informative

When was the informative rating removed? I see it on a lot of older threads. Is that only for moderators and developers?

 

the 2019 "Informative Rating" incident

 

TL;DR, people abused the Informative rating by spamming it to the point where the staff members decided to disable it once and for all, since it became completely meaningless as a result of the incident. It's not coming back anytime soon.

The full picture is that in the early days of the forums, the only rating available was the Like rating. Then Agree, Informative, Funny, Awesome, and Useful ratings were implemented some time later. For many users who have been here long enough, those 6 ratings were the "standard" for several years until the staff members decided to experiment with certain ratings such as Dislike and Disagree one day. Those didn't last long, and so they were removed after a controversy arose. Shortly afterwards, the staff members also removed Funny, Awesome, and Useful ratings since they were redundant, while also adding a Staff Pick rating to be handed out by staff only. And after that, people intentionally misused the Informative rating, which led it to be disabled rather than being deleted (hence why you can still see Informative ratings on older posts).

Thus, the only ratings available on the forums today are Like and Agree. That's pretty much all you need to know if you weren't around on the forums several years ago. And similarly, you can no longer Like resources unless you are a staff member today, which again is another relic of the past along with profile posts and groups.

 

you have me interested