Also, I would like an inter-engine fermentation system.

January 23, 2013 12:15 PM

We have clouds for the top 150 tags posted to Mefi, Music, Meta, Jobs, IRL and Ask. We can see the top ten tags we've used listed on user profiles. Would it be possible to view all tags (or a greater subset than 'top ten') for individual users, either in a list or cloud form?

Thanks in advance, as always.

posted by zarq to Feature Requests at 12:15 PM (15 comments total)

I'm not sure where we'd put it if we had one, though I suppose sticking it behind a link on the user page near the "top ten" list would be one approach. I also don't know if that'd be a little bit of a bear to render in real-time, or whether folks would feel weird about that generated list being so officially accessible (though it is, of course, all publicly accessible data as is).

On a more self-serve front, you could generate this yourself with a little bit of filtering of the tagdata files in the Infodump.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:20 PM on January 23

I am actually more interested in finding out more about getting an inter-engine fermentation system.

I approve of all things that involve fermentation.
posted by bearwife at 12:22 PM on January 23 [2 favorites]

1. Why do you want to view all tags that a user has used?

2. If this is enabled, could we have an option to turn off or limit what others view about this information?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:23 PM on January 23

I'd like to see the tags I've used.
posted by ChuraChura at 12:38 PM on January 23

cortex: " On a more self-serve front, you could generate this yourself with a little bit of filtering of the tagdata files in the Infodump."

Honestly, I think that would be way beyond my meager data-crunching skills. The tag files break down tags by tag id, link id, link date and tag name, but they're not cross-referenced by the user who posted the link.

I also don't know if that'd be a little bit of a bear to render in real-time, or whether folks would feel weird about that generated list being so officially accessible (though it is, of course, all publicly accessible data as is).

Understandable. I wouldn't want to break the server(s). Does the regular 'top 150' cloud take up a lot of resources to generate?

An opt-in toggle would also be totally reasonable.

Even if this were restricted so that people could only view their own tag list by frequency and no one else's, I think it would be neat.
posted by zarq at 12:43 PM on January 23

If you're requesting this as a feature for users to check on themselves, cool. Neat idea. If you're proposing that it be openly available as a way to "research" other users, I'd object to it.
posted by cribcage at 12:44 PM on January 23

cribcage: "If you're requesting this as a feature for users to check on themselves, cool. Neat idea. If you're proposing that it be openly available as a way to "research" other users, I'd object to it."

Whichever people are most comfortable with. It would be totally fine with me if it were restricted to us only seeing our own data.
posted by zarq at 12:47 PM on January 23

Oooh, it'd be cool to also see a tag cloud based on the posts that I've commented in, as well as what I've posted.
posted by klangklangston at 1:28 PM on January 23 [1 favorite]

Why would it need rendering in real-time? Presumably you render a cached copy once, only when a new post is written and posted by the user. Why regenerate it on each view? That would be very wasteful.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:15 PM on January 23

Well, disk waste vs. clock waste basically. It's possible that neither would even be worth blinking at as far as practical resource cost, but caching tens of thousands of tag clouds is using disk that rendering on the fly is not.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:19 PM on January 23

Is that ... does the first engine turn the biofuel into cud, and the second engine chew it?
posted by Catch at 4:00 PM on January 23

cortex: “Well, disk waste vs. clock waste basically. It's possible that neither would even be worth blinking at as far as practical resource cost, but caching tens of thousands of tag clouds is using disk that rendering on the fly is not.”

Displaying them as lists instead of clouds wouldn't involve any rendering at all, though, would it?
posted by koeselitz at 5:19 PM on January 23

I'm using rendering in the very general sense of "querying the database and chucking queried data out to the screen"; formatting the output as a list vs. cloud isn't likely to make any real difference in computational complexity, it's mostly just a question of how much work we're asking the db to do on a moment's notice for the average or the worst case (where a "bad" case here is a user with a whole lot of tag history).

In any case, probably that's not a huge deal either way, if this was notionally something a couple clicks deep, since it'd be more the occasional idle curiosity browse than a frequently-loaded daily-use thing. So we're just jawing.

I think the better question is whether folks would be uncomfortable with a public-facing list like this. It'd be less of a thing if we were to do this just as a private thing, where you can easily look at your tag list/cloud but sharing that with anyone else would be entirely your call. In that format it's something that falls easily into the Ideas Josh Likes bin, though whether and when and how to set that up are questions we may not have answers to.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:27 PM on January 23

While I'd be interested in seeing the tags of the threads I've commented in, I'm not sure I want it public. I have a sense of foreboding about that, just because I know how many threads I have commented in, and fear a tag cloud that says things like "dog farts" and "yeast infections."
posted by ambrosia at 7:35 PM on January 23 [1 favorite]

Tags are Metafilter's secret strength. This isn't really a pony request, because I don't think anyone else would ever use it, but I often wish that I could do a tag search across the entire site (ie, tags.metafilter.com/tags/puppies would show me everything puppy-related on Mefi and Ask, and hell, Jobs, why not.)

http://metatalk.metafilter.com/tags/tags brought me here, btw
posted by roger ackroyd at 9:47 PM on January 23