A link for just the post. July 21, 2013 12:31 PM   Subscribe

I often find great posts I'd like to pass along to people but sometimes I'd rather not expose them to rough and tumble that is a Metafilter comment section. Would it be possible to have a link that would just present the post without comments. Or failing that, a link with the comment section collapsed so someone would have to click to see it?
posted by Tell Me No Lies to Feature Requests at 12:31 PM (47 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite

You can always just not read the comments. It's not compulsory.
posted by shelleycat at 12:40 PM on July 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


For example, don't read this one. How hard was that?
posted by bleep-blop at 12:42 PM on July 21, 2013 [3 favorites]


I'd second this request, but I've found that its also often just as easy to pick the best link or two and send that along.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:43 PM on July 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


This is not something we're likely to consider, no. People in general are aware of the risks of reading the comments, I think - and Metafilter's comments are better than most places.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 12:43 PM on July 21, 2013 [11 favorites]


People in general are aware of the risks of reading the comments, I think - and Metafilter's comments are better than most places.

And yet not so good for my aunt, who in any case is often not entirely clear what part of what I'm sending her she is supposed to be paying attention to.

Like Blazecock Pileon I usually end up sending the links rather than dealing with the confusion, but I thought I would ask.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:08 PM on July 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


If it is a private email, I think I would be okay with copying the post and saying something like "found this on metafilter.com". Obviously, that wouldn't be kosher to repost the entire thing on your personal blog or whatever. I have a relative who is dreadfully bad about forwarding entire email conversations without permission and I wouldn't want to send them anything like that but for someone unlikely to forward it, I would be okay with doing something like that so they understood what I was trying to share if I didn't want them hip deep in comments.

I might also copy some portion of the post and give the post link and just explain a bit about comments. (Hypothetically, since I don't do any such thing in actual practice.)
posted by Michele in California at 1:21 PM on July 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


And yet not so good for my aunt, who in any case is often not entirely clear what part of what I'm sending her she is supposed to be paying attention to.

Yeah, I hear you, but I think in general repackaging for different audiences is better done on a case-by-case basis. I usually pull out the links and reframe it in those situations, myself.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 1:25 PM on July 21, 2013


If you can find a pair of tags that uniquely identify the post, you can link to that page. Your most recent post, for instance: memoto+lifeblog. It doesn't show the [more inside], though.

You could also subscribe to the MeFi RSS in a feed reader that allows for sharing items, then send them that. Google Reader would let you send the full text of a post with links, and just a link to the comments page at the bottom. (I'm not sure which, if any, GR replacement replicates this feature however.)
posted by Rhaomi at 1:32 PM on July 21, 2013


Just make another post with the same links--you make the post, post gets deleted, you send the link, problem solved.
posted by box at 1:59 PM on July 21, 2013 [6 favorites]


What? No.
posted by rtha at 2:00 PM on July 21, 2013 [4 favorites]


Okay, yeah, I omitted the step where you eat the hamburgers.
posted by box at 2:01 PM on July 21, 2013 [8 favorites]


Whew. /recalibrates ability to smell delicious grilling hamburgers
posted by rtha at 2:03 PM on July 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


but sometimes I'd rather not expose them to rough and tumble that is a Metafilter comment section.

When I read this before I thought you somehow meant you didn't want to expose the links to the rough and tumble of comments. Which doesn't really make sense when I think about it but explains why my previous answer doesn't actually match what you're asking for. Sorry.

If you want to share links with people without the rest of metafilter then just send them the links directly. You don't need to have it published here first to be able to share stuff with people, that doesn't make much sense either.
posted by shelleycat at 2:06 PM on July 21, 2013


If you want to share links with people without the rest of metafilter then just send them the links directly. You don't need to have it published here first to be able to share stuff with people, that doesn't make much sense either.

Metafilter is at least nominally about the posts. The posts are often framed well and present the links in a sensible manner. There is value there.

If it were simply a matter of copy and pasting the posts and I would get the links intact I would do that instead.

