I’ve been ‘liking’ posts with a thumbs up and others have been doing the same. However discourse doesn’t count this as a true like for the purposes of advancing users through trust levels, Understanding Discourse Trust Levels
It seems we have to be less restrained and use the heart option instead of just a thumbs up (unless this is somehow configurable).
We can change the icon from heart, which maybe us cold calculating scientific types don’t really get on board with. I would be happy to change the heart to something else. Perhaps a star?
There is a linked discussion about the effect of changing icons, but the results are very forum specific
I agree! 
or is more attractive than a 
What’s the benefits of “liking” a post? I usually never use “like” anywhere as I don’t want to be tracked from these. I guess there isn’t any tracker here but it’s easier to apply everywhere tan pick and choose.
As Martin alluded to above, it assists members to progress through the trust levels of the discourse forum. It is other members essentially saying what they post is useful.
In my opinion, the heart is an effective way to “like” something as it is used in other social medias as well (see Instagram or tiktok). So I would not see any problem with it. I prefer a heart to a star if I want to “like” something.
I think what could be very useful in the forum, is a way to let people who ask questions (mostly users) know that we have seen the question and are “looking into it”, without necessarily having to write a reply. This because sometimes questions need some time to be addressed and answered.
My suggestion for this would be the “eyes” icon → 
, with hovering which says something like “looking into it”.
There is a plugin which can be used to customise these icons. It is installed, so I’ve added the reaction as requested @atteggiani. Unfortunately the text is the name of the icon. I could add a custom eyes icon but name it something appropriate, like “looking into this”. Let me know if you think this is necessary.
Do we want to get rid of some of those reactions? 
is a bit random. If there are any people think would be useful I can add them, but they will undoubtedly lead to fewer people “liking” posts.
And the plugin allows to change the icon used for “Likes”. So this can be done easily depending on what people think. It does sound like is quite well used for like, so perhaps it is a matter of educating members as to it’s meaning.
We can also turn off the like requirement for TL advancement.
I think that looks good. Something better than “eyes” would probably be more understandable, but if that requires too much work I would say like this is pretty good already.
I personally think the ones that should be there are: 
and maybe 
Then if it’s possible, I would add a “+” option to select a custom emoticon if anybody wants to use another one.
https://cylc.discourse.group/ has gone the other way and shows only the heart icon for like with no other reactions available.
I like the idea of “looking into it” as an option, but it’ll need some explanation.
Perhaps we need something on good practices for asking questions and responding.
I didn’t know about this group! We should add this to ACCESS-Hive.
Sounds like a good idea. I have created a start here:
It is a wiki page, so feel free to edit it.
I have added a link to it on the Welcome Page.
This looks good, though I’m not sure that everyone will know what the working groups are.
No. I thought as I wrote it “Now I should write a page about the working groups”, but have they been signed off completely? For now I was going to leave as-is, but if there is scope to write a description of the Working Groups, what they are etc, then that would be great.
I’ve added a link to the empty working groups page on the ACCESS-Hive, so at least when that gets populated it will point to something that explains working groups.
I’ve added 
and 
to the reactions, as they are ones I’ve seen more on slack at least, and removed which doesn’t seem familiar to our community.
I have added a custom theme component that allows the text for emoji to be specified, and animates when hovering. I have installed it and added custom labels that hopefully better reflect the purpose of each emoji.
Happy to take feedback on the emoji and accompanying labels.