I think my AskMe question belongs in more than one category.

July 27, 2008 11:04 PM

I think my AskMe question belongs in more than one category.

Er, that's it. Just for the sake of saying it, really.

I'd like to hear from Computers and Internet people and I'd like to hear from Writing and Language people.

Not that I think my question will go unanswered, I'm just remarking on the first time I honestly felt that posting in two or more categories would be a good and perfectly valid thing to do.

posted by AmbroseChapel to Feature Requests at 11:04 PM (19 comments total)

I think this is the purpose of tags, which didn't always exist on MetaFilter. I wonder if Matt created AskMe again today, if he'd bother with categories at all. From my own experience, I use tags all the time to search for questions, but I never browse by category.
posted by knave at 11:13 PM on July 27, 2008

For what it's worth, I've often wished I could choose more than one category when categorizing my questions. But, so far, in my experience, the one-category-per-question thing has never been a detriment to getting good answers.
posted by amyms at 11:16 PM on July 27, 2008

jessamyn and cortex said not enough gain for the pain in this still open thread.
posted by Mitheral at 11:25 PM on July 27, 2008

I don't know about anyone else, but I don't even notice the categories on other people's questions. I have a few categories selected in My Ask, but I still browse the main page pretty regularly. I've wished for the ability to select more than one category, too, but I doubt it really matters.
posted by katillathehun at 11:27 PM on July 27, 2008

One of the best things MySpace Music ever did was allow you to choose three genre categories and string 'em together to better categorize your style of music. It's much easier to reflect reality a little more accurately by doing so. I am currently "Idol / Black Metal / Chinese Traditional", and I change those up every so often, as my music continues to evolve into new directions.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 1:26 AM on July 28, 2008

It must be summer. MeTa's in reruns again.
posted by Eideteker at 4:18 AM on July 28, 2008

I'd like to hear from Computers and Internet people and I'd like to hear from Writing and Language people.

Son, you don't want to be mixing with THEM.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:50 AM on July 28, 2008

Use tags to add more depth of meta information to your post. Having multiple categories is something that rarely comes up and would require a bunch of extra coding to implement so it's not something we're gung ho about.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:09 AM on July 28, 2008

I think my AskMe question belongs in more than one category.

Every post is a special pretty snowflake.
posted by chillmost at 7:27 AM on July 28, 2008

Every "special snowflake" comment is a tedious pointless cliché.
posted by nanojath at 7:34 AM on July 28, 2008 [4 favorites]

Every tedious pointless cliché is an AskMe question. AHHHHHHHH.

But, yeah, what she said. (Also, that thing where someone will very occasionally hector the poster in-thread for splitting hairs in the wrong direction category-wise? That's a paddlin'.)
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:40 AM on July 28, 2008

Pony request: Can we make all the one-to-one relationships one-to-many relationships, that would be awesome!
posted by Artw at 8:13 AM on July 28, 2008

Trivial too.
posted by smackfu at 8:33 AM on July 28, 2008

I think what the OP is after is access to the followers of one category who filter out the other, and vice-versa.

So, yeah, as emphatically un-gung-ho as y'all are about doing a bunch of new coding, I must insist that this is indeed something worth fixing. Eventually.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:35 AM on July 28, 2008

I think part of it is we don't really agree that it'd be a matter of "fixing" so much as just plain refactoring.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:48 AM on July 28, 2008

For that particular question, I think that anybody who professed an interest in computers but zero interest in language, probably wouldn't have been able to add anything.
posted by vacapinta at 8:49 AM on July 28, 2008

That's a paddlin'.

And after the paddlin'...? The oral sex!
posted by carsonb at 9:08 AM on July 28, 2008

Er, that's it. Just for the sake of saying it, really.

The cornerstone of any good MeTa.
posted by kosem at 9:17 AM on July 28, 2008

I almost never consciously pay attention to the categories that AskMe questions fall into, but I do use My Ask a lot which is directly tied to them.

Maybe a good way to make My Ask more tag friendly would be to have a little link next to the tags in a question, where clicking on it would automatically add that tag to your My Ask preferences. (I realize that adding tags isn't all that difficult, but making it dead easy by just clicking on a link might depreciate the need for categories.)
posted by quin at 9:29 AM on July 28, 2008 [2 favorites]