We can haz favorites categorization? March 2, 2011 6:12 PM   Subscribe

PonyFilter: Can we filter our favorites by topic?

It would be great, if I'm in a music mood, to scan through all my music favorites, or if feeling lovelorn, to check out AskMe relationships I've favorited, and so forth, without having to sort them mentally.
posted by xenophile to Feature Requests at 6:12 PM (26 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite

That would be great.
That or tagging.

And while we are at it, a pony riding another pony:
In the "Add Contact" form, replacing the 20 choices of relationships with tagging.
posted by bru at 6:30 PM on March 2, 2011


If this pony gets implemented, I want my cut of the profits.
posted by Phire at 6:41 PM on March 2, 2011


Yeah, we need to do tags on favorites and we've kicked around ideas for it. Nothing has been tested or implemented and it's a pretty major change, so I'd say it's on the someday pile.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 7:11 PM on March 2, 2011


Nothing has been tested or implemented and it's a pretty major change, so I'd say it's on the someday pile.

As I understand it this request is for a much smaller change than what has been discussed previously. This would be a way to view favorites sorted by the existing metadata—category and tags on the posts, not a new mechanism for adding tags to the favorites themselves.
posted by grouse at 7:49 PM on March 2, 2011


That would be entirely awesome.
posted by arnicae at 7:58 PM on March 2, 2011


grouse, without you being able to self-categorize your own favorites, it'd be to the whims of whatever someone tagged their post. Here's a classic example: some people tag posts about moving pictures with "film" while I prefer "movies". If I looked up every "movies" post I favorited, it would miss those tagged "film".

I'd rather tag them myself, which would also mean I could tag comments I favorite as well.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 8:16 PM on March 2, 2011 [4 favorites]


I once spent hours going through my favorites trying to find some comment about a job I'd wanted to read about later... would've loved this pony. :3
posted by biochemist at 8:32 PM on March 2, 2011


I would vote for this pony.
posted by not_on_display at 10:04 PM on March 2, 2011


Great idea; I hope this happens. And I like the idea of it being My Own Private Pony(ho).

(Not a pre-defined set of categories/tags, but rather tags I write myself.)
posted by heyho at 11:35 PM on March 2, 2011


grouse, without you being able to self-categorize your own favorites, it'd be to the whims of whatever someone tagged their post. Here's a classic example: some people tag posts about moving pictures with "film" while I prefer "movies". If I looked up every "movies" post I favorited, it would miss those tagged "film".

I actually did a semester-final project for a graduate comp sci class on exactly this problem - identifying synonymy in tag clouds. Short version: It's not impossible but it's really hard to do it enough to be trustworthy, and it requires a pretty dense level of tagging to find co-occurring tags (eg, film and movies both show up next to hollywood frequently. Though it's a lot more involved than just that.)
posted by Tomorrowful at 12:55 AM on March 3, 2011 [1 favorite]


This is what I remembered mathowie talking about implementing, in the favs/bookmarks meta last week. Those of us who want to follow up on something to help other mefi members could just add a to do tag.
posted by cashman at 4:49 AM on March 3, 2011


I thought that was rejected because it was recreating delicious? Am I thinking of something else?

I'd love this. I have a pile of favorites I made with the intention of being able to find them later, but in reality it's easier to find older comments/posts with google..
posted by cj_ at 7:33 AM on March 3, 2011


I guess I'm missing some crucial distinction. I took in the request as "hey, let me somehow be able to organize what I click, so that when I come back to it later it is useful". Rereading that previous post I guess the asker did specify that they wanted it separate from favorites, but honestly if you can click favorite and then tag it as "readlater", I can't imagine the asker wouldn't consider that a solution.
posted by cashman at 8:08 AM on March 3, 2011


Am I thinking of something else?

Nope, you're right, we tried to put this at the top of the to do list several years ago and it was too ambitious along with everything else we wanted to do at the time. I think we could scale back our perfect design for this and have something that isn't as nice as delicious but still lets people add tags and view favorites by tag. This feature is big enough that we should probably think about it in versions instead of as a fully realized application.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:21 AM on March 3, 2011


I thought that was rejected because it was recreating delicious?

Do you know of anyone who regularly saves Metafilter comments in Delicious (or Pinboard)?
posted by John Cohen at 10:59 AM on March 3, 2011


I've done it multiple times. I wouldn't say I do it regularly.
posted by grouse at 11:01 AM on March 3, 2011


True story: I got a phone call (an actual phone call) from an ex-mefite who didn't like having one of his threads (tagged as "funny") in my Delicious bookmarks.
posted by roll truck roll at 11:43 AM on March 3, 2011


I've done it multiple times. I wouldn't say I do it regularly.

Have you done it enough times to notice that the link for a comment often doesn't go to that exact comment? Through some coding quirk, it often goes a bit above or below the comment, making it look like you've bookmarked another comment.

Favorites, by contrast, make it completely unambiguous which comment they apply to.
posted by John Cohen at 11:47 AM on March 3, 2011


Favorites Pony!
posted by galadriel at 11:48 AM on March 3, 2011 [3 favorites]


And I like the idea of it being My Own Private Pony(ho).

"I really wanna tag you, man... Well goodnight, man... I fave you though... You know that... I do fave you."
posted by NoraReed at 12:25 PM on March 3, 2011


Have you done it enough times to notice that the link for a comment often doesn't go to that exact comment?

I checked a few of my bookmarks and do not seem to have this issue. Can you give an example?
posted by grouse at 12:36 PM on March 3, 2011


Have you done it enough times to notice that the link for a comment often doesn't go to that exact comment?

I can also not recreate this. Could you give an example?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 12:55 PM on March 3, 2011


I appreciate that favorite tagging is a rather large undertaking, but I'd be happy with the ability to sort my AskMe favorites by category. Surely this wouldn't be that hard? I have favorited almost 1500 things, almost all in AskMe. 1500 is unwieldly to go through in the current system, but not so many that being able to sort by category would actually be very useful. I brought this up the last time we had this discussion, and pb seemed somewhat open to the idea. I'd link to it but I'm on my phone right now.
posted by malapropist at 3:03 PM on March 3, 2011 [1 favorite]


Here's your earlier comment malapropist. Yeah, I still like the idea.
posted by pb (staff) at 3:16 PM on March 3, 2011 [1 favorite]


We just added sorting favorites by category for Ask MetaFilter and MetaTalk. Once you choose either of these sites, you should have the option to narrow further by category.
posted by pb (staff) at 3:26 PM on March 10, 2011 [2 favorites]


Oh hey, I didn't catch this until now. Thanks so much pb! Wow, my very own pony. I promise I'll take care of it and ride it every day.
posted by malapropist at 12:46 PM on March 19, 2011


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