More Inside

December 12, 2006 9:47 AM

A wee pony for the holidays: How about a "More Inside" option for the Blue, so that interesting posts like this one are not consistently derailed by people pissing and moaning about "too many paragraphs on the front page" or some other such useless pedantry.
posted by briank to feature requests at 9:47 AM (54 comments total)

You can fake [more inside] by immediately posting the rest as the first response.
posted by mecran01 at 10:04 AM on December 12, 2006

You want to encourage people to make long illegible link splooges?
posted by cillit bang at 10:11 AM on December 12, 2006

I really dislike seeing the page breaks on the fornt page, but the pissing and moaning is even worse. briank's wee pony is a good one.
posted by and hosted from Uranus at 10:15 AM on December 12, 2006

MetaTalk: Useless Pedantry
posted by evilcolonel at 10:19 AM on December 12, 2006

If we have two part posts, does that mean we can have a standard where every link on the front page has to be interesting in its own right and all the links to reference sites and other padding have to go in the "more inside"? Please say yes.
posted by teleskiving at 10:23 AM on December 12, 2006

> You can fake [more inside] by immediately posting the rest as the first response.

Unless you get too compulsive about testing the links in your illegible link splooge in preview, in which case somebody else will sneak in with the first post (which will be a snark about the incomprehensibility of your unadorned fpp, which the more-inside bit might [might] have cleared up. )
posted by jfuller at 10:27 AM on December 12, 2006

jessamyn and I had a debate about this recently. I wanted to do this last month or so and she pointed out it would encourage axgrindfilter because you could suddenly go off all kuro5hin-style with a 1,000 essay after your links if you wanted. By keeping things the way they are, she said we force people to get to the point and those that must go on use a first comment more inside.

I'm not a fan of line breaks on the front page either and would like to consider doing this, essayists be damned.
posted by mathowie at 10:29 AM on December 12, 2006

people pissing and moaning about "too many paragraphs on the front page" or some other such useless pedantry.

Don't be a jerk. It's not useless pedantry, it's an attempt to keep the front page from looking like an untended vacant lot.


I'm not a fan of line breaks on the front page either and would like to consider doing this, essayists be damned.

Excellent! As it is, the essayists are not discouraged, they just let it all hang out in public. Make them put it back [inside] (and maybe even zip up).
posted by languagehat at 10:36 AM on December 12, 2006

Can we at least remove the hard returns between paragraphs on that post? It does mess up the flow.
posted by mattbucher at 10:37 AM on December 12, 2006

How hard would it be to make paragraph spacing within posts smaller than the spacing between posts? I think that would go a long way to making multi-paragraph posts more readable.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 10:38 AM on December 12, 2006

that would go a long way to making multi-paragraph posts more readable

There is no reason for multiparagraph posts to exist. The front page of MeFi is not a literary magazine. If your post is too long to fit in one paragraph, by far your best option is to cut it down, but if you can't bring yourself to do that, put the overflow [inside].
posted by languagehat at 10:46 AM on December 12, 2006 [3 favorites]

seriously, i would say we should actually eliminate the ability to put linebreaks in all posts, if it weren't for the fact that I'm sure there are GOOD reasons to have them on occasion.

but we should completely eliminate the ability to put two consecutive line breaks in an fpp.

like this.
posted by shmegegge at 10:51 AM on December 12, 2006

n'th-ing in agreement that multi-paragraph posts need to be killed. If you can't do it without linebreaks you are doing it wrong.
posted by Rhomboid at 10:58 AM on December 12, 2006

I'm not a fan of line breaks on the front page either and would like to consider doing this, essayists be damned.

How hard would it be to put a character limit on the more inside box?
posted by nooneyouknow at 11:06 AM on December 12, 2006

hama7 FTW!
posted by AwkwardPause at 11:14 AM on December 12, 2006

Don't be a jerk. It's not useless pedantry, it's an attempt to keep the front page from looking like an untended vacant lot

Bullshit. It's about lording one's position within the community over others by redirecting comnmentary into stylistic quibbling.
posted by briank at 11:17 AM on December 12, 2006

I tend to share in Jessamyn's fears about a [more inside] feature, but I dislike the long, long posts on the front page as well. In short, I'm ambivalent.
posted by OmieWise at 11:19 AM on December 12, 2006

mathowie: "jessamyn and I had a debate about this recently. I wanted to do this last month or so and she pointed out it would encourage axgrindfilter because you could suddenly go off all kuro5hin-style with a 1,000 essay after your links if you wanted. By keeping things the way they are, she said we force people to get to the point and those that must go on use a first comment more inside."

You could solve this by having a limit on the more inside. Like, say, eight characters.
posted by Plutor at 11:25 AM on December 12, 2006

It's about lording one's position within the community over others by redirecting comnmentary into stylistic quibbling.

