there’s another aspect to all those praises…
often i find myself taking the time to post some valueable c&c - then i look at the thread a day later and after my reply there are 10-15 praise posts lingering around, so my reply which was supposed to help that guy out is literally drowned in this whole swamp of non-constructiveness
so my point is: i don’t think it’s enough to leave it to the artist to say if they want praise or not, because it kind of ruins the experience for every user that’s interested in learning and teaching something on these forums
you also have to consider this (this is important ): this "i only want c&c will not work anyway imo, because i think those praisers usually don’t read the text around the pretty pictures anyway (“sorry i haven’t read the whole thread, just wanted to praise your awesome stuff, you are my god”)
i know very well that there’s no practical solution to this yet, as you don’t want to modify the code, and even if you’d allow that…filtering out this sort of stuff isn’t possible
i guess you have to place those rules in a way everybody sees them, because as leonard already said - a lot of people don’t bother / haven’t even heard of them (on that new graphical banner? although this might take it a bit far…but hey - i guess most serious people in here would take that risk to stop all this drifting away into … whatever)