It depends on the community. The need to draw a line between (analytical) Voting and (personal) Liking is how this plugin proposal came into being in the first place.
We’re gonna be testing Feature Voting here on Meta, and in the context of this community we definitely want to keep the concept of Votes separate from Likes, because Votes behave differently, most importantly:
- Can be retracted at any time
- Much lower max-cap than Likes (also separate from Likes*)
If we kept the concept of likes throughout the forum, except they’d behave differently in #feature, I think this would confuse users way more than having two distinct points systems. I can definitely see how the uniform “Upvote” concept would make sense on your forum though, and that’s your prerogative.
* Actually @joebuhlig, I guess the way the plugin currently works, if I hit my Like limit for the day, that would effectively prevent me from casting any further votes as well, right? Shouldn’t be a big deal as users hardly ever hit their Like caps, but worth making note of in a “Known Issues/Limitations” .