It’s not entirely clear how Settings > Other > staff like weight works. The description says “How much extra weighting factor to give staff likes.” The use of the word “factor” seems to indicate it’s a multiplier, and that to give no extra weight to staff likes would mean “1” should be entered. Is that correct?
It was a little tricky to find much information on how the likability of posts affects the post or a user’s experience. All I could find was that the relative number of likes can influence topic summaries. Anything else?
Based on that code, for each like a post receives from a non-staff user, the post’s score will be increased by 1. For each like a post receives from a staff member, the post’s score will be increased by the value of the staff_like_weight setting. Setting the staff_like_weight to 1 will cause staff likes to affect a post’s score in the same way as non-staff likes.
I wonder if there could be a bit more explanatory text under the setting to indicate this. An admin might miss the “factor” part, and enter 0 so as not to add weight, thereby removing any weight from staff likes whatsoever. A very minor issue, I admit
If I’m reading the logic correctly, the use of the term ‘extra’ in the description is incorrect. Without making any changes to the logic that Discourse uses for calculating post scores
How much weight to give staff likes (non-staff likes have a weight of 1.)
would be an accurate description of what the setting does.
The current description makes it seem that setting staff like weight to 0 would give staff likes the same weight as regular user’s likes, but what it would actually do is remove staff likes from the score calculation.
