Easy Trips Down Memory Lane April 30, 2008 7:32 AM   Subscribe

On the front page sidebar, it says "1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years ago"—links to Metafilter, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 years ago. Could we please have this feature in Metatalk?
posted by interrobang to Feature Requests at 7:32 AM (37 comments total)

Actually it would be sort of nice if the front page version of this went back 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 too...
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:34 AM on April 30, 2008


Well, we do have random, which is like a funner version of the same thing.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 7:34 AM on April 30, 2008


"Random", as fun as it is, is not a version of "x years ago".
posted by Wolfdog at 7:41 AM on April 30, 2008


Funniness is definitely a plus. But yeah, I don't really have any particular objection to the timewarp thing.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:41 AM on April 30, 2008


it's just a jump to th... wait no I wont
posted by owhydididoit at 7:45 AM on April 30, 2008 [1 favorite]


Just change the date on your computer. I don't see the need for this feature.
posted by Eideteker at 7:54 AM on April 30, 2008


drive you in-uh-SAY-EE-AY-EE-AY-EE-AYYYY-ANNNNE
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:55 AM on April 30, 2008


I always describe the Euclidean algorithm as "It's just a jump to the left", complete with demonstration (in the form of jumping to the left). I have never had a student suggest that this should be followed with a step to the right. It's a little disappointing.
posted by Wolfdog at 8:03 AM on April 30, 2008 [9 favorites]


I'd like to know what's going to be posted next year on this date.
posted by netbros at 8:03 AM on April 30, 2008


What the hell was MetaTalk back in 2000? Look, the first meetup thread! Oooh, MeFi Mail was a project 7 years in the making! And don't forget MetaTalk for Dummies:
What's the difference between MetaFilter and MetaTalk?
posted by hobbes to MetaFilter-related at 12:53 PM

...

Wendell's right, it's a great place to masterbate.
posted by mathowie at 8:43 PM on March 29
posted by ALongDecember at 8:03 AM on April 30, 2008 [4 favorites]


Because sometimes grudges die hard.
posted by Sailormom at 8:05 AM on April 30, 2008


"Random", as fun as it is, is not a version of "x years ago".

What? Random is exactly a version of "x years ago."
posted by dersins at 8:22 AM on April 30, 2008 [2 favorites]


Alice: "I would like to see what the posts were like 5 years ago to the day."
Bob: "Here is a randomly selected post, chosen with no attention to date whatsoever."
Alice: "That's not what I asked for."
Dersins Bob: "It's a version of what you asked for!"
posted by Wolfdog at 8:32 AM on April 30, 2008


I like it when interrobang asks for things in MeTa. I want to give them to him.
posted by Jofus at 8:32 AM on April 30, 2008


I very much like this suggestion. On the downside… there was no MetaTalk post for May 1, 2000. Actually, looking at just May, there were days in row without a post!
posted by tellurian at 8:38 AM on April 30, 2008


Insofar as x is assumed to be an integer, Wolfdog is right.
Insofar as x is assumed to be an arbitrary number greater than 0.5 or so just for nostalgia's sake, dersins is right.
Insofar as entertaining responses to feature requests go, Matt is my hero.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:42 AM on April 30, 2008


New Feature No year, so I don't know when the comments were made, but looking at the months, I have a sneaking suspicion they weren't current (or even of that year).
posted by tellurian at 8:48 AM on April 30, 2008


Insofar as entertaining responses to feature requests go, Matt is my hero.
When I pointed out that some feature in Jobs barfed on the latitude and longitude in my profile he suggested, in so many words, that not living there would be the most immediate (and only forthcoming) solution to the problem.
posted by Wolfdog at 8:50 AM on April 30, 2008


Heh!
From May 8, 2000:
I'm also thinking of doing a "my metafilter" that would let you collect threads you like all in one place.
That's probably a few weeks away, as I'm working on a couple other projects...
posted by mathowie at 2:26 AM on May 9 [+] [!]
posted by tellurian at 8:55 AM on April 30, 2008


