AskMe to Recent Ac

November 9, 2009 11:00 AM

Could one's AskMe questions perhaps show up in Recent Activity?

As it stands, to keep track of your own AskMe thread, you have to manually check it through your general activity. Since questions seem to remain open for a very long time, it's possible that people can provide an answer long after the question has faded into the vaulted halls of memory.

Would it not be better if asking an AskMe question acted as if you'd posted in your own thread, thereby adding it to your recent activity and bumping it to the top whenever somebody replies?

Yea, would this not be a very shiny and well-behaved pony?

posted by Netzapper to feature requests at 11:00 AM (11 comments total)

Click on the "My Posts" tab in Recent Activity to see activity on your questions.

Posts and comments are currently separate spaces because performance in RA has historically been abysmal. There is a lot of data crunching going on behind the scenes to generate the pages there, and having both Posts and Comments together would take a few minutes to generate everything.

We might be getting to the point where we can revisit having these together on one page, but for now it's just a click away.
posted by pb at 11:05 AM on November 9

What pb said. I'd love this too as a feature, but RA is a grand nexus of pain in terms of complexity and performance, so making changes to it, particularly additions, is a more conservative process than tweaks to more stand-alone pages.
posted by cortex at 11:17 AM on November 9

grand nexus of pain

will try to work this phrase in to an essay soon. Thanks, cortex.
posted by milestogo at 11:30 AM on November 9

Or you could just comment in your question. Shazam!
posted by Plutor at 11:31 AM on November 9

You know, I don't know if this'll land with a huzzah or with a resounding thud, but I have to admit, I'm a bit enamored of Wikipedia's watchlist ... it would be quite nice to be able to 'watch' and 'unwatch' various threads, even if we have not participated in them.

For example, let's say I see an Ask Mefi hit the RSS feed about a really interesting topic -- but I go and there's no answer there yet. Well, I definitely can manually check back. I can even add the RSS feed to my reader and monitor it that way, and that's a wonderful improvement.

But since the Recent Activity is already such a 'landing page' for a lot of Mefites, and we can already manually remove items off it, it might be nice to be able to manually *add* pages to it, too.

I could even see, theoretically, a by-default-checked checkbox near the Post & Preview buttons that says "[x] Add to Recent Activity" -- so that by unchecking it, you could have the post not appear there.

Just throwin' that idea out there to let it float or sink. It'd solve the OP's problem, in that they could click this theoretical 'watch' button. (Or, like Wikipedia, you could perhaps have any post you create automatically added to your watchlist/Recent Activity ... )
posted by WCityMike at 1:55 PM on November 9

Favorites work like a "watch" button already. Recent Activity has a "My Favorites" tab where you can watch the latest comments on posts added to your favorites. We added that specifically so you could watch threads without adding a superfluous comment.
posted by pb at 2:09 PM on November 9

I would do that to watch my own posts but I think there is a stigma against favoriting your own posts.
posted by grouse at 8:20 PM on November 9

grouse, you can just click the "My Posts" tab to see activity on your own posts.
posted by pb at 9:05 PM on November 9

Yes, I know. But I hardly ever have posts so I'm not in the habit of doing it, while I am in the habit of checking My Comments and My Favorites.
posted by grouse at 9:16 PM on November 9

This is quite late but another thing that would be nice is an ability to watch AskMe questions somehow, for those questions that I'd like to read future responses to but don't comment in. I can see this creating a lot of extra load on the server, though.
posted by 6550 at 1:05 PM on November 24

6550, you can add the questions you want to watch to your favorites, and then click the "My Favorites" tab in Recent Activity to keep up with them.
posted by pb at 3:22 PM on November 24