Hot Topics Request

August 13, 2006 2:26 PM

OK, now I rarely venture into this grey area here, so I may be way off base but I was kinda thinking - no matter how popular a thread becomes it sinks down and out just as quickly as people post new links/questions/dumb feature requests. I was wondering, would it be possible to have a separate page for MeFi, AskMe and MeTalk in which the threads were listed by most recent comment. This might give threads a bit of a longer lifespan and give an easy way to see what topics are 'hot'
posted by criticalbill to feature requests at 2:26 PM (22 comments total)

I'd ride the pony every day, Matt! And feed her, and brush her! use this feature.
posted by Zozo at 2:28 PM on August 13, 2006 [1 favorite]

Now, on further looking, I just noticed the little box in the right-hand corner of Mefi which sort of probably does exactly this for you, but still even so...its own page...
posted by criticalbill at 2:31 PM on August 13, 2006

I've often wished that little box existed for AskMe and MeTa...
posted by dersins at 2:32 PM on August 13, 2006 [1 favorite]

OK, at the very least, can you give AskMe/MeTalk that little box in the top corner that does this for MeFi and then I'll never darken these grey shores again without doing some very thorough checking first
posted by criticalbill at 2:34 PM on August 13, 2006

To be honest, I've completely ignored that box for as long as I can remember as "noise", never even noticing what it was.

I'd like to think this says something more about design elements than me being an idiot, but I could see good arguments for both.
posted by twiggy at 2:58 PM on August 13, 2006

Your idiocy is a design element! It's a win-win!
posted by cortex at 3:08 PM on August 13, 2006

i see longboats.
posted by quonsar at 3:09 PM on August 13, 2006

Then you're delusional, 'cause they're long gone.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 3:17 PM on August 13, 2006

long dong
posted by cortex at 3:20 PM on August 13, 2006

The non-bumpableness of metafilter is a design feature.
posted by Mitheral at 3:36 PM on August 13, 2006

bump.
posted by bob sarabia at 3:39 PM on August 13, 2006

burp.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 3:45 PM on August 13, 2006

If you're interested in following up on certain threads, I recommend using co.mments.com, where you can bookmark individual threads, and it creates an RSS feed. That way, if anyone posts a comment in any of the co.mment bookmarked threads, it bumps to the top of the RSS, and you'll see it, even if it's a thread that's lain dormant for a week or two and is far off the front page. They also have a bookmarklet for bookmarking pages, so you don't have to go to the co.mments.com site itself to bookmark the thread.
posted by bugbread at 3:50 PM on August 13, 2006

I'd love this feature, even with the potential for longboatage. It's not about following a specific thread, it's about having old threads that are getting regular comments get a spot on the sidebar.

There would be some sort of formula for ranking the oldtivity of threads, like:

if not on the front page (or second, third, maybe), then:

For activity,
(# of Comments in the last 24 hours) + (the # of comments in the last 72 hours divided by a constant (6 or 12, maybe))

For oldness, (# Days old) / (A constant, tweaked to make it work)

activity * oldness ≈ score

Another question is whether you'd want them listed by score, or listed by date (with a score threshold that is auto-adjusted to keep the # of featured threads down to a certain size.
posted by blasdelf at 6:36 PM on August 13, 2006

I never got a raedyn tiara. Now it's over.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 8:51 PM on August 13, 2006

Which, btw, is a fucking tragedy.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 8:52 PM on August 13, 2006

What is longboatage?
posted by criticalbill at 10:04 AM on August 14, 2006

Twenty bucks, same as in town.
posted by cortex at 10:17 AM on August 14, 2006

Ah, thanks for that
posted by criticalbill at 10:57 AM on August 14, 2006

I second the motion!
Threads that get one post after weeks of silence should not get bumped up to the top right away, though. Update it hourly, showing the N busiest threads (with a penalty for thread age, as noted above).
posted by jewzilla at 6:16 PM on August 14, 2006

Twenty bucks, same as in town. HAHAHAHAHA.
posted by Samuel Farrow at 8:25 PM on August 14, 2006

This is a new, novel idea and will surely be implemented.
posted by signal at 10:03 PM on August 14, 2006