An impatient pony: queuing FPPs?

December 13, 2018 1:35 PM

I find that a lot of why I don't post as many FPPs as I used to is that I prefer to post them in the earlyish morning, although I might write them at other times, and in the afternoon I wind up going "well, I'll just submit it tomorrow." I also tend to get into spates of writing FPPs, and when I've just submitted one is (bar none) the time most likely for me to get excited and want to write another one. I would love the ability to be able to submit my FPP of the day before the 24-hour delay is up, so that it will be posted either at a time of my choosing or else when the 24-hour delay has ended. I think this would be something that would make posting FPPs easier, at least for me. Thoughts?
posted by sciatrix to Feature Requests at 1:35 PM (9 comments total)

The biggest problem I see is that especially for new stuff, we're likely to get queue-caused doubles, posts with overlapping content, etc. It's not something I'm personally super convinced will make the site better, but happy to see what kind of thoughts people have on it.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 1:40 PM on December 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

Time to link to one of the all-time best comments.
posted by Chrysostom at 1:53 PM on December 13, 2018 [17 favorites]

I didn't even need to click on the link before I started laughing. Thank you Chrysostom.

(As to the actual MeTa, me and my whopping one FPP history don't have a dog in the hunt.)
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 2:18 PM on December 13, 2018

I mean, yeah, but we already do get duplicates. I'm not sure that I'm convinced that we'd need to handle them any differently than we already do when two people simultaneously post something, or when someone makes an error and posts something from last week, etc.

I also suspect this sort of thing is more likely to be used by people who get in the habit of posting FPPs than people who go for one-offs or post things based on new content or breaking news. YMMV, though.
posted by sciatrix at 2:28 PM on December 13, 2018

Personally I think auto-posting is something I'm not keen on. However, in the past it's been asked if we could have a 'drafts' functionality on mefi, so that you could draft up a post and click 'post' later.
posted by freethefeet at 3:11 PM on December 13, 2018 [5 favorites]

freethefeet, we do have draft capability now!

Don't need auto-post, but I'd like to be able to work on a draft before the 24-hour delay ends.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:19 PM on December 13, 2018 [6 favorites]

Wasn't there a plug-in that someone made that allows you to do drafts? I have, at times, used the wiki for this. I don't have strong feelings about this, since it's something I don't think I'd need, but I'd be concerned that people would use it to queue "breaking" news type posts more than anything else (because can't anything else wait until the next day?) and I feel that the site is better with fewer of those.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 5:36 PM on December 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

I use a text file, but it's nice to have the Link button instead of having to do All That Typing.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:50 PM on December 13, 2018

So, the draft function can help with part of this -- when you start writing a post, be sure to Preview it. Hitting Preview saves the draft, so that is the key step. Then if you go away you can start up from the state it was in when you last Previewed.

It doesn't auto-post, but it will hold (just one) partial or complete post ready, for when you want to post it manually.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 3:12 PM on December 15, 2018