Thread deletion marker pony request

March 4, 2009 3:25 PM

I can haz pony filter: Some sort of live marker of deleted posts, perhaps in live preview, would be really nice.

We spend time composing interesting, referenced, pertinent answers/ posts, and then formatting and posting them - only to find the thread has been baleeted in the interim. A marker of deletedness, perhaps in live preview, would save time and not leave posters with that "Uh, bugger. That was a waste of time and effort" feeling. Not a high priority, but it would be nice to have eventually.

posted by goo to Feature Requests at 3:25 PM (45 comments total)

Is this a good place to tell you that "baleeted" isn't a real word, and while it's cute and all, I think making it a tag is a little bit precious?

No?

Then I'll just say that while I lean toward the idea that this pony = feature bloat, I myself have been caught X+1 times by a response to a post, only to hit "Submit" and get the big "HA HA"</nelsonmunch>.

Then again, I tend to be verbose, so when it does happen, I assume that it's my cosmic punishment for lack of brevity.
posted by pineapple at 3:35 PM on March 4, 2009

Heh - point taken, tag removed. It is annoying though.
posted by goo at 3:37 PM on March 4, 2009

Haha - It'll never happen.
posted by frecklefaerie at 3:43 PM on March 4, 2009

pineapple: "Is this a good place to tell you that "baleeted" isn't a real word"

Is too! It's in the dictionary!
posted by team lowkey at 3:46 PM on March 4, 2009

I hope I didn't sound too mean, but really, it's just another comment on the internet. Taking the internet seriously and personally is the road to unhappiness.
posted by frecklefaerie at 3:52 PM on March 4, 2009

NO MY PRECIOUS SNOWFLAKE...

rosebud...
posted by GuyZero at 3:58 PM on March 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

goo said: "Heh - point taken, tag removed. It is annoying though."

You are a good sport.

And yes, it is annoying. It always seems to happen right at the point where you've crafted a very thoughtful, careful response and then *bloop!* gone.

Like telling someone how to deal with his girlfriend's outhouse ass-crack.
posted by pineapple at 4:00 PM on March 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

I think this would be really useful. At the very least it would be nice if comments to deleted threads did not disappear into the ether. It would be better if they were repeated back to us so we had one last chance to save them for our own use.
posted by grouse at 4:04 PM on March 4, 2009

I agree, this happened to me like 5 times within the last week. :(
posted by sixcolors at 4:25 PM on March 4, 2009

Once, I even had five or six paragraphs typed up in my reply.
posted by sixcolors at 4:28 PM on March 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

I have a question about the closed post above.

Does the "three comments before being allowed to post" rule only apply to the blue? Doesn't it make sense to make newbies hang out just a little bit before asking a question in AskMe or MeTa, too?
posted by CunningLinguist at 4:29 PM on March 4, 2009

Once, I even had five or six paragraphs typed up in my reply.

One time, I typed a reply THIS BIG.
posted by turgid dahlia at 4:37 PM on March 4, 2009 [2 favorites]

sixcolors: "I agree, this happened to me like 5 times within the last week. :("

You have a powerful counterargument there.
posted by Plutor at 4:44 PM on March 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

I think after you hit submit to a thread that was deleted in the interim, your comment should be displayed to you for 10 brief seconds, frozen in carbonite in an uncopyable form, and fade away like the April fools effect from last year.
posted by cashman at 4:49 PM on March 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

While the phenomenon in question is indeed annoying (it happens to mods, too!), it's not something I think we're likely to address as a feature. It's an edge-case situation, and the proposed solution would be at best a method of fractionally reducing without actually preventing the annoyance of time and effort wasted composing. Eh.

Does the "three comments before being allowed to post" rule only apply to the blue? Doesn't it make sense to make newbies hang out just a little bit before asking a question in AskMe or MeTa, too?

AskMe has a week wait before posting a question, period. We don't require comments because we don't want people throwing chatter into askme questions. Plus, most askme spam is in comment form anyway, as opposed to being in post form on the blue.

