Where are you located? Where are you located? Where are you located? August 2, 2010 11:18 AM   Subscribe

Is it possible for the mods to edit anonymous posts on the Green?

Frequently anonymous questions generate an update from the OP transmitted via on of the mods. This is great. I notice, though, that there are often a lot of comments posted below the update from people asking for the information included in the update. I know that sometimes it's a case of people hitting "post" without previewing, but sometimes people read the initial question and fire off an answer without reading all the comments. (Not to encourage that, but let's face it, it happens.)

It seems that some of this could be avoided if the mods included an "update:" at the end of the original question, in addition to posting the update in-thread. That way people who come into an already active thread get all the information at one glance, and the thread is spared people asking for the same information over and over.

Is something like that possible?
posted by ambrosia to Feature Requests at 11:18 AM (38 comments total)

I think we may have made an edit like that once or twice when it was an exceptional case, but generally speaking it feels like a better plan to inline the updates in the thread where they occur so that the continuity of the responses is clear. Making a question a moving target by adding/changing the post content after the fact is not totally transparent for the reader.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:26 AM on August 2, 2010 [5 favorites]


Would be kinda cool if that were actually an optional field on the anonymous question form. So many of those questions end up being location-dependent, and there's no knowing if the asker will ever get around to telling the mods.
posted by katillathehun at 11:26 AM on August 2, 2010


I much prefer inline updates, there's no need to kowtow to people who don't read.

And frankly I don't feel bad about not participating in poorly-detailed anonymous questions. "I work in a job and I think I could do better. Thoughts? --anonymous"
posted by rhizome at 11:31 AM on August 2, 2010 [2 favorites]


people who comment without reading the thread don't deserve a special feature. this isn't yahoo answers, it's a community. if people even just scrolled through the thread it's obvious where the updates are since the mods indent them.

i'm in full support of the hesitation mods exercise in changing the original question (whether anon or not) after it's been posted.
posted by nadawi at 11:38 AM on August 2, 2010 [3 favorites]


Maybe there could be a way for mods to arbitrarily mark any comment to have that left-hand indicator bar that comments from the author have in non-anonymous threads, that way it would be easier to quickly scan the thread looking for updates. I don't think it's worth putting too much effort into, though; people who aren't going to check for updates, even on preview, still may not notice an update to the original post text, especially because it usually doesn't change.
posted by XMLicious at 11:45 AM on August 2, 2010 [2 favorites]


At this point we've fallen pretty firmly into the habit of blockquoting followup comments, so finding them on a quick scan should be trivial in almost all cases.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:58 AM on August 2, 2010 [2 favorites]


people who comment without reading the thread don't deserve a special feature.

This. I suspect a lot of these are also people who don't read the [more inside].
posted by shakespeherian at 12:04 PM on August 2, 2010 [1 favorite]


people who comment without reading the thread don't deserve a special feature.

Unless said feature is "a smack upside their rude heads." Especially the ones who flippantly announce that they haven't read the thread before responding. If you can't be bothered to read other people's words, why should anybody read yours?
posted by Gator at 12:08 PM on August 2, 2010 [2 favorites]


Unless said feature is "a smack upside their rude heads." Especially the ones who flippantly announce that they haven't read the thread before responding.

Maybe it's just me, but i'm seeing an uptick of that behavior lately.
posted by micawber at 12:18 PM on August 2, 2010


I don't think a little editorial note by the mod at the end of the original question (e.g. "note: further details supplied in-thread -- cortex") would be problematic. I sometimes skip by Anon questions entirely when it looks like the info is so vague as to be unanswerable, so a brief note appended to the question itself would signal to me that it might actually be worth it to read the rest of the thread, rather than just writing it off from the start.
posted by scody at 12:19 PM on August 2, 2010 [3 favorites]


I totally get the reluctance to alter the original question and maintain timeline integrity. There were two questions yesterday (1, 2) where an update from the OP added a significant piece of information or extra context, but there were still lots of comments below the update asking for the information provided in the update.

people who comment without reading the thread don't deserve a special feature.

I completely agree with this sentiment. My question wasn't so much about a special feature for people who can't bother to read the thread, but a feature for those of us who are reading the whole darn thread, to spare us from having to read queries that have already been answered.

But I'm perfectly happy with the answer from Cortex, so feel free to close this up.
posted by ambrosia at 12:21 PM on August 2, 2010


nadawi: “people who comment without reading the thread don't deserve a special feature. this isn't yahoo answers, it's a community.”

I agree that changing the question after the fact is a bad idea, but I think this constitutes a major misunderstanding of how ask.metafilter should work and how it ought to work. Reading an ask.metafilter thread before commenting is not ideal, and in fact causes more problems than it solves; I can probably come up with a dozen examples from the front page of ask.metafilter right now where some kind of conversation is developing, and where people are getting derailed from actually answering the question because they were distracted by something they read in the comments. It's actually hard to come up with a question where this doesn't happen; the question is asked, and then some commenter posts something interesting, strange, controversial or even just bold, and everybody after that feels a strong compulsion to respond to that comment rather than the question itself.

The difference between ask.metafilter and yahoo answers isn't discussion; it's focused discussion. Simple discussion is possible anywhere on the internet; we do the answers thing a bit better because we're focused on the question, and because we aim at answering it. Free-ranging discussion is very often a distraction that gets in the way of this focus.

I think ask.metafilter works best when people read the question thoroughly and carefully, and then skip to the text box at the end and give their answer. It really doesn't matter what anyone else might have said in the interim. The only thing that sometimes matters is, as has been said above, the occasional update; but even then, sometimes it's best to just give your initial answer, uncolored by the discussion in the thread, and then give a follow-up to your answer which takes updates into account.
posted by koeselitz at 1:03 PM on August 2, 2010 [1 favorite]


should does work and how it ought to work”
posted by koeselitz at 1:06 PM on August 2, 2010


people who comment without reading the thread don't deserve a special feature. this isn't yahoo answers, it's a community. if people even just scrolled through the thread it's obvious where the updates are since the mods indent them.

That's true, but the feature wouldn't really be for the benefit of the people who don't read the thread carefully enough. It's really for the benefit of the OP of the thread.
posted by Ashley801 at 1:26 PM on August 2, 2010


They were very accommodating with making changes to my anonymous question about trapping one of my testicles in the disc tray of my xbox.
posted by Elmore at 3:05 PM on August 2, 2010 [5 favorites]


Oh fuck.
posted by Elmore at 3:05 PM on August 2, 2010 [2 favorites]


Dude, no worries, you said it was a PS3 in the question so I don't think anybody'll make the connection.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:08 PM on August 2, 2010 [3 favorites]


Thanks man. The PS3 doesn't even have a disc tray, which makes it all the more embarrassing...
posted by Elmore at 3:49 PM on August 2, 2010 [3 favorites]


They were very accommodating with making changes to my anonymous question about trapping one of my testicles in the disc tray of my xbox.

What you want to do is shave it beforehand, and preferably use some petroleum jelly. Practice a bit on a PC, because the tray on the xbox is a tad strong.

Oh, wait, you mean trapping it unintentionally? Uhm... no suggestion there, then, other than trying to enjoy it. Ahem... or so I heard... from a friend... who is also the one who wrote the first paragraph... and he's more of an acquaintance really... and that wasn't my xbox by the way...
posted by qvantamon at 4:29 PM on August 2, 2010 [1 favorite]


Put it in the microwave first, but no more than 20 seconds.
posted by nomadicink at 6:29 PM on August 2, 2010


Is something like that possible?

My biggest hesitation is that if we change the question it's unclear who was answering before and who was answering after the change. It's much more clear, to everyone, if we just blockquote and inline the changes the way we do it now. We also have specific instructions on the AnonyMe page to include relevant details like location/gender/etc so I feel like we've taken some pretty proactive steps to get people to include this sort of thing.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:03 PM on August 2, 2010 [2 favorites]


Unless we're going to allow non anonymous posters to do the same this proposal would just seem to create a special case for anonymous questions. What would be better is if the mods, as part of their panel, could flag their update comments so they'd be highlighted like current OP's comments are.
posted by Mitheral at 7:12 PM on August 2, 2010


I guess I'm guilty of this, because I read a recent anonymous question then skimmed the bajillion comments to leave my own. I guess I should have read them all but I just didn't have time to read them all. Anyways, I had missed the additional info. from the OP posted by a mod so part of my comment was redundant.

It would be cool, if it's even possible, for the mods' comments in the thread on behalf of the anonymous askers to show a line beside them like it does for non-anonymous OPs in other threads.
posted by 1000monkeys at 8:17 PM on August 2, 2010


if you're skimming the question so quickly that you don't see a huge block quote section - well, maybe just slow down half a second instead of pb reprogramming the site.
posted by nadawi at 11:40 PM on August 2, 2010


generally speaking it feels like a better plan to inline the updates in the thread where they occur so that the continuity of the responses is clear.

I'm sure this has been hashed out before, but why don't you have an anonymous by-line on comments? A true anonymous follow up system would be hard, but it would be easy to make anonymous by proxy comments appear as if they came from anonymous directly.
posted by Chuckles at 8:07 AM on August 3, 2010 [1 favorite]


it would be easy to make anonymous by proxy comments appear as if they came from anonymous directly.

I think we're worried that anything that could be subverted might remove the overall feeling of anonymity that we're trying to offer. So a system like this would need to have a few parts

- verifying that the comments came from the original user
- masking the poster of the comment to ensure that it's not in any way visible to other users of the site
- some mechanism to allow this to happen repeatedly [possibly] in the thread and then anew in another thread.