Wow!
From May 9, 2000
how about I setup announce.metafilter.com and use it as a place to announce new projects (I assume it will be seldomly posted to)
posted by mathowie at 7:43 AM on May 9 [+] [!]
posted by tellurian at 8:59 AM on April 30, 2008


I made a quick script for this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 years ago
posted by Plutor at 9:01 AM on April 30, 2008 [2 favorites]


Although dead links abound on the archives of the front page, the shelf life of stuff here in Metatalk is, rightly so, about 2 weeks. Anything older than that is either fixed or ignored.
posted by Dave Faris at 9:26 AM on April 30, 2008


Plutor, I must admit. I fell hard. 4 times.

Well played.
posted by pearlybob at 9:29 AM on April 30, 2008


I too would like this. And no, "random" is not even close to a version of it, nor do I find it as much fun.
posted by languagehat at 11:12 AM on April 30, 2008


I find random to be somewhat fun -- this post has a zen koan like quality to it -- but in various side tangents I discovered that cortex has over 1,000 comments mysteriously missing from the archives. WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO HIDE
posted by waraw at 11:34 AM on April 30, 2008


By "over 1,000" do you mean "under 100", or are you using some crazy New Math shit with different properties for subtraction?

That said, that is a little weird. I wonder if it's a undeleted-vs-total thing? Or something else. I'll bug pb.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:43 AM on April 30, 2008


Just for the record, I no longer believe MetaTalk is a great place to masterbate (or masturbate). These days, I prefer Projects - much less crowded.
posted by wendell at 12:01 PM on April 30, 2008


Odd. At the time of posting, there was a discrepancy of about a thousand comments. Honest. New math or no. However, now the discrepancy seems down to about 13. Which itself is significant.
posted by waraw at 12:38 PM on April 30, 2008


Things are improving; pb has been tooling around. I think the key discrepancy that may or may not remain (depending on whether there's a slick adjustment to the query that we can make) comes from comments that were left in metatalk threads that were nuked before we got metatalk doing handling proper stay-in-the-db deletions.

So I probably left 13 comments in metatalk threads that were later nuked from orbit, in other words.

Another interesting thing: trying to access an out-of-bounds page of results now just displays the first page instead. We might want to change that to actually redirect to the page-1 url, though. Hmm.

I maintain that you are crazy about your math, though, and somehow carried or didn't carry a digit in the thousands place when you initially made your complaint.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:59 PM on April 30, 2008


Wow, sybilline ("what" from ALongDecember's comment) may have compacted the most amount the weirdness into the shortest MeFi history, one MeTa post and one MeFi comment.
posted by Kattullus at 1:52 PM on April 30, 2008


Found this via Random.

May 29, 2000

In the next design iteration of MetaFilter, it might be nice if on the front page there was some indication that a thread had been added/updated in MetaTalk. I'd wager a guess that at least half the 985 (eep!) members don't even know this section exists.
posted by alan to feature requests at 8:43 AM (2 comments total)
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 1:57 PM on April 30, 2008


I think this is a bad idea, because it would make it clear that both the random and the x years ago function would bring up the same stupid shit, no matter what.

(Really, I'm for the idea, but I'm just worried that the realisation that we have been having the same bitchy conversations for eight years now would kill the best part of MeFi.)
posted by dg at 2:18 PM on April 30, 2008


That's where the cheerful, zen-like denial comes in, man.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:20 PM on April 30, 2008


Denial I can do. Zen, not so much.
posted by dg at 2:54 PM on April 30, 2008


Speaking of old MetaTalk stuff, what in the world was all that ZippityCrap about? (off to the wiki for me)
posted by Stewriffic at 4:35 PM on April 30, 2008


Funniness is definitely a plus. But yeah, I don't really have any particular objection to the timewarp thing.

Yeah, I think we should do it. And then we should do it again.
posted by trip and a half at 7:49 PM on April 30, 2008 [1 favorite]


Now i miss naxosaxur.
posted by schyler523 at 9:36 AM on May 1, 2008


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