Follow Tags in My FanFare May 4, 2015 11:09 AM   Subscribe

We just added the ability to follow specific tags in My FanFare which should make it a bit easier to follow movie clubs and favorite topics.

Last December we added My FanFare which is a way to filter FanFare posts to shows you care about. Now in addition to favorite shows you can tell the site your favorite tags, and any post with that tag will appear in My FanFare.

To set your favorite tags, head over to My FanFare and click the Set Preferences link toward the top of the page. Scroll past any shows you've added to My FanFare and you'll see a place to enter favorite tags. You'll also see some suggested tags based on your commenting history that you can click to add. Click Set Tags and you should see any recent and future posts with those tags in My FanFare.

As always, let us know if you have any trouble here.
posted by pb (staff) to Feature Requests at 11:09 AM (15 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite

Yay!
posted by ocherdraco at 11:10 AM on May 4, 2015


Also, since this came up in a recent Metatalk about movie club/subscribing functionality (hat tip to carsonb for broaching the tag notion specifically), I want to note that we have at least rough plans for a more full-featured movie club / FanFare event calendar system in the works; that'll take longer to iron out the details and implementation on, though, and this tag stuff will be useful independent of those functions, so pb went ahead and got this taken care of as a good stopgap.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:14 AM on May 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


Oh nice!
posted by phunniemee at 11:30 AM on May 4, 2015


or specific actors! Like Lance Reddick and Jared Harris, which would be even more useful if certain shows also tagged cast members.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:49 PM on May 4, 2015


Oh, great news about the official calendar!
posted by Room 641-A at 2:21 PM on May 4, 2015


Since we're here, I'll go ahead and announce that the election film club is officially live with its first movie, the fantastic Wag the Dog. Like news coverage of the actual presidential election, the election film club has already begun and will be constant with seemingly no end in sight.
posted by phunniemee at 2:41 PM on May 4, 2015


Tagging every cast member seems like a ridiculous amount of work with a really dubious payoff.
posted by Pronoiac at 2:56 PM on May 4, 2015


Yeah, as much as I can see the idea, practically speaking I think it's unlikely that following stuff on FanFare based on actor tags will be useful; folks haven't shown an inclination to do cast-based tagging and I'm not sure it'd be a great idea even if they were inclined to. Which, I don't have an obvious answer there—it's possible we could find a slick way to pull that kind of metadata in the future, but it's not really something we've been thinking about given all the other more core stuff the site could use.

One thing that might help there is, when we have FanFare Club stuff worked out, doing actor-specific clubs for given interesting actors; the Robin Williams film club has made for a pretty good proof of concept there, and I imagine for folks who are doing or have previously done significant career stints of interesting work that'd be sort of a gimme. (Dibs on founding the Christopher Walken Is The Greatest Actor Ever club.)
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:15 PM on May 4, 2015


Yay! I got my pony!
posted by fings at 5:17 PM on May 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


We got our pony! Yay!
posted by carsonb at 6:39 PM on May 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


COURT-MANDATED SHARED PONY CUSTODY
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:54 PM on May 4, 2015 [5 favorites]


Now, can we twiddle a bit to make My Fanfare our default view?
posted by pjern at 7:39 AM on May 5, 2015


Sorry, pjern, no plans to do that right now. We haven't ever done that with My MeFi or My Ask and we'd like to keep that default view of all recent posts consistently in the same place. You could always bookmark the My FanFare tab and use that to get there when you want to read FanFare.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:47 AM on May 5, 2015


"Yeah, as much as I can see the idea, practically speaking I think it's unlikely that following stuff on FanFare based on actor tags will be useful; folks haven't shown an inclination to do cast-based tagging and I'm not sure it'd be a great idea even if they were inclined to."

I've included the lead actor, but that's it.

For what it's worth, the tagging is for me one of the most anxious-making aspects of a FanFare post for me. It's not the only thing -- there are several such barriers for me -- but it's one where I feel a strong sense of implied responsibility that's unfortunately coupled with a near-absence of any idea of what and how many tags I should include. I've tended to just copy those that previous posters have used and, if I've been the first poster, include only the most obvious ones.

Seems to me that it would really help if somehow tagging of episodes was opened up to more than just the poster.

Since I've mentioned my anxieties about FanFare posts, I'll also bring up the issue about the post content itself, which we all understood to be at the very least a minimal episode summary. As I see it, FanFare episode posts are all about the discussion, unlike how MetaFilter works, and so while I applaud (really, I admire them greatly) the posts that are witty products of great labor of something like a mini-recap, most posts are not like this and they don't need to be like this. But they do need to include, apparently, a minimal summary. I think maybe we should revisit that requirement.

One reason for this is that in the absence of a hand-crafted summary we're directed toward online summaries, and what I've been doing has been taking whatever it is that the automated metadata my Plex server comes up from various online sources ... but it bothers me. These summaries available online are someone's else's words, and it's not clear whether they're intended to be widely disseminated without attribution. The whole thing bothers me and if this is potentially a problem, which maybe it is, insisting on original summaries would mean that fewer episode posts would end up being made. Maybe it's not a problem. Or maybe we should specify only sources that are intended to be republished in this way. Or, finally, I guess I'm suggesting that there shouldn't be an actual requirement for a post body.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:52 AM on May 5, 2015


If you're concerned about attribution, it's fine to use quotation marks or italicize and cite the source.

I hear you on why it doesn't seem necessary to have a post body, but I also think there's no particular harm in having a one-sentence post body just to fill that spot, if one wants to go minimalist. I don't think that basic element of site organization is likely to change at this point, since it seems to be working reasonably well. (Of course, that's my take as someone who doesn't use FanFare a ton, so I'm interested to hear from the people who do.)
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:05 AM on May 5, 2015


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