Right now there's no explicit link to who asked an anon comment in the database itself. We sort of like this. We'd have to find a way to end run it in order to implement follow-up comments by anon and for the most part, us doing follow-ups hasn't seemed too time intensive for us to just do.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:14 AM on August 3, 2010


And even the notion that we would, as admins, just flip a switch while otherwise submitting an anony followup manually so that it shows up under a different byline is not awesome, in my opinion, much as I can dig the superficial attraction of the idea. Right now there's a clear indication of who was involved in brokering that proxy followup, which makes it clear to newer folks that there's an intermediary involved and makes it easier to followup directly if someone has a question or concern related to the followup comments.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:24 AM on August 3, 2010


Cortex/Jessamyn: then is there a way you can make it so that mods comments show up with the little line on the left side (excuse my lack of techie speak) so it at least stands out more, just like it would if the OP had posted the question themselves? I think that could be a quick and easy fix that would make followup comments stand out more.

I don't know if Chuckles was getting at this, but I took his(her?) question about making anonymous comments by proxy appear as though they came from anonymous to mean: can't the mods just create a "dummy" "anonymous" Mod account and post all anonymous questions under that account so that there is some consistency (and we get that little line thingy on the left side)? I think that would be the easiest and quickest fix.
posted by 1000monkeys at 12:25 PM on August 3, 2010


what's wrong with the blockquote? how does that not stand out?
posted by nadawi at 1:16 PM on August 3, 2010


I kind of struggled with the wording, actually, but I guess not enough :) 1000monkeys has it..

Nothing wrong with the blockquote. I was just wondering if there was a reason that it hasn't been done.. I mean, I can think of some arguments against it. For example, it is probably worth something to know that a mod has had an active roll. Users might get confused about where these anonymous comments come from.
posted by Chuckles at 1:22 PM on August 3, 2010


But I can also think of lots of arguments for it.
These word things... so complicated...
posted by Chuckles at 1:24 PM on August 3, 2010


then is there a way you can make it so that mods comments show up with the little line on the left side

Oh *I* see what you're saying. Technically I think that's doable, but my suspicion is that it might be more trouble than it's worth on our end.

However, I can say that whenever we post an OP update, we pretty much always use the same template [we have a little option under the search box] so that someone could mock up [or maybe we could, I'm not ruling it out but I think it's unlikely] that looked for something posted by cortex/mathowie/jessamyn that started with the words "From the OP" and did that style thingie to the comment. This is something perfect for Greasemonkey. The onyl reason I'm foisting it off that way is because I don't know if it's something everyone would want, but it's something easily configurable for certain people to have and others not to.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 2:05 PM on August 3, 2010


You got it, Jessamyn :) If it can't be done, no worries, don't go crazy trying to fiddle with it, but I just thought it might make things clearer and more consistent with the non-anonymous questions.
posted by 1000monkeys at 3:46 PM on August 3, 2010


I feel like we need a Greasemonkey Requests page. Oh look there it is now.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:46 PM on August 3, 2010


You techies with your greasewidgets and scriptmahoozits :-S Hopefully somebody who knows what that stuff is will figure it out for me and make a request :-D
posted by 1000monkeys at 7:22 PM on August 3, 2010


Ya, just the line thing is what I was suggesting.
posted by Mitheral at 7:43 PM on August 3, 2010


Especially the ones who flippantly announce that they haven't read the thread before responding.

Oh, I disagree -- I want people to say whether they read the thread or not.

I am of two minds on whether reading the thread is an absolute necessity. Sometimes the answers develop in a way that one person builds on past comments in a helpful way. But I do sometimes wonder how people's answers would differ if they hadn't read other comments first. When I'm one of the first comments, I answer more carefully, only after considering the question from many angles. It's much easier to get swept along by (or react against) the emerging consensus, but when I do that, I'm probably not fully grasping the complexities of a given question. And since I think answers do tend to differ, it's helpful to know if someone didn't read the thread.
posted by salvia at 11:56 PM on August 3, 2010 [1 favorite]


My process of answering a question on Ask (assuming it is a topic that I feel I can answer, or at least offer helpful information):

1. Read the question
2. Scan for answers already marked as a good answer
3. Scan for follow-up posts by the OP
3b. If there is a follow-up, read the answers above to understand the context in which it was posted
4. Read through the rest of the answers to make sure I won't repeat something for the tenth time and make sure that my answer fits the context of the entire thread. Generally I'll already have my answer ready once I've finished reading the original question.
5. Preview, edit as necessary
6. Post
6b. Post again to fix spelling and grammatical mistakes

Anonymous questions really make steps 3 and 3b harder, as I can't quickly identify follow-up-by-proxy posts -- especially if they are short enough that the blocking doesn't stand out. I rarely look at the name of the user who posted the question, which adds another layer of difficulty. 1000monkeys and Mitheral are proposing the same thing that I thought of as soon as I saw my first follow-up-by-proxy. The "OP bar" is an easy and recognizable way to indicate follow-ups in non-anonymous questions, it is silly and confusing to have a separate convention for anonymous questions.

The only argument that seems reasonable (aside from technical limitations) is that it shows official support for a convention that always seemed a little ad hoc in the first place, and that legitimizing it removes a disincentive to posting anonymously and adds extra work for the mods.

That being said, it's not a big issue. The follow-up is there, just a bit harder to find. But I think appending the OP bar to follow-up-by-proxy posts is a simple way to make them stand out.
posted by clorox at 2:04 AM on August 4, 2010


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