Questions about the way Contact Activity Works.

April 11, 2008 9:17 PM

I have some questions about contact activity.

1) I have the Anonymous AskMetafilter account as one of my contacts, but when a new Anon question is posted it dosen't show up in Contact Activity in the sidebar. Personally, I would like it to show up; the whole reason I made Anon as a contact is so I could be alerted to new Anon questions, which I always love reading. I understand that filtering Anon questions from contacts activity was done on purpose. Do the mods see this as being preferable? If so, why? Could it be changed? Would other MeFites like to see this changed?

2) Why is 12 favorites the magic number for when a post and/or comment appears in contact activity? I'm not advocating for a change here; I'm just curious is all.

3) Following on from #2, let's say for the sake of argument that a post and/or comment gets to 11 favorites and then it kind of just stalls and dosen't get any more favorites for a while. Then, a month or more later, it gets its twelfth favorite. Would it appear in contacts activity then, or not? What is the cut-off period for a post or comment attaining 12 favorites to appear in Contact Activity?

posted by Effigy2000 to etiquette/policy at 9:17 PM (18 comments total)

1) Anon is a special case. We've discussed looking into making those available, maybe by default or maybe as an option, but volume-wise it's a firehose compared to normal contact activity even from the most prolific user. So while it might make sense to change it, we're a little more cautious about that.

2) We just picked 12. It's a nice threshold for enough-to-be-notable without requiring some sort of superhuman special case to make it happen. Could be tweakable, but it's kind of a question of how you figure what the better value would be, esp. with people already finding this or that aspect of the contact-activity sidebar too busy, etc.

3) I believe they appear in the list in sequence of datestamp of post. So if a comment or post gets its twelfth favorite long enough after posting that your sidebar has accrued a screen's worth of other items in the meantime, it'll just not show up. I don't believe there is a cutoff, so if you have very few contacts (or at least very little contact activity), I'm pretty sure a dozener will show up even if its a month later or whatever.

The reason for (3) is that it's really simple to do that way, is my understanding.

Matt and pb may be able to elaborate or correct my assumptions, of course. They're closer to the code than I am.
posted by cortex at 9:23 PM on April 11

1) Touched upon here.

2) I've wondered this too. Why not ten?

3) I believe that it appears, but it's not dated to the most current favorite but when the post/comment was made, so if it's a month or more, it won't show up on the sidebar unless you have a particularly stagnant sidebar. Many of you have missed out on my Noel Coward-esque wit because of this.

On preview, goddammit.
posted by middleclasstool at 9:25 PM on April 11

*blows smoke off of fingers*
posted by cortex at 9:36 PM on April 11 [2 favorites]

*blows smoke off of fingers*

Dude. Not cool. You're married.
posted by dersins at 9:58 PM on April 11 [1 favorite]

1) Yeah, consider the anon activity would be 4-5 posts per day, where most contacts only show up with new posts once a week at most.

2) it's 12 because we tried 5, we tried 10, and we tried 20 and the sweet spot was about 12.

3) I don't know what the cut-off is offhand, but it might miss very old stuff
posted by mathowie at 10:13 PM on April 11

Hey, smoke off fingers is an old family friend.
posted by cortex at 10:23 PM on April 11 [1 favorite]

*dances in, likes the look of the place*

Of course, it does show up here still. Maybe that page could be even longer or logged?

*snags a vodka, bails*
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 10:46 PM on April 11

Cool, thanks matt and Quick Draw Mc-cortex. Consider my questions answered.

FWIW, I like the idea of having a per-user option to allow Anon questions to appear in Contacts Activity. It'd be a firehose, sure, but no more than the several dozen "user x has added user y as a contact" messages that appear there everyday (which I know I can turn off but I don't mind, so please don't see that as a complaint). A little bit of notification of the daily troubles of Anon would break that up nicely, I think. I suppose that pony would depend on how many people wanted it though, yes?
posted by Effigy2000 at 10:51 PM on April 11

Hey, i posted it in the other new pony preference thread, but this is contact related also.

When you hit the edit contact button, it pops a new window, instead of target="_self"
posted by mrzarquon at 11:08 PM on April 11

(to submit your changes / confirm settings)
posted by mrzarquon at 11:09 PM on April 11

target="_self" is pb's nemesis.
posted by sveskemus at 2:42 AM on April 12

Maybe I am confused, but can't you use the anon's askme RSS feed?
posted by terrapin at 5:24 AM on April 12

2) We just picked 12. It's a nice threshold for enough-to-be-notable without requiring some sort of superhuman special case to make it happen. Could be tweakable, but it's kind of a question of how you figure what the better value would be, esp. with people already finding this or that aspect of the contact-activity sidebar too busy, etc.

Should be automatically adaptive based on the histogram of all comments' favorites. If more and more people keep joining Metafilter there'll be more favorites in the future and it will require adjustment.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 9:08 AM on April 12

Why is 12 favorites the magic number for when a post and/or comment appears in contact activity?

12 is a nice number. What have you got against 12?
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 9:46 AM on April 12

Twelve is almost bad luck!
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 11:25 AM on April 12

middleclasstool: "1) Touched upon here. Why not ten?"
Because some people just don't get the metric system.
posted by dg at 1:10 AM on April 14

Twevle has more factors than ten. Should the day ever come where we need to divide that magic number evenly, you'll thank us.
posted by cortex at 6:20 AM on April 14

where most contacts only show up with new posts once a week at most.

Apparently, I have chosen some of the most prolific and favoritable people as contacts, because that thing is constantly telling me about some new bit of awesomeness they have pulled off.

It would make me feel really inadequate if I were not so apathetic.

(Actually, I just view it as having the good taste to keep an eye on a couple of the interesting characters around here.)
posted by quin at 8:31 AM on April 14