How We Removed 600,000 "Thank You" Posts to Boost Forum Content Quality

Efforts to Improve Forum Content Quality

We've finally been able to create a script to identify and remove those single-line "Thank you" posts. We just removed about 600,000 of them. Posting "Thank you" seems like a nice gesture, but it adds page after page of useless posts, and users have to browse through all those pages to identify any useful content. This is going to change—we now have a minimum word limit of 100 characters, and even after the post is made, it may get removed if it doesn't add to the discussion.

Moderators, please help in this effort—if you see any such posts, please remove them.

Regards,
Sid

You have taken the much-needed action, and I will also remove such posts from now on. In the past, I was not sure if I was within my rights to do it. Now that you have provided the "Appreciate and Validate" facility, there is no need to post "Thank you" messages. You may find that such posts will still continue in the Humor and other sections, which do not have the facility to thank otherwise.

Regards,

This is an automated process which we will keep improving as we discover loopholes or things we missed. We'll keep adding more features to help improve the quality of the posts.

Deletion of One-Liner or Non-Useful Posts

Yes, all moderators have complete rights to remove such posts. We should also keep an eye on people who repeatedly post the same general comments along with links. Remove such accounts using "delete post as spam." You should also remove all previous posts of such accounts by applying punitive action on all posts (check box) after checking the user's posts.

Regards,
Sid

You have put in a lot of effort in removing "Thank you" posts. Would you mind also removing unwanted "humor" posts? Let's aim for fewer but more meaningful posts on this forum to increase its overall value.

Additionally, would you consider reinstating shortcut keys and font color options that have been disabled for some time?

Thanks,
Dinesh V Divekar