By way of pushing the powers that be a little, I would like to note that in the brief time this post has been up several different people have commented that they face the same problem and presented their hacky solutions to it. Based on this small data set I would argue there's a Need.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:16 PM on July 21, 2013


I would bet money that there is higher demand for more memail features than there is for something like this, and those enhanced memail features are not going to happen. Demand isn't the sole driver; that's why we have so many greasemonkey scripts floating around.

How about if you set up a free blogspace somewhere and just copy mefi posts you'd like your aunt to read there? You'd link to the original fpp, of course, but she could just read the post and the links as they appear on your blog (which would have comments turned off). Would something like that work?
posted by rtha at 2:20 PM on July 21, 2013


If it were simply a matter of copy and pasting the posts and I would get the links intact I would do that instead.

You could pull it from the source code.

Or you could send them links to Ranther, which appears to be skimming posts. E.G. my post Get the lead out, copied here, as "The correlation between lead exposure and crime"

quick and dirty google search here
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:49 PM on July 21, 2013


Isn't this more or less what the Best Of blog does?
posted by the latin mouse at 2:50 PM on July 21, 2013


I share the MetaFilter post because I want people to read the comments.
posted by theichibun at 3:41 PM on July 21, 2013 [3 favorites]


I'd pay cash money for the opposite feature: a button that would remove the lame jokes from my family's emails and turn them into delicious MetaFilter comments sections.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:58 PM on July 21, 2013 [7 favorites]


I would like to note that in the brief time this post has been up several different people have commented that they face the same problem

My read on this thread is quite different from yours. It's actually okay if you want to repackage the stuff on another blog and just include a link-back tumblr-style for the most part. You could call it postsformyaunt.tumblr.com sort of like what rtha says above.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 4:36 PM on July 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


I like this idea, honestly. Especially if you're linking to something where people are harsh about it.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 5:31 PM on July 21, 2013


Despite the fact that I have many friends who I think would make great MeFites, I've utterly failed over the years to get any to join. For the most part if I see something here that I think they'll like, I send them that link specifically.
posted by dhartung at 5:34 PM on July 21, 2013


Here's a procedure you can follow to get a link to Metafilter post without comments that you can give to someone:
  1. Load the thread of interest. You might want to be logged out, as the resulting page that the person will see will be a little bit confusing otherwise, as it will be a duplicate of how it looks in your browser, including "welcome back, username". (But you aren't actually giving them any access to your Metafilter acccount!)
  2. Open your browser's JavaScript console. In Chrome this is Ctrl-Shift-J, in Firefox it's Ctrl-Shift-K. You can also find it in the menus.
  3. Copy and paste this and hit enter: $('#page .copy').nextAll().remove();$('#body').text(document.documentElement.innerHTML);
  4. The page should now show markup. Select all and copy it, e.g. Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C.
  5. Post this HTML somewhere. You can use Dropbox, Google Drive, or several free sites. These instructions will show how to do that with gist and bl.ocks.org.
  6. Go to gist.github.com. Where it says "name this file..." type index.html. Then paste the markup in the big box below that. Then click on create public gist.
  7. Note the user name and ID from the URL of the resulting page. The user name is "anonymous" if you didn't have a github account or you weren't logged in when you made the paste. The ID is the series of digits after the username. Take those values and form a URL from the following template: http://bl.ocks.org/(USERNAME HERE)/raw/(ID HERE)
  8. Load that URL -- you should see a simulacrum of the Metafilter thread, sans comments.
Here's an example that I just made for demonstration purposes:
original thread: http://www.metafilter.com/130212/The-Case-Against-The-Confederacy
commentless version: http://bl.ocks.org/anonymous/raw/6050744/
posted by Rhomboid at 6:43 PM on July 21, 2013 [16 favorites]


Wow. Damn.
posted by rtha at 6:44 PM on July 21, 2013


Hrm, I didn't notice that the example has mojibake. (I set my browsers to default to UTF-8.) You can force UTF-8 in the view -> encoding menu to clear that up, or add a
<meta charset='utf-8'>
to the markup before creating the paste.
posted by Rhomboid at 6:50 PM on July 21, 2013