You know what? Style fucking matters. I am so very tired of people acting like it doesn't (see also: superscript). You may be a booger-eating mouth-breather who wouldn't know taste if it bit him in the ass, but many of us aren't. And if you think multiple paragraphs aren't ugly or antithetical to the purpose and general appearance standards of the front page, then fine, make that argument. But how you do something matters as much as what you do, and most of us make peace with that notion by the time we're fifteen. If you want to give the impression that you don't give a shit about shared real-eastate or user ease, then go ahead and do so. But don't act like the impression is the result of Mean People with their Unreasonable Standards trying to prove they are Better Than You.
posted by dame at 11:32 AM on December 12, 2006 [9 favorites]

Agreed, down with ugly posts.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 11:35 AM on December 12, 2006 [1 favorite]

dame, ftw. that comment should be on a meta sidebar, and new meta sidebar should be instated that consists of only that comment.
posted by shmegegge at 11:41 AM on December 12, 2006

Well, if strongly, put, dame.
posted by OmieWise at 11:45 AM on December 12, 2006

But how you do something matters as much as what you do

Agreed, which is why people posting off-topic comments about it in the blue is indeed "redirecting comnmentary into stylistic quibbling". The blue is not the place for it.
posted by and hosted from Uranus at 11:49 AM on December 12, 2006

If I ran the world, I'd put a hard character limit on posts, so what we currently have is a compromise between that and a "more inside" option. Brevity is hawt. Just do what you do in MetaTalk and put it in the first comment. The trouble has to do with mathowie and I feeling like we can't really, kosherly, edit a FPP besides removing white space, so posts that are otherwise good but way too long currently both suck and remain.
posted by jessamyn at 11:51 AM on December 12, 2006

mathowie: I'm not a fan of line breaks on the front page either and would like to consider doing this, essayists be damned.

Why not just make a line count policy then. Anything too long gets deleted. Sorry fellow, try again tomorrow.

dame: Style fucking matters.

Yes, but if you want to comment on it, at least hold off for a couple of hours. Shitting in the first ten comments is the worst of bad style.

If it isn't important enough to come back to later, well, there you go..
posted by Chuckles at 11:52 AM on December 12, 2006

I don't know, Uranus. On the one hand, long discussions of style belong in MeTa. On the other hand, mentioning it at all in a post, given how many people don't read MeTa, isn't a hanging crime, in my book. Regardless, discussing style is never quibbling, and that is what briank is arguing, it seems--not that it shouldn't be there, but that it shouldn't be.

See what sitting around waiting on authors can do to you, OmieWise? Plus all that bad parenting.
posted by dame at 11:54 AM on December 12, 2006

There is no reason for multiparagraph posts to exist.

Tripe.

Nonsense.

Bollocks.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 11:54 AM on December 12, 2006

By keeping things the way they are, she said we force people to get to the point...

I agree. In fact, I'd agree with a hard character limit.

It's about lording one's position within the community....

"Position within the community"? MetaFilter consists of two admins and a couple thousand people with too much free time. Which are you talking about?
posted by cribcage at 11:59 AM on December 12, 2006

I'm concerned that a hard coded character limit is problematic. There are lots of useful things you can do with limited space, but it takes up a lot of characters in html tags, and etc.

The trouble has to do with mathowie and I feeling like we can't really, kosherly, edit a FPP besides removing white space, so posts that are otherwise good but way t

Editing somebodies post is normally going to be a poor use of admin time anyway. Are you afraid that just axing them like you do with Dawkins posts is going to cause too many MetaTalk threads? It will cause some, of course, but once the reason and the solution are clear, I can't see the issue. Too many lines, fix your problem and post it tomorrow - nobody gets hurt. If the uproar over no image tags is tolerable, this will be nothing!
posted by Chuckles at 12:01 PM on December 12, 2006

I hate multiparagraph posts because they make the front page hard to parse. I'd be in favour of both a hard character limit on posts and having paragraph breaks stripped.

And if you're writing such an opus that you can't get the MI composed in time to make the first post just compose your post out of band. Presumably what ever computer you browsing the site on has a text editor available as well.

Armitage can you point to a post that contained paragraph breaks that wouldn't have worked just as well with the second thru what ever paragraphs as the first omment? The only ones I can think of are the post so badly written or require so much explanation that they don't contain a link in the first paragraph.

Chuckles writes "There are lots of useful things you can do with limited space, but it takes up a lot of characters in html tags"

Good point, the character limit should apply against display characters not tags.
posted by Mitheral at 12:04 PM on December 12, 2006

I say count your blessings. On boingboing today, they didn't bother putting any part of this behind a jump.
posted by Partial Law at 12:06 PM on December 12, 2006

How hard would it be to put a character limit on the more inside box?

