I am sorry! I just got on and was running through the threads on the RoadTest changes. I was liking and adding the "helpful" marks as I saw fit. I apologize for inconveniencing you.
Again, I apologize. I do not have my inbox linked to my email, thus do not get notifications in the same manner. I didn't need the points at all, but felt inclined to contribute my opinions. And again I apologize for the annoyance.
As I just stated I personally don't have my inbox linked to my email and didnt think about notifications being sent that way. I was trying to contribute my opinions with the community, but did not think or mean to cause such an annoyance. I will keep this in mind in future interactions with posts
I have asked before for the ability to disable the "marked as helpful" email notifications, I don't find them particularly useful.
I think this is really the crux of the problem and focusing on blaming an individual for using the site's functionality isn't particularly fair in my opinion, I can see that it's the site's functionality doing something which effectively spams people and there's no granular control over it. One of our developers, Dudley has already been tagged in this conversation elsewhere and may be able to chime in with a comment about how the site operates in this way and/or why though I'm not sure what customisation we can do about it.
The ability to disable "marked as helpful" notifications is becoming increasingly necessary because there is a lot more of such marking going on - and the points system encourages it.
I've said before that I don't think that marking as helpful is a useful feature itself - since there is no cost to the marker there is no value in the mark !! (I never mark things as helpful for this reason.)
You don't like the idea of racking up points by simply hitting a button a good deal of times... I know you're level 7 but if you did just a few more clicks you could achieve level 10.
In all seriousness, I agree with you. I feel at times that it is just used to rack up points as fast as possible but it really doesn't add much value to the community as a whole. I will say one point that goes against this. When you spend time writing a post or responding to a question, it's nice to get some appreciation for your time even if it is just that someone thinks you answered well or wrote a good blog.
I do think that it incentivizes better quality posts, as it effects not only the clicker but clickee. However, I do think that the "Not Helpful" button having some sort of negative reward would make this button more meaningful, but that introduces the possibility of abuse. And I do not believe that "with just a few more clicks you could be a level 10" really portrays the system correctly as you do not get the reward every time you mark a comment has helpful. Another reason me "spamming" you was not for the internet points. If anything I gave more internet points than I received (by at least 10 fold), I felt like saying hey I agree with you and think that this is a useful idea. But I do see where people are coming from with their dislike for the option.