I also just pick the best links and copy them. Besides the comments, there is inevitably more there than I want to send to someone, and on the rare occasion that there isn’t I just go crazy and give them a link to the MF page. I actually wanted something similar to what you’re asking for at one point, but realized I would keep doing what I’m doing 99% of the time.
posted by bongo_x at 8:04 PM on July 21, 2013


dhartung, they're already mefites, they just don't want you to know which one.
posted by ctmf at 9:27 PM on July 21, 2013


Alright, fine. Dunno why this is annoying me so much today.

You can change the post id in the URL below and it will show people a post. It ain't pretty, but it does have a professional white background.

http://tkolar.com/cgi-bin/mefipost?postid=130224

output for above

I reserve the right to fiddle with the appearance later on depending on the preferences of my aunts, uncles, grandparents, godparents, dentists, neighbors, passing strangers and if I drop acid at some point, aardvarks.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:49 PM on July 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


dhartung, they're already mefites, they just don't want you to know which one.
posted by ctmf at 9:27 PM on July 21


Shhhh!
posted by Michele in California at 9:51 PM on July 21, 2013


If you're using Firefox, just grab this extension. I'm sure there are similar ones for Chrome, and there may be a better one for FF, for that matter.

Then you can just highlight the content of the post, right-click, and copy the HTML, which will let you paste it, with links and all intact, into an email or whatever, no muss no fuss.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:56 PM on July 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


I use Firefox. To copy and paste a post all I have to do is select the bit on the page I like, right click and choose "view selection source", hit control c when the little box opens up (don't bother scrolling around, everything will be there but only the html you want will be selected), then go make an html email where I paste the content. Voila, links and text and whatever just like in the post, all for about one minute's work. I'm sure other browsers do the same thing.
posted by shelleycat at 2:39 AM on July 22, 2013 [2 favorites]


Oh and I don't have any extensions or whatever installed.
posted by shelleycat at 2:40 AM on July 22, 2013


© 1999-2013 MetaFilter Network Inc.
All posts are © their original authors.


Could a mod please clarify what exactly this disclaimer means?

I was not under the impression that copying the entire contents of multiple metafilter posts and posting them elsewhere was kosher.
posted by zarq at 4:15 AM on July 22, 2013 [1 favorite]


Could a mod please clarify what exactly this disclaimer means?

It means the original authors are the ones who own the copyright to a post which means basically that if someone wanted to, say, publish a book of MeFi content, they would have to get agreement from the posters, not just Matt or MeFi LLC.

We'll give the stinkeye to people who wholesale copy content from MeFi and repost it on their own blog if we think they're doing it to boost Google juice for their site (or are doing it in shitty ways without attribution etc) but if someone wanted to copy a post and include it with attribution on their own Tumblr because we didn't want to build a mechanism for them to send a copy of the post to their aunt so that she could read the post without reading the comments, we don't really care that much.

I have pretty strong feelings about fair use and the one-off reposting (with attribution) elsewhere of a MeFi post doesn't really set off any alarm bells for me. If it's your post and you want to make a thing out of it, that is your choice. Owning the copyright will perhaps give you legal remedy.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 5:48 AM on July 22, 2013 [1 favorite]


OK. Thank you. I was trying to determine where the line gets drawn between acceptable or not. Thought it surprising that this idea would be given a green light since I know y'all have gone after the very infrequent site clone without hesitation. I know this is a different case and TMNL isn't a spammer.

Taking legal action against someone for reposting an FPP or three (especially when they obviously don't have nefarious intentions, such as this case) seems kinda ridiculous to me. But yeah, if somebody's making ad money off reposts, I'd rather see it in Matt's pocket than theirs.
posted by zarq at 6:48 AM on July 22, 2013


Well, site clones are basically always mercenary content-theft operations trying to scoop up mefi content for the sole and specific purpose of stacking their own ad-laden pages with external content, usually without more than token, if any, attribution. There's nothing to say in defense of them.

