity contest" territory.