Pony request: notification when a certain tag is used

February 8, 2006 1:48 PM

PonyFilter... Would it be possible to get a notification either as email (probably hard to do) or on the my comments page when an ask.mefi or metafilter post uses a certain tag. [more inside]
posted by drezdn to Feature Requests at 1:48 PM (10 comments total)

We all have an expertise in some field, but it’s easy to overlook questions that we might be the right person to answer. It would be very useful either through email or the my comments page to be able to see if anyone has made a post with a tag we are looking for. Say you’re an expert in “Foo” instead of keeping your eye peeled for posts about foo, you could just check you’re my comments page and see when someone has tagged something foo.
posted by drezdn at 1:48 PM on February 8, 2006

Use an RSS reader and the RSS feed for the foo tag. Better yet, you can convert the RSS to email.
posted by Plutor at 1:51 PM on February 8, 2006

What about just having an RSS feed of posts tagged with foo? Such a thing might already exist - admittedly I have no idea.

I imagine Mathowie wants to avoid high volume notification emails... as a guy who runs a web server and a few sites myself (one community site, though not as popular as mefi) I find that sending boatloads of emails becomes pretty server intensive and high risk (due to overzealous "spam filters")...
posted by twiggy at 1:52 PM on February 8, 2006

I was aware of mathowie's anti-email stance. The RSS solution is a nice one.
posted by drezdn at 2:05 PM on February 8, 2006

subscribe to the RSS. I have all mefi posts tagged with "art" and it's great. I keep seeing posts I missed on the front page.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:08 PM on February 8, 2006

Do those RSS feeds include AskMe posts? The ones I tested did not.
posted by apple scruff at 2:17 PM on February 8, 2006

Ask MeFi tags have their own address, like this:
http://ask.metafilter.com/tags/apple/rss
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:36 PM on February 8, 2006

maybe the pony could be transmorgrified into making a Bloglines/My Yahoo/.. button more obvious on each tag's page. low cost, less filling, tastes great together.
posted by kcm at 2:44 PM on February 8, 2006

Ah. I thought that was the case but I tested out http://www.ask.metafilter.com/tags/apple/rss instead. Love this feature!
posted by apple scruff at 2:49 PM on February 8, 2006

Is there a way to include wildcarding in the RSS feeds of the tags? Foo*, for example?
posted by jonson at 6:35 PM on February 8, 2006