[feature] Add facility to say Thanks to launchpad users

[Simos Xenitellis ]

Currently, Launchpad records the contributions of members though the Karma facility.

It would be desirable to have a facility that other members can say thanks to Launchpad members for their work.

The profile page of each member should have an option visible to other registered members;
Each member can select to say Thanks and write a one-line comment for what they are thanking the person for.

[Diogo Matsubara (matsubara)]

I think we have such facility already. It's the contact any user feature, where you can contact a user using a form in their profile. For example, if you look at my profile <https://launchpad.net/~matsubara> you'll see a link to Contact this user right by the side of my first email address.

[Simos Xenitellis  (simosx)]

My view would be to be able to say Thanks in a visible way.

An issue with Ubuntu and getting more members to contribute is that there is little visibility to those who actually contribute to something significant.
Indeed, saying Thanks personally is nice, I would consider good to have a general facility, where the Thanks are visibly recorded.

For example, advogato.org has a facility where others rate you.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

I think this should be reconsidered. There's more to it than just the communication being physically possible, which you're right is possible at the moment.

The Answers application has a "Thanks, that answered my question" feature and in my opinion this works very nicely: it has both a functional aspect (that you know it's definitively resolved) and a social aspect, that both parties leave feeling incrementally better about stuff. I would like this in other places, such as bugs.

Although it's possible to contact users to thank them, this is not presented as something you might want to do in the ui, it has no visible appearance in the place where it happened, it might be seen as spamish, and it'd be a lot slower to type out a message and link it back to the place it happened.

I don't think tying this to karma or any kind of numeric score is useful: it opens up a risk of gaming and anyhow the point is the interaction.

If we added a 'thanks' feature with regard to bug fixes, ppas, projects, etc, it would give a very interesting emergent heat property.

I'm going to reopen this on the grounds that contact user doesn't really solve it.