Been lurking these forums (and TO) a while. I read all seven pages of replies to give my response
I'm glad this is being dealt with. The entire situation is a balance between keeping the forums lively and healthy through good discussions and "incentives" for making quality posts such as likes while suppressing the floodgates for abuse of said incentives, but there was little restriction to what could and could not be done until now.
There are still some questions I need to ask. Maybe i'm overestimating the like counter volatility of this forum's community, but often times in TO there were large explosions of likes to a single person when said person made a high quality thread about a popular topic. I'm talking 50+ likes in a couple of hours to the OP, and a fiesta of likes spread across posters in the thread. What will be done, since the high density of people visiting the topic makes the like-fest inevitable?
With me, likes are rare. It takes an amazing thread that informed me lots about a subject to give a like if I didn't already forget likes existed. Some people have different thresholds and will like most reads that didn't waste their time.