What percentage of FPPs have [more inside]?

January 6, 2012 1:20 PM

What percentage of FPPs have [more inside]?
posted by Trurl to MetaFilter-Related at 1:20 PM (24 comments total)

Are you wanting to include the thousands of posts that were made with a link on the front page and the first comment (or several subsequent comments, often in y2karl's case) serving to expand the post without actually using the then-unimplemented [more inside] feature? If so I think you just have to go back and count them. Sounds fun!

And by FPP do you mean just on The Blue? What about AskMe? (Has AskMe always had that feature?)
posted by carsonb at 1:27 PM on January 6, 2012

This would be a pretty easy db query; don't think there's any way to calculate it from the current infodump files, though on my todo list is a post character count file that would provide counts broken down by individual posting form fields, so eventually that'd provide a route to DIY calculation.

Worth noting that we did some retroactive more-inside work at one point in askme, hence many questions that currently have a MI section were originally a post and a first comment. I dont know if we did similar work for posts to the blue; I'm guessing not but it's something to mind if someone gets up to some datawankery.

Also, I am pleased to note that my phone has figured out that datawankery is a word. Though that will probably lead to some sort of embarrassing autocorrect situation down the line.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:32 PM on January 6, 2012

Back of the envelope calculation using the site search says 2749 out of 111342 (2.4%). Contrasting this with a Google search for the bound phrase "more inside" with duplicates removed and you get approximately 42,300 out of 111342 (38%). So the answer is in there somewhere and cortex or FishBike could give you a more granular idea of the actual number.

If you've just got math questions about the site, you can just drop them in the contact form.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 1:32 PM on January 6, 2012

Cortex: these comments mean nothing without a picture of your new haircut.
posted by kate blank at 1:44 PM on January 6, 2012 [3 favorites]

Any trending on the cutesy "of course, there's much [more inside]"? My gut tells me that there was a stronger policy against it before and that it's proliferated in recent (years?)--but that doesn't seem to be borne out by a quick look at the current headlines on AskMe.
posted by Admiral Haddock at 1:46 PM on January 6, 2012

That's actually something we'll edit to fix, because it totally doesn't work in RSS readers and just looks broken.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 1:47 PM on January 6, 2012

I would say the cutesy thing is actually close to extinct these days, compared to when we first started seriously grumbling about it a few years back. I don't believe it'll ever completely go away because it's the sort of easy joke people can come up with independently, but I used to fix a lot more of them than I do these days.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:52 PM on January 6, 2012

Any trending on the cutesy "of course, there's much [more inside]"? My gut tells me that there was a stronger policy against it before and that it's proliferated in recent (years?)--but that doesn't seem to be borne out by a quick look at the current headlines on AskMe.

Speaking as someone who has not been away from the front page for more than 12 hours at any time in recent memory, I literally can not recall the last time I saw one of those. If anything, I would say it was going extinct rather than proliferating.
posted by Trurl at 1:55 PM on January 6, 2012

Speaking as someone who has not been away from the front page

I see it more on the Green, but as Cortex and R_N note, they seem to clean it up afterwards, which may explain why I don't see it now that I'm paging back on the past couple days' posts. I seem to visit the Green every couple of minutes during the workday (efficiency be damned)--I may be passing by in those few golden minutes before the mods come in and make everything right.

Or I may just simply be going completely monkey-ass crazy. Ask yourself, Trurl, are you feeling lucky? Are you feeling lucky with my monkey ass? Alternatively, since it's Friday, and I'm feeling frisky, you may also ask yourself whether you want to get lucky with my monkey ass.

Of course, there's [more inside].
posted by Admiral Haddock at 2:08 PM on January 6, 2012

Looks like we have 102,208 posts, and 15,399 with a non-zero-legnth "more inside" section. That gives us 15%.

However, "more inside" wasn't introduced on MeFi until September 6, 2007. So if we include only posts since that date, we have 42,243 posts and 15,399 with "more inside". That gives us 36%. If you only look at 2011, we had 10,912 posts and 4,101 with "more inside". That's roughly 37.5%.
posted by pb (staff) at 2:11 PM on January 6, 2012 [4 favorites]

Yeah, I should say that to the degree that it happens at all these days (and mostly when it happened back in the day more often) it's pretty much an askme-only thing.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:15 PM on January 6, 2012

If you've just got math questions about the site, you can just drop them in the contact form.

Can as in should?

I suspect I wouldn't have gotten all these angles on the question in an e-mail reply.
posted by Trurl at 2:23 PM on January 6, 2012

Speaking as someone who has not been away from the front page for more than 12 hours at any time in recent memory, I literally can not recall the last time I saw one of those. If anything, I would say it was going extinct rather than proliferating.

I see it ALL THE TIME on the green. It drives me crazy.
posted by two lights above the sea at 2:24 PM on January 6, 2012

Flag it as HTML error or something, we really do remove the plays on words when we see them. People who say variants on "special snowflake details inside" or whatever, not as much.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 2:30 PM on January 6, 2012

There's more variation in potatoes than in snowflakes, for what that's worth.
posted by aubilenon at 2:40 PM on January 6, 2012 [1 favorite]

I'm a special potato.
posted by Devils Rancher at 3:20 PM on January 6, 2012 [2 favorites]

Back of the envelope calculation using the site search says 2749 out of 111342 (2.4%)

Actually, I don't think you can use the site search to find these. The [more inside] text would be generated by the code that puts the page together, rather than being part of the text in the database that the search looks at, wouldn't it? So Google can see it (since it looks at the final page's HTML), but the internal search that only looks at database contents can't.

I get the same number with the site search, and it's just a count of posts containing the word "inside", because the word "more" is too common to search on and the square brackets are stripped out.
posted by FishBike at 3:32 PM on January 6, 2012

I see it ALL THE TIME on the green. It drives me crazy.

Yeah, I flag the [more inside] puns with, not just impunity, but a feeling of thermonuclear righteousness. I think it's in an FAQ or something, under the heading of DO NOT. The mods seem to tidy these up really quickly.
posted by FishBike at 3:35 PM on January 6, 2012 [1 favorite]

Flag it as HTML error or something, we really do remove the plays on words when we see them. People who say variants on "special snowflake details inside" or whatever, not as much.

I usually do, I'm pretty sure. I don't flag snowflake crap though, even though that's just as annoying.
posted by two lights above the sea at 3:35 PM on January 6, 2012 [1 favorite]

I'm a special potato.

My friend kept a "special" potato on his balcony after it started sprouting. But after several weeks of freezing temperatures, it turned into a shriveled ghost of itself. Now I use it as an ashtray.

And that's my story of a special potato. You're welcome.
posted by the littlest brussels sprout at 4:51 PM on January 6, 2012 [4 favorites]

Ah, well, I'm not that special.
posted by Devils Rancher at 5:26 PM on January 6, 2012

I always use the [more inside] if I am going to do something with a lot of text/links, assuming it can give some basic context in a sentence or two, while saving people reading on phones the hassle of scrolling through a bunch of stuff that might not interest them.

Am I correct in that, or does the phone feed read differently?
posted by timsteil at 6:47 PM on January 6, 2012

the rss feed shows the more inside.
posted by empath at 9:08 PM on January 6, 2012

Well, if you're just browsing the blue on mobile (iPhone user here), the more inside is, well, inside, and the front page only shows the first field. It's pretty much the same as the non-mobile site, but with less clutter (no sidebar, for instance).

So timsteil, your efforts are appreciated.
posted by malapropist at 2:49 AM on January 7, 2012