I know this has come up before and been shot down...but I wanted to mention it one more time. The reason is, I recently joined another forum (no I'm not leaving) because I had a question and that forum had the "thanks" feature and once again it made me think how useful that would be here.
The forum I joined was a message board about German Luger Pistols (I'm interested in buying one and I wanted to learn about them)...the point of the site is for collector's to come together and help each other learn. It basically has the same "mission" as coin talk does for coin collectors.
Each post has a "thanks" button in the lower right hand corner which a member could click if they found the information useful. Their name then appears below the post showing their thanks to the poster (kind of like with the TOTW) but it can happen on the OP or any reply. Also, below the post count there is a counter that shows how many times that user has been thanked and how many times he has said thanks. That count to me is much more meaningful than a post count (which basically means nothing) because it reflects the content of the posts rather than the number.
I know we have the clinker award and the TOTW...but both of those are "awards" that I don't feel accomplishes what a thanks button would do. If someone won 10 clinker awards it would be a good thing, I'm not saying it wouldn't. But, if someone had been thanked 200 times in 45 posts it would show that they have had a large number of posts useful to others. Plus, it just takes a second to click thanks and doesn't alter the page or anything.
I just really like it.
Here are some screenshots that I took from that forum to show how it works for those of you who haven't seen this before:
