Hi,
It's well known that Wikipedia is facing threats from other social networks and losing editors. While many of us spend time trying to make Wikipedia different, we need to be cognizant that what other social networks are doing is working. And if we can't beat them, we need to join them.
I've written a patch[1] that introduces a new feature to the Thanks extension called "feelings". When hovering over a "thank" link, five different emoji icons will pop up[2], representing five different feelings: happy, love, surprise, anger, and fear. Editors can pick one of those options instead of just a plain thanks, to indicate how they really feel, which the recipient will see[3].
Of course, some might consider this feature to be controversial (I suspect they would respond to my email with "anger" or "fear"), so I've added a feature flag for it. Setting $wgDontFixEditorRetentionProblem = true; will disable it for your wiki.
Please give the patch a try, I've only tested it in MonoBook so far, it might need some extra CSS in Vector.
[1] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/280961 [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/F3810964 [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/F3810963
-- Legoktm