Contrast that, as Jess says, with something purpose built for a very small, mefi-centric audience as a tool, and we're looking at very different things. Or with someone reblogging a specific post with clear attribution in the spirit of the good end of the web.

Ultimately, defending the hell out of an individual copyright assertion on the text of a post is not the scale at which we're going to be even able to operate organizationally; we keep an eye out for examples that are broad, malicious, or in maybe odd cases fairly specific but in a sketchy high-profile way and can try and deal with those as they come up, but if a given user just doesn't want their post text showing up on a random blog it falls to them to deal with it on their own terms. They retain that copyright, they can go do it to it.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:18 AM on July 22, 2013


Thanks for the notes about Firefox, folks, I didn't know I could make it do that.

Unfortunately though my primary web reading platform is an iPad.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:52 AM on July 22, 2013


cortex: "Contrast that, as Jess says, with something purpose built for a very small, mefi-centric audience as a tool, and we're looking at very different things. Or with someone reblogging a specific post with clear attribution in the spirit of the good end of the web."

Oh, sure. And I totally think what TMNL is proposing is a good thing. I realized when I read Jessamyn's response that I really should have said that up front. I don't want anyone to get the impression that I thought Tell Me No Lies is/was a content spammer or that we should be somehow protecting our posts against this project.

It just struck me as weird. But your explanations solved that, thanks.

Ultimately, defending the hell out of an individual copyright assertion on the text of a post is not the scale at which we're going to be even able to operate organizationally;

Ugh. I can't even imagine what that would look like.

...we keep an eye out for examples that are broad, malicious, or in maybe odd cases fairly specific but in a sketchy high-profile way and can try and deal with those as they come up, but if a given user just doesn't want their post text showing up on a random blog it falls to them to deal with it on their own terms. They retain that copyright, they can go do it to it.

*nod* That's fair. I can't imagine that sort of fine control would be worth the effort for anyone anyway, unless someone were stealing content for clearly malicious purposes.
posted by zarq at 9:07 AM on July 22, 2013


rough and tumble that is a Metafilter comment section

Oh my stars and garters, "rough and tumble?" Seriously? MetaFilter? In 2013?
posted by entropicamericana at 12:40 PM on July 22, 2013


Oh my stars and garters, "rough and tumble?" Seriously? MetaFilter? In 2013?

I took that as sarcasm, maybe it’s not?
posted by bongo_x at 1:56 PM on July 22, 2013


Oh my stars and garters, "rough and tumble?" Seriously? MetaFilter? In 2013?

Uh, yes, absolutely. The comment sections on this site can get pretty testy, the only difference is that here people seem to use more five dollar words.
posted by averageamateur at 2:50 PM on July 22, 2013


There is no topic so genial that someone on Metafilter won't be bitterly sarcastic about it. And it will frequently be in the first few comments as they can't read the article with all that snark waiting to come out.

Hanging out here it's easy to forget that a lot of people go weeks or months at a time without encountering sneering sarcasm.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:55 PM on July 22, 2013 [1 favorite]


Oh, you think snark is your ally. But you merely adopted the snark; I was born in it, moulded by it...
posted by entropicamericana at 4:51 PM on July 22, 2013 [1 favorite]


I've decided that sneering is a good word in that saying it bends your face into the appropriate expression. It's the visual equivalent of onomatopoeia.

Are there other words like that? Do they have a collective name?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:03 PM on July 22, 2013 [1 favorite]


Grin comes close I guess.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:04 PM on July 22, 2013




Oh my stars and garters, "rough and tumble?" Seriously? MetaFilter? In 2013?


It's not as overtly nasty as other sites but MeFi has lots of snark and passive-aggression. And if enough members of the site decide they don't like something in the first few posts a thread about it can be a huge pile-on.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 6:09 PM on July 22, 2013


Tell Me No Lies: "Are there other words like that?"

Pout? Mumble?
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane (staff) at 5:01 AM on July 23, 2013


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