They're all talking about me behind my back...

April 7, 2009 3:01 AM

Is there a way to figure out who linked to a specific comment?

Occasionally, when I'm ego-browsing my own history, I'll find that I've received new favorites on old comments. I'm sure most of the time it's just someone happening upon the thread and coming across that comment, but at least once it was because someone specifically linked to a comment I had made. I managed to find the link in question manually that time, but I'd love to find a general solution.

The only thing I can think of is a reverse Google lookup, but it doesn't seem to work (and narrowing it down with the "site:" qualifier doesn't help). Is there something I'm missing here, or an alternative way to accomplish this?

I'm not asking for this as a pony, necessarily. My own motivation is way too selfish for that. On the other hand, having this built into the site somehow (as an asterisk link next to comments, for example) might be a nice way to, for example, let people know when they've been called out on MeTa... although I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing.

posted by Riki tiki to Feature Requests at 3:01 AM (8 comments total)

cortex once mentioned that he uses the post or comment ID in the local search to see if there are any recent links to that item. You might give that a shot.
posted by pb (staff) at 3:18 AM on April 7, 2009 [1 favorite]

Oh, awesome. Sorry, didn't come across that thread when I searched for what I thought were logical keywords for this.

Thanks, pb!
posted by Riki tiki at 3:21 AM on April 7, 2009

(and cortex)
posted by Riki tiki at 3:22 AM on April 7, 2009

I think there's a greasemonkey script that sorta tracks things like this, actually. Yeah -- it's Metafilter Why Favorited: "Adds "why?" links to old stuff in Recent Favorites that were newly favorited. Links to a search for the URL, which will hopefully show you a link from another comment."
posted by inigo2 at 5:14 AM on April 7, 2009

What pb mentioned about what I once mentioned. It's more reliable than Google.

I didn't know about that greasemonkey script, but that's pretty cool.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:46 AM on April 7, 2009

I like it when my fans dig into my catalog and check out some deep cuts. Don't get me wrong, I'm still doing my best work, but I'm like Dylan. Each different phase of my career has been an evolution. Some people could be a fan of early ND¢, but might not care for mid-career ND¢. So for anyone out there who is wondering what all the fuss is about ND¢, bear in mind that just because you might not "get" current ND¢ (or "golden age ND¢", as I'm confident it will be known) doesn't mean that you have to miss out on my work completely. Dig a little deeper. It's worth it.
posted by ND¢ at 8:09 AM on April 7, 2009 [3 favorites]

Yeah, that script works really well.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 8:37 AM on April 7, 2009

Google Advance Search.
posted by blue_beetle at 11:20 AM on April 7, 2009