Metatalk is pretty much a grab-your-balls-and-jump-in deal. Sign up and post a thread right away, if you're so inclined and you're one of the very rare folks who actually finds Metatalk in the first week.
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:53 PM on March 4, 2009

Also, I pretty much make a point of copying any comment longer than two paragraphs before I hit post, on Metafilter and everywhere else. Mefi at least doesn't eat comments under normal circumstances, unlike way too many surprisingly high-profile sites. It's a handy survival skill.

And while I imagine this depends a bit on system and browser and the phases of the moon, hitting the browser's back button after the heartbreaking Oh No It's Deleted moment works for me as a text-recovery tool in those situations where I got lazy and didn't grab a copy.
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:56 PM on March 4, 2009

Metatalk: pretty much a grab-your-balls-and-jump-in deal.
posted by Pronoiac at 5:40 PM on March 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

Man, I hate that. It happens to me all the time -- right after I've furiously typed "baleeted!" while trying to beat the mods to the punch.
posted by Devils Rancher at 6:46 PM on March 4, 2009

Also, I pretty much make a point of copying any comment longer than two paragraphs before I hit post...

I'm glad I'm not the only obsessive about this. I think Safari is specially coded to crash most frequently when you've hit a "submit" button. I've gone a step further on occasion & copied the coments into a .txt file and saved it. I really should get a clue that suff I type on the internet isn't quite that important, though.
posted by Devils Rancher at 6:55 PM on March 4, 2009

What do you all do with the comments you've carefully typed up and copied as backup when the thread is deleted?
posted by Science! at 6:59 PM on March 4, 2009

I didn't know I needed to grab my balls before going to Metatalk. If I'd only known...
posted by marxchivist at 7:09 PM on March 4, 2009

What do you all do with the comments you've carefully typed up and copied as backup when the thread is deleted?

Well, since you have no access to something simple and generally effective like a handgun, remember the golden rule: it's down the road, not across the street. You could also increase the likelihood of success by locking yourself in a garage and switching on the car's engine: the fumes will help. Then, use what strength you have left in your arms to fashion a noose from twine or an old garden hose, and viola! This 3-in-1 approach has proven remarkably effective in the past. Good luck, let us know how it goes!
posted by turgid dahlia at 7:37 PM on March 4, 2009

So that's my problem; I have no balls!
posted by deborah at 7:37 PM on March 4, 2009 [2 favorites]

What you need to do, then, is politely ask any of your male friends or acquaintances if you can hold their balls while you post in MetaTalk. I'm sure that many of them will be happy to oblige, and will hardly charge you anything at all to do so.
posted by yhbc at 7:48 PM on March 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

Workaround: flag and ignore things you think should be deleted instead of crafting elaborate and cutting responses.
posted by freebird at 7:55 PM on March 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

On the few occasions I've lingered on a page long enough for something to go wrong and crash and take my reply with it (Fucking Facebook and their damn Javascript interface), usually it's because it's a difficult piece of work to compose and I waffled back and forth a lot about how to phrase things.

In many of those cases, I've actually found that restarting completely based on a better idea of what I want to say and how to say it worked wonders for my lucidity.

So feature, not bug.

(Except when the thread is deleted and no one gets to see that beautiful piece of wisdom anymore. Then you're just shit outta luck.)
posted by Phire at 8:15 PM on March 4, 2009

What do you all do with the comments you've carefully typed up and copied as backup when the thread is deleted?

You... have them.

Is this a trick question?
posted by Devils Rancher at 9:15 PM on March 4, 2009

Is this a good place to tell you that "baleeted" isn't a real word, and while it's cute and all, I think making it a tag is a little bit precious?

Is there some sort of meaning for "precious" that I don't know? I've looked through every possible definition of the word, and can't find any that makes sense in all of the instances that I see this usage. I see this shit constantly, and it drives me crazy.... the only thing I can assume is that you meant "precocious", you misspelled it, and your spellcheck fixed it to "precious" instead.
posted by Netzapper at 11:19 PM on March 4, 2009

"Precious" can mean something that's obviously contrived to be cute.
posted by transporter accident amy at 11:51 PM on March 4, 2009

Well. That's sad. I rather liked it better when it unironically meant "extremely cute".

