I also think it might be, especially since we one can do respect + excitement.
However, the 3+3+1 layout for 7 reactions looks really bad, so if we remove “thank you”, I want to add (or remove) another.
1 Appreciation
I like 8 total and don’t prefer to lose another besides “thanks”. So, I think we either swap “thanks” for “confused” (or another suggestion if you or others have one), or we keep “thanks” for now but at least switch it to a hand-clap icon.
@smichel17 I opened https://git.snowdrift.coop/sd/outreach/issues/7 for the tasks, want to claim that?
It’s hard-coded in the discourse plugin, so it’s not possible to change it via the discourse interface. There’s an issue about that here.
If we want to change it, we can modify the hard-coded string in the cloned retort repo (requires backend access, but we’re only doing it once); not ideal, but possible.
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We’re moving agree back to primary. So, that is gone from Retort. We can thus keep Retort at 6 or put the heart back there for some purpose…
Okay, I suggest we stick to 8 Retort emojis in this order:
— like
— Thanks!
\o/ — Yay!
— funny
— this-changed-my-mind
— tl;dr
— skeptical: needs more explanation/research/citations
— sympathies
Note that this means one row of various positive-acknowledgement and one row of more troublesome, nuanced reactions!
I thought about 
and “love” as alternate for the first one or other uses for . I think that could work, but I dislike the combination of and “like” and see more value in having a mild positive acknowledgement than having a “love” reaction. The super value to 
is that it’s the same icon as Retort button, so people can be prompted to click the Retort button when they want to get that reaction instead of the agree-reaction.
I hope we can really encourage people to mark that as appropriate. We don’t want cases such as where I got an “agree” on my personal intro post… that’s weird.
All that said, I could see — love as well or instead of the Thanks or Yay! reactions. There’s cases where love is appropriate…
One other useful-enough thing to possibly consider: 
… of course, people can post actual posts with emoji like and and tons more. The point of reactions is to avoid extra posts for the most common reactions and to prompt valuable reactions people might not mark as much otherwise. But if we want to explore having more than 8 reactions in Retort, I’m open to considering it.
Update: 9 reactions is 3x3 and looks fine. 10 is 5x2, and also looks fine enough. 11 is no good, of course. 12 is 4x3 and works but is the absolute limit to consider ever (really too much, overloading feeling).
I made a \o/ emoji, mostly for fun but we could use it if we want.
Here it is at emoji size:
Here’s the gimp source file. Discourse wouldn’t let me upload it as a .xcf*, so just remove the txt extension after you download: whoooo.xcf.txt (32.9 KB).
*I fixed this after in the admin panel but I can’t actually fix it for this specific file.
nice first version, but I don’t find the expression correct. The smile and eyes and relative size of the face doesn’t capture the same feeling as \o/ does. Here’s a tweak:
and xcf: w00t.xcf (33.0 KB)
addendum: I think the hands ideally would be either fist or spread fingers…
One more variant (then I get back to real work):
w00t2.xcf (26.5 KB)
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I edited my post above with suggestion for final setup but now I’m feeling again that we’re missing the key response (which almost deserves to be primary): “valuable post”
Basically, we want some positive acknowledgement / appreciation for the post itself, effectively “I appreciate this post”. That doesn’t mean I like it (it could be reporting a real problem) or love it or am thankful for it (it might not reflect much work, and I want to reserve the response for less common cases)…
This gets back to why I was encouraging “respect” because that’s similar to “appreciate” and the real goal of having a main acknowledgement reaction.
Brainstorming: 
nod or “mhm”
That would allow us to put “respect” back in, as a retort reaction (which could replace ‘like/agree’ or be in addition – more likely to replace if we go with 
as primary).
Note that we could also change the retort button icon.
Primary reaction:
— Appreciate
Retort reactions:
\o/ — yay
— haha
— changed_my_mind
— tldr
— skeptical
— sympathies
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So, we can change Retort emojis later with minimum hassle.
The set-in-stone thing is the primary reaction. Shuffling reactions where it would affect the primary is not okay. But other than that, we can do whatever with Retort:
- if we change the order: just changes the order for entering
- if we decide to change names, the old names stay in cases when they were used
- if we remove a custom emoji, the reaction shows the name and loses the image
- we could keep old ones but still turn them off in Retort going forward if desired
- if we replace one image with another but keep the name, all reactions are updated
So, overall, we can pretty freely tweak the reaction set as needed as we go!
misc extra note: I can retort-react to my own post, but can’t use the primary reaction
At some point I think it’d be nice to change 
to mimi/eunice with that gesture. Not in the immediate future, though.
Along with our choice of ‘appreciate’, this seems entirely appropriate.
Well since it seems the discusses purpose was more about the “TL” than the “DR” (perhaps you read it all but don’t think others will), how about an emoji-style icon of just the letters “TL”. Definitely better than confused icon.
Quite the necro, lol. Over in Custom emojis (esp. as retort reactions) (edit: moved here) we decided on 
and I’m happy enough with that.
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Similarly, a single-icon form of “ACK” (like in classic radio communications) would be pretty cool to me.
Edit: yeah slowly catching up sorry
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Brainstorming ideas for “agree” and “disagree” icons, with my new S Pen:
BTW yes I know it’s terrible
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Without having read that thread yet, my intital reaction is that while it does convey “too long” (in a funny, almost sarcastic “what is this, a newspaper?” way) - it does not convey the “please condense” meaning, which is more important.
More brainstorming
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I moved your replies to this thread, where they’re more on-topic.
I appreciate your interest in catching up on these discussions, and I like your specific suggestion — even just as a simple rename from tldr to shorter_please or something like that.
I also think there are much higher priority issues to resolve — the crowdmatching update and improving our ability to receive contributions from volunteers (the other thread you replied on) are two — so I don’t want to spend much time revisiting this right now.
Changes to retort reactions don’t apply retroactively (unlike the primary reaction), so it’s easy enough to change them at any time; we don’t need to get them totally right before the forum starts getting more traffic.
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