[Add to Favourites] [Add to Recent Activity]

August 31, 2012 11:16 AM

Can we have a "follow thread" button?

I'm finding a lot of the longboat threads really interesting, but I don't always have a constructive comment to add to the discussion. A button which adds the thread to my recent activity would be nice.

posted by Orange Pamplemousse to Feature Requests at 11:16 AM (35 comments total)

This is what a lot of folks use favorites for. There's a tab in recent activity where you can follow your favorited posts.

I know it's not exactly the same, but it's close enough to work for me.
posted by phunniemee at 11:19 AM on August 31, 2012 [2 favorites]

Yes, this is what the My Favorites tab in Recent Activity is for. You can follow the thread as long as you'd like and then remove it from your favorites when you're finished if you don't want it in your Favorites list.
posted by pb (staff) at 11:23 AM on August 31, 2012 [4 favorites]

hmm, yeah, I'll second this pony. I know that's how favorites work, but it would be good if there was also another.... something ..... like another way to favorite things, in this case, "follow", like a more temporary way, or some other way to follow things? Like I think of a favorite as a FAVORITE, it's not just a post or comment I want to follow, it's my FAVORITE.

So something else, like different colored stars in gmail, or something where we can follow, and favorite, and I dunno, other things to follow along.

Jeeze I hope this made some lick of sense.
posted by Blake at 11:37 AM on August 31, 2012 [9 favorites]

I'd really like to have "recent activity" and "my favourites" combined.
posted by bonehead at 11:43 AM on August 31, 2012 [7 favorites]

I'd much prefer an extra button too.

I award my favorites after great thought and consideration or alternately because I was made to snort.
posted by bearwife at 12:20 PM on August 31, 2012 [7 favorites]

"You are not my mother! You are a SNORT!"
posted by zarq at 12:32 PM on August 31, 2012 [12 favorites]

I vote for another button, but only because I like dissent, confusion, and chaos! (Also, note I am not a mod.)
posted by cjorgensen at 12:38 PM on August 31, 2012

Oh, hey, "My Favorites" has the same great display as "My Activity". That's nice.

I still would like an "Add to Recent Activity" feature, for the same reasons OP listed.
posted by benito.strauss at 12:47 PM on August 31, 2012

To add a thread to recent activity favorite it until you get a chance to comment in it.

There would be some crazy uses of recent activity if you could add threads to it without participation.

35 total comments. ALL since your most recent lack of comment...
posted by cjorgensen at 1:39 PM on August 31, 2012 [1 favorite]

> I vote for another button, but only because I like dissent, confusion, and chaos!

Tenser, said the Tensor. Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun.
posted by languagehat at 2:09 PM on August 31, 2012 [1 favorite]

To add a thread to recent activity favorite it until you get a chance to comment in it.

No, that puts it in "My Favorites". I'd like to see it in "My Activity", which, admittedly, I think of as "Threads I'm following".

I used to put in a say nothing comment, e.g. "That's interesting", to get it into "Recent Activity". But everyone else has to read it and it adds nothing to the conversation, so I've stopped.

There would be some crazy uses of recent activity if you could add threads to it without participation.

Reading isn't participating?
posted by benito.strauss at 2:11 PM on August 31, 2012 [3 favorites]

Yes, the "Recent Activity:My Favorites" sort of works for this on mobile, but becomes problematic when you are just using favorites as "I want to read this later, someday." It doesn't work for keeping up on active, long threads for me. Makes me drop a comment as a tracker frequently.

I use the "recent comments" tab on the standard site for this, but there doesn't seem to be a "recent comments" option on mobile. Am I missing it?

(and thanks for posting this thread as I've been meaning to ask pb about the mobile recent comments thing)
posted by Big_B at 2:18 PM on August 31, 2012

There's no Recent Comments option in the mobile menu, but you can bookmark this page.
posted by pb (staff) at 2:28 PM on August 31, 2012 [1 favorite]

"Threads I'm following"

≈ "Recent Activity" ∪ "My Favourites", at least for me.

"Threads I'm following" is what I really want.
posted by bonehead at 2:48 PM on August 31, 2012 [8 favorites]

pb, is there an RSS feed for the My Favorites tab under Recent Activity or am I not doing something right?
posted by jroybal at 3:54 PM on August 31, 2012

I would also very much like a button that would allow me to add threads to Recent Activity or even better, a "Threads I Am Following" option.