Not hard, pointless.

Anyone posting too much [more inside] is going to be pretty determined, and you just aren't going to stop many of them. Haven't you ever seen discussion forums where the OP posts blanks in the first five comments, just to reserve the space :) (ya, ya, there are many good reasons for that practice..)

Anyway, once it is inside the thread, the rules are relaxed. A lot. And, that is how it should be. The government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation, and all that.
posted by Chuckles at 12:09 PM on December 12, 2006

Unless you get too compulsive about testing the links in your illegible link splooge in preview

Which is why you should test the links in your illegible link splooge "more inside" comment first in someone else's post. If you really are worried about beating the snarky first commentor, anyway.

And then when you accidentally post your preview test in the unrelated thread, we can all giggle.
posted by cortex at 12:14 PM on December 12, 2006

If I can jump in with a small amount of self-defense (and pity) - I wrote the entire post in notepad last night and, due to time contstraints, had to quickly transfer it to mefi this afternoon and intended to cut and paste the second chunk into a new comment. Obviously that didn't happen. It was careless and I apologize. I regretted it immediately after posting, but hoped that it could be fixed somehow.

[new paragraph]

I don't mind if people piss all over my thread for the content or ideas which they disapprove of, but its this type of bitching that kept me from posting for my first 1+ year of membership. I think the way things look is important, but not above the quality of the post. And having the second half of an in-depth post relegated to a comment in the thread certainly isn't aesthetically pleasing.
posted by SassHat at 12:18 PM on December 12, 2006

Armitage can you point to a post that contained paragraph breaks that wouldn't have worked just as well with the second thru what ever paragraphs as the first omment?

Sure, this one would read better as three paragraphs than it does now. If the last two paragraphs were [more inside], I'd have to wait for another page full of of whining about how there was too much / too little inside to load just to read the rest of the post.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 12:22 PM on December 12, 2006

The way things look is part of what makes up the quality of a post. If you will, a post's quality comprises its style and content. And honestly, SassHat, that post doesn't need to look like that and "I was careless" just proves my suspicions about bad style (you don't, in fact, care). Maybe instead of feeling bad about all the people being mean, you should work on feeling good about learning to structure. For instance, you could have on the front page:

The crash of Flight 1285. As with any disaster with unanswered questions, conspiracy theories abound. To this day, many of the questions surrounding this disaster remain unanswered. While the crash may never be fully explained, one certainty remains - for the families whose loved ones never came home for Christmas, the twelfth day of the twelfth month will never be forgotten. [more inside]

with whatever arrangement of links you wanted. And it would be more legible than the text dump that it is.
posted by dame at 12:41 PM on December 12, 2006

Armitage Shanks writes "Sure, this one would read better as three paragraphs than it does now."

This is all very IMO of course but it could have been split at the children link and the rest posted as the first comment. If you aren't sucked into the post by then you aren't going to be swayed by the rest.
posted by Mitheral at 12:50 PM on December 12, 2006

There is no reason for multiparagraph posts to exist. The front page of MeFi is not a literary magazine. If your post is too long to fit in one paragraph, by far your best option is to cut it down, but if you can't bring yourself to do that, put the overflow [inside].

What languaghat (and dame) said. In terms of readability, consistency, and visual appeal, the blue front page should look like AskMe, only with slightly longer FPP paragraphs. The best blue posts now get the main link(s) and "thesis" or essential preview into the first few lines. If some people decided that [more inside] was a license to bloat, digress, or grind axes, well, isn't that what the "breaks guidelines" and "noise" flags are for?
posted by FelliniBlank at 12:52 PM on December 12, 2006

due to time contstraints, had to quickly transfer it to mefi this afternoon

I don't understand why people cite time constraints or say "I was in a hurry" to explain away errors or sloppiness. Why is anyone in a rush to post? Can't it wait until a quieter moment when there is more time to be careful and thoughtful? This is not intended to pile on SassHat, but I see people say this every so often and truly don't get it.
posted by brain_drain at 2:24 PM on December 12, 2006

Tripe.

Nonsense.

Bollocks.

There is, of course, every reason to have multiple paragraphs in comments.

I was talking about front page posts.

I don't understand why people cite time constraints or say "I was in a hurry" to explain away errors or sloppiness.