I wish that answer made my blood boil less my assumption that there was a conspiracy to replace the spelling "precocious" with "precious". I thought it was a rare viral eggcorn designed to drive me fucking insane.

But, at least my blood boils in a different way now that I learn it's just another perfectly useful word that's been perverted to the pejorative.
posted by Netzapper at 12:06 AM on March 5, 2009

Is there some sort of meaning for "precious" that I don't know?

I believe he's using it in the twee sense.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 6:30 AM on March 5, 2009

Yeah, but see, when I use "twee" people complain that I'm being Eurotrash.

A girl can't catch a break.

Feel free to rewrite the sentence in a way that suits your particular vocabulary and linguistic needs, everyone. There might even be a GreaseMonkey script that will take any word used in a way you don't recognize and [convert it to something friendlier to your own brain].

(There was another phrase I wanted to use there, but I didn't want to confuse anyone who might assume that I was just trying to invent crazy-making language shortcuts.)
posted by pineapple at 6:55 AM on March 5, 2009

But, at least my blood boils in a different way now that I learn it's just another perfectly useful word that's been perverted to the pejorative.

OED:

3. Aiming at or affecting refinement in manners, language, etc.; fastidious, particular. Now usu. depreciative: over-delicate, over-fastidious; affectedly refined in matters of taste, language, etc.

1667 R. FLECKNOE Damoiselles a la Mode II. v. 35 Elevate your stile, and speak a Language which none may understand but the Pretious Cabal,{em}that which they understand not they'l admire. 1712 R. STEELE Spectator No. 306 {page}7 An apparent Desire of Admiration,..a precious Behaviour in their general Conduct, are almost inseparable Accidents in Beauties. 1887 G. SAINTSBURY Hist. Elizabethan Lit. (1894) iv. 145 Elaborate embroidery of precious language. 1894 Athenæum 25 Aug. 252/3 The employment of ‘curious’ in a somewhat precious sense at least three times. 1960 D. MACDONALD Masscult & Midcult in Partisan Rev. Fall 628 His first recognition..came from the English pre-Raphaelites, a decadent and precious group if ever there was one. 1990 Times 29 May 19/2 It's a bit waxy, talking about acting. To explain minimizes it. It's so easy to seem precious.

The usage starts to feel like the familiar-to-others pejorative style around the end of the 19th century, there. The perversion presumably also boiled your grandfather's grandfather's blood.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:06 AM on March 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Next, you're going to tell us there is no Pretious Cabal.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 7:30 AM on March 5, 2009

My grandfather's grandfather fucking hated irony.

And polio.
posted by SpiffyRob at 7:43 AM on March 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Next, you're going to tell us there is no Pretious Cabal.

Not since Marisa stole it.
posted by Spatch at 7:52 AM on March 5, 2009 [2 favorites]

He went so far as to pen the #3 charting pop hit of 1893, (Isn't It) Polioriffic.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:54 AM on March 5, 2009

and it's less popular follow-up, The Civil War Veteran Amputee Hop.
posted by jonmc at 8:11 AM on March 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Both narrowly edged out by The Cat Came Back (With Cholera), and Ruben the Rubella Rube.
posted by SpiffyRob at 8:15 AM on March 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

As sung by the popular duo Sam and Ella?
posted by Devils Rancher at 12:01 PM on March 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

who also gave us The Polio Polka.
posted by jonmc at 12:29 PM on March 5, 2009

Poliolka, surely.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:31 PM on March 5, 2009

They also scored big with Consumption Junction, my great-grandma wrote in her diary.
posted by pineapple at 12:32 PM on March 5, 2009

Grabbing your balls before jumping into MetaTalk is a good idea - it stops other people doing it for you, after which they will usually add a squeeze and twist.

So that's my problem; I have no balls!
Nobody said they have to be attached to you for you to grab them.
posted by dg at 7:18 PM on March 5, 2009

You offering, dg?
posted by goo at 10:56 AM on March 6, 2009