Why can't I 'unlike' a post?

Currently, there’s a thing that is pretty annoying: you can’t dislike a message that you have previously liked.

IMO, it would make sense to allow that option. It’s possible on https://devtalk.blender.org so I guess, it’s just an option to enable on this Discourse forum.

Sometimes, we change our minds or our opinions about something, we deserve the right to click on this :heart: once more.

You can undo actions (liking, flagging etc) on a post for 10 minutes. That’s typically enough to realise you did something by accident.

Oh please, consider removing this limit (or extending it to 1 day, but imo, if I had to choose, I would remove it completely).

We can all change our minds and sometimes we can regret to have liked some posts.

For example, one can browse the forum at work, while shopping, while making love… (who knows…), and he/she can like posts without really paying attention to the whole message. And afterwards (another day) it might be interesting (important even) to remove that heart.

This is the first time it has come up since we launched 15 months ago, so I don’t think this is actually a problem.

I’ve regretted liking posts because they got edited or followed with shit posts by same member (sorry that’s the best description) and/or I had simply misunderstood the post.

Nothing bad enough to post a comment in the thread about my regrets but almost. Would have been nice to have the undo feature still active (hours or days later).

What harm would it do to take the timer off?

Thanks.

To be honest, I don’t know - which is why I don’t change defaults when one or two people asks me to :wink: . So I asked the Discourse team about this design decision:

Personally, I believe that if you can’t make your mind up in 10 minutes, you probably never will.

The point is to be able to un-like in this cases:

  • when you read a post quickly, you like it, then you move on and browse other threads (10 min are way to short if, later (the evening or the day after), you want to go back to that post to read it again, especially if you think that you maybe missed the meaning)

  • if, hours/days later, you change your mind about a topic and want to un-like the message
    It’s normal to change our minds, that can happen.

This is the Discourse response:

You can pretty effectively grief people by liking and un-liking forever. You could also get mad at someone and rage-unlike all their posts. In general unlimited user actions are dangerous as a rule.

For now, I agree with their position and I’ll stick to the defaults unless more people report in about this issue.

Perhaps the limit should be removed for posts / replies that have been edited?

If I am not mistaken, since the adoption of the GDPR, every european BlenderArtist user can ask for his/her right for data deletion, and these hearts (likes) are user data…

It would be much more convenient for BlenderArtist users to be able to un-like messages whenever they want, rather than “forcing” them to ask BA moderators for data deletion (here: hearts).