Reactions are a low-pressure way for members to engage with site content, which is especially important in new communities.
Because they’re currently disabled by default, admins may incorrectly assume that these reactions are not possible at all, and then perceive this as a missing feature while evaluating Discourse during their trial.
Discourse Reactions is a popular feature; even though it is disabled by default, its been enabled manually by admins on a good chunk of our hosted sites.
We also thought it was time to do this since the new post reaction menu rolled out by @davidb has greatly improved the experience of viewing reactions on posts:
The upcoming change will gradually roll this out to all sites like other upcoming changes. Admins who do not want reactions on can still disable them, our end goal is to not force reactions on for everyone forever.
Hmm, this is what I would use to describe Boosts, not reactions. Is there a timeline on when Boosts will become a core feature instead of a plugin? For the use case mentioned in the post it seems to fit perfectly.
No timeline yet, this work isn’t very high priority at the moment. Long term we would like to have a more coherent story around likes, reactions, and boosts, perhaps combining them all into one plugin, but we aren’t quite ready for that yet.
Historically we’ve been quite hesitant to “mess with” existing sites, as it was very hard to tell whether admins had turned things off intentionally or they are just keeping the default because they weren’t aware of it. Changing defaults also used to be a bit painful from a rollout perspective.
Now, with upcoming changes, it becomes far easier to do these kind of rollouts in a low-risk way where admins are easily informed of the changes before they occur, and still have the opportunity to opt out of these features.
Turning this on automatically in the recent update broke some things, because the heart button on my site is “thumbs up” icon (using this official theme component). Suddenly, when people clicked the thumbs up, a heart started appearing on the left site of the post footers.
I was confused because I didn’t know that Discourse Reactions had been installed and automatically enabled, so I went into the settings to try to figure it out what was going on, and I saw a setting for default that said “heart”. I flipped it to “+1”, but just as I hit the save button, I saw a note underneath that strongly recommend that people don’t change that setting:
I tried to change it back and it wouldn’t let me. The red error message said something like “heart” not found. Not knowing how bad the damage was, I restored from a backup that I had made right before updating, which turned it all into a 40 minute ordeal.
I don’t want a heart icon to be the default icon on my site, so I hope there aren’t plans to force that change. That’s the main thing preventing me from trying it.