I didn't know about "My Favorites". I'll try using that, but I'm already not happy with that solution, since it requires me to go back and un-favorite posts that I liked a lot, that is, liked the FPP and the link(s). The FPP's that I like the most for their FPP qualities are almost never the same posts with the discussions that I most want to follow. (sigh...)

OK, I've now un-favorited most of the MeFi FPP's that I favorited over the last 30 days. Apologies to their creators.
posted by marsha56 at 5:53 PM on August 31, 2012

Apologies to their creators.

Right, because now their score has gone down. Favorites are a harsh mistress indeed.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 6:10 PM on August 31, 2012

I would love this too!

I tend to read rather than post, and sometimes find a stray comment in metatalk pointing out that some thread I loved continued long after it dropped off the front page and my attention span. But like marsha56, they're threads I wouldn't bookmark for later reading. I actually kept a tab open on the "girlzone" discussion so I could keep up with it until the bitter, bitter end.
posted by Measured Out my Life in Coffeespoons at 6:31 PM on August 31, 2012 [1 favorite]

I want this because I want to follow some threads and god knows I comment enough already. And having two separate pages of recent activity? That's silly.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:09 PM on August 31, 2012 [2 favorites]

is there an RSS feed for the My Favorites tab under Recent Activity...

We don't have any RSS feeds for Recent Activity. The format there doesn't lend itself to feeds. You can subscribe to your favorite posts, though. Look for the Subscribe link at the top of the page here.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:06 PM on August 31, 2012

I am now following this thread.

PS: Pony, please.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:15 PM on August 31, 2012

I just say something stupid in the thread I want to follow and use recent activity.
posted by cmoj at 10:40 PM on August 31, 2012 [1 favorite]

Cmd-D.
posted by pompomtom at 11:48 PM on August 31, 2012

I would like better tools for following posts also.
This issue is an ongoing minor irritant.

Recent Activity & Favourites are poor as just showing 10 often misses a lot of goodness.
Favourite as a marker is poor as often those posts are not "cookie" posts.
Dropping a fluff comment as a marker for Activity is poor as it is obnoxious.
Using two tabs to reconnoiter is poor as it is clumsy.

Something like trn would be nice.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:41 AM on September 1, 2012 [2 favorites]

Do not want!
posted by daniel_charms at 9:26 AM on September 1, 2012

I demand more buttons.
posted by jeffamaphone at 9:40 AM on September 1, 2012

> Something like trn would be nice.

Why settle for anything less than a full NNTP interface to mefi?
posted by scruss at 10:26 AM on September 1, 2012 [2 favorites]

I demand the immediate return of the image tag.
posted by daniel_charms at 10:52 AM on September 1, 2012

My issue with using My Favorites as a thread tracker is that I favorite a lot of posts that I have little to no interest in reading the discussion about and they clutter up the My Favorites page, making it difficult to find the new comments in threads where I care about the discussion.
posted by iamkimiam at 2:36 PM on September 1, 2012 [3 favorites]

My issue with using My Favorites as a thread tracker is that I favorite a lot of posts that I have little to no interest in reading the discussion about and they clutter up the My Favorites page, making it difficult to find the new comments in threads where I care about the discussion.

100% agree.
posted by hapax_legomenon at 8:36 PM on September 1, 2012 [1 favorite]

You see, though, you don't have to use them that way...
posted by Joseph Gurl at 3:44 PM on September 2, 2012

Agreed.

My Favorites are like bookmarks. I can come back to them at some later time but am hardly expecting to be able to keep tabs on several pages of discussion at once.

What Orange Pamplemousse is suggesting sounds more like an RSS feed of sorts. Unless that already exists somehow.
posted by DisreputableDog at 10:28 PM on September 4, 2012

Maybe somebody already mentioned this unthread, but how does one follow threads that one hasn't commented in on a smart phone? (I'm using one for the next 10 days and can't figure out how to follow threads this way...even if I favourite them there's no easy way for me to follow my favorited threads)
posted by iamkimiam at 1:19 AM on September 9, 2012

The "My Favorites" tab is available in the mobile version. You can either bookmark that page for extremely fast access, or you can get to it from the menu at the bottom of the page once you're in Recent Activity. To do that, click "Recent Activity" on any menu, click "skip to menu" at the top of the page, and then click "Recent Activity: My Favorites".
posted by pb (staff) at 6:56 AM on September 9, 2012

Oh, awesome. That makes sense, thanks!
posted by iamkimiam at 6:58 AM on September 9, 2012