What is the upvote button do

Is it your intention to replace the current forum with this Feed as the only navigation available in time?

You should have access to it right now. Just click on "Feed" in the navigation menu.

I love cats, I love every kind of cat. Sorry I'm thinking about cats again...

I may have to give you my new google voice number to call.

Yeah, add me to the growing list of people who are confused as to why a new "Upvote" button is even needed when we already have a "Thanks" button which is doing the exact same thing.

For that matter, why are the Report and Infraction buttons so tiny and hard to find? They could be combined, (as few people know the difference), and made just as large and obvious as the "Thanks" button. If the admins were really serious about getting rid of the nonsense, this would be a no-brainer, and if we actually got rid of the spam, (in seconds, not hours), then the remaining threads would in fact have (some) value, and there'd be no need for any "Upvote" buttons.

In that same line of reasoning, since 88% of this site's visitors are not logged in, why not make the now-stunningly-obvious "Report" button available to any visitor? This should increase the spam reporting eight-fold, which would at least trigger the auto-hide mechanism far more quickly, until a human is able to attend to a given post. I can't see much downside, as I strongly doubt that non-Members are going to behave much differently for this particular reporting behavior.

Speaking of eliminating the spam before it became visible, how about setting the search engine spidering robot configuration so that threads would only get indexed by Google, et. al., after the second post in a thread, and/or if they lasted, say, three hours. This would have minimal/zero impact on desired search engine traffic, but the weekly get-your-ex-back-with-voodoo nonsense wouldn't get their phone numbers into Google's index (at least via WF).

tl;dr: We have a Thanks button; we don't need an Upvote button. We do need a much better Report button.

It looks to me like manipulation. The Op in that thread isn't involved with PIP any longer on the WF, I believe I saw her mention because Freelancer closed the PIP thread on WF when they took over. How an old thread can have ANY upvotes is beyond me, since they predate the Upvote button. If there is deliberate manipulation going on, the whole Upvote concept is contrived and completely useless. Sounds to me kind of like promoting content that used to be good because of a lack of current good content. Just my impression.

This reminds me of when Freelancer first took over, they proposed to have chosen posters posting contrived posts. That was panned, or downvoted by the members who saw the suggestion, but who knows whether or not they did it.

It shows to me that the problem is with the quality of members rather than with the site burying old content and it not being able to be found by new members. New, valuable content should be produced daily on this site, but the overwhelming amount of posts are spam and posts that are by people so lacking in English skills, you can barely stand to read them. Tight moderation is what is needed to get rid of the garbage so that good content can be found. Problem is, many of the experienced marketers who created that good content are long gone.

I've always distrusted popularity contests. It goes back to the mid 70's when I stopped paying attention to the Top 40 music charts. i wasn't going to buy a record (remember them?) just because everyone else was buying it, and the stuff I did buy very rarely made the charts. Even if it did, i bought it because I liked it, not because it was on the charts.