Exactly. What is your fucking hurry? If you can't do it right until tomorrow, wait until tomorrow.
posted by languagehat at 2:29 PM on December 12, 2006

I wrote the entire post in notepad last night and, due to time contstraints, had to quickly transfer it to mefi this afternoon

I'd like to know more about the editorial deadline implied here.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:00 PM on December 12, 2006

how about a [less inside] option?
posted by localhuman at 3:15 PM on December 12, 2006

So first she read the post of the Verbose Linkorrhea Mefite, and that was too long for her; and she said a bad word about that. And then she read the post of the Wikipedia-superscripted Googlesearch-padded Mefite, and that was too messy for her; and she said a bad word about that too. And then she went to the porridge of the Succinct Mefite, and tasted that; and that was neither too long nor too messy, but totally hawt; and she liked it so well she favorited it all up: but the naughty Metafilter User said a bad word about the ensuing discussion, because it was not amusing enough for her.

posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:41 PM on December 12, 2006

There are three hundred and fifty-five stories about Suleiman-bin-Daoud, O Best Beloved; but that was not one of them. It was not the story of the Lapwing who found the Water; or the Hoopoe who shaded Suleiman-bin-Daoud from the heat. It was not the story of the Glass Pavement or the Ruby with the Crooked Hole, or the Gold Bars of Balkis. But, all things and personalities and usernames considered, it could just be part of the story of the Butterfly that Stamped.

- stavrosthewonderkipling

posted by jfuller at 5:14 PM on December 12, 2006

For people wondering about the "time constraint", I think it was becasue it's an anniversary post.
posted by and hosted from Uranus at 8:06 PM on December 12, 2006

Dame, you did a good job of editing down the post, but to me, it doesn't sound interesting anymore. I thought sasshat's writeup was fine, and I think the "more inside" field would be a great thing.

Exactly. What is your fucking hurry? If you can't do it right until tomorrow, wait until tomorrow.

Languagehat, I remember a time when you would have been much more helpful to someone making their first post. Would it kill you to offer advice with a modicum of kindness?
posted by taz at 9:16 PM on December 12, 2006

Yeah, sorry taz, I just wanted to grab a few sentences, because I couldn't read the gigantic paragraph of doom to find out why I should actually care. I'm sure there is a way to do it and make it interesting, too, though.
posted by dame at 7:04 AM on December 13, 2006

My goodness, I do believe dame has infected me with a wickedly powerful case of the vapors.

Normally I bridge the divide of form and function with a fair amount of ambiguity - on one hand I'm an artist and designer who has made a living (off and on) doing what amounts to making ugly masses of information pretty, and on the other hand I'm hardcore nerd known for consuming vast amounts of raw, unformatted information in nearly any form or media.


As brisantly righteous as dame may be presenting herself here (*pauses, fans self feverishly*) she's unquestionably right. Good formatting is an outright function of text. It's not some needless, stylistic fob to be thrown to the wayside at one's leisure.

The English language is a formal (but, yes, evolving) system. The formatting rules in themselves is a type of mark-up language, in which formatting important things can be expressed, with or without the use of actual words. Formatting and other stylistic methods lend themselves to ease of use, delineation of different points or modes - and so on and so forth until we're all quite thoroughly sick in the head and wanting a nice cold beer and a few moments of relative silence.

*returns to fanning and swooning, briefly considers playing Devil's Advocate for the express purpose of prodding dame into further and greater rants*
posted by loquacious at 7:22 AM on December 13, 2006

I can think of more fun things to do, loq.
posted by dame at 9:52 AM on December 13, 2006

> I can think of more fun things to do, loq.

Do you know, I've noticed that? Post a good, thick, bubbling, incoherent rant and some still, small Captain Bringdown of a voice always goes "That was just compulsive, that wasn't really all that much fun, you could have had a V8 or something instead."
posted by jfuller at 10:06 AM on December 13, 2006

MY RANT WAS NOT INCOHERENT.

*sips lemonade*
posted by dame at 10:56 AM on December 13, 2006

Oh no no no, never meant to imply that it was. I was just reflecting on the importance of style in general, as you say, and thinking how much effort I put into making my rants thick, bubbling, and incoherent--'s my style, alors, half beef, half ectoplasm, half top quarks--and wondering whether the same sorts of content I typically rant about might be more fun to rant about in a more pared-down style. A pale imitation of quonsar, maybe. Or maybe just lurking, but lurking filled with implied content. Don't think either one would ever call for a [more inside.]


fish in pants. [more inside]
posted by pale imitation of quonsar at 2:53 PM EST on December 13

...nope.
posted by jfuller at 11:56 AM on December 13, 2006

He he.
posted by dame at 12:30 PM on December 13, 2006

jessamyn and I had a debate about this recently. I wanted to do this last month or so and she pointed out it would encourage axgrindfilter because you could suddenly go off all kuro5hin-style with a 1,000 essay after your links if you wanted. By keeping things the way they are, she said we force people to get to the point and those that must go on use a first comment more inside.

jessamyn is wise. We should follow her counsel.
posted by dios at 12:34 PM on December 13, 2006