Comment thanking has been implemented in T249893, it's currently only deployed on the beta cluster.
It can be tested on the beta cluster: https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page?dtenable=1
Deployment sequence
| Phase | Wikis | Deployment date | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phase 0 | testwiki, pt.wiki | ✅ 29 July 2025 | Wikis where the ••• menu is already available by way of the Incident Reporting System |
| Phase 1 | All wikis that have usability improvements enabled (T379264) | ✅ 15 October 2025 | |
| Remaining wikis | n/a | Unless we explicitly disable the feature on a wiki, this will happen automatically when we enable usability improvements on remaining wikis | |
Tech/News
Phase 1: 15 October 2025
This week, volunteers at wikis where talk page Usability Improvements are already available by default (read: everywhere except wikis listed in T379264) will gain the ability to Thank a comment directly from the talk page it appears on. Before this change, Thanking could only be done by visiting the revision history of the talk page.
Feature overview
Quick summary of how thanking works with this deployment (via @DLynch in T366095#10865103)...
- See a comment you want to thank
- A ••• overflow menu appears next to the reply button on a DT page
- It contains a 🖤 Thank item, which you click
- The user who wrote the thanked comment is sent a notification saying that the comment was thanked, which includes the thanking user, the talk page section, and the comment id
- The public thanks log will now include an item saying that User1 thanked User2, but not giving any details about what exactly was thanked
Before this deployment, the only way to thank someone for making a comment would be:
- See a comment you want to thank
- Look at the revision history for that talk page
- Find the revision that created the specific comment you care about, presumably by looking based on the timestamp in the signature <-- this is the painful bit
- Use the "thank" tool in the history item
- The user who wrote the thanked comment is sent a notification saying that the revision they made was thanked, which includes the thanking user and a link to the diff
- The public thanks log will now include an item saying that User1 thanked User2, but not giving any details about what exactly was thanked
There's no exposure either way of exactly what was thanked, so although the comment you're thanking in the new method isn't immutable like a revision there's not any particular way to edit your comment to make it look like your thanker is endorsing something they didn't mean to. (We might want to be mindful about this in the future if enhancements were ever made to the thanks log, because there's enough data stored that we could decide to link from there to the revisions / comments that were thanked...)
🗄️ Archive
Tech/News: Phase 0
This week, volunteers using testwiki and pt.wiki with the Show discussion activity preference enabled will gain the ability to Thank a comment directly from the talk page it appears on. Before this change, Thanking could only be done by visiting the revision history of the talk page.
