Old threads and new discussions

December 7, 2021 3:40 PM

I'm been trying to think of a non-clunky, non-pain-in-the-ass way for people to keep abreast of ongoing/current discussions in pre-existing episode FanFare threads for a given TV show, and I don't know what the answer is.

I've been spearheading a Supernatural rewatch in FanFare, and we've reached the point in the rewatch that almost all of the rest of the run of the series is already in the FanFare database. Now that there is no longer a fresh thread being posted every day, it's making it difficult for the group involved in the rewatch to discuss things together.

Clicking on "Recent Activity" will show you any comments made since your last comment in any thread you've recently contributed to, but it won't show you comments made in threads you've never commented in, or commented on years ago, and I know some people just want to read the discussions without commenting themselves at all.

The best tracking method I've come up with so far is to go to the page listing the posts for whatever season we're currently in (i.e., Supernatural season 10), and scan it for new comments, but that's not all that satisfactory.

It seems to me that ideally we'd have a way to subscribe to all the posts for a particular show, and get an easily accessible feed of whatever new comments had been made in them, rather like Recent Activity, only for a given series rather than for threads you've been commenting in. I spent ten minutes or so poking around and trying to figure out if there's a way to do that, but if there was one I couldn't find it.

I suppose what I'm asking is, are there better options for following an ongoing discussion in a particular show's threads, especially if those threads are years old, and if not... could we perhaps get a "follow that show" pony? Or do any of you have better ideas?

posted by orange swan to Feature Requests at 3:40 PM (31 comments total)

Yeah, it's a tricky one with organized rewatches and existing threads. I think the notion you're suggesting of a show-specific activity feed is interesting: something that'd just be automatically generated for every series rather than individually/personally managed. That said, I don't won't guess at how trivial or thorny that would be to implement; I'll put it in front of frimble to opine on.

There does exist the My Fanfare feature, but that's really only useful for new posts, which cuts back to the point you're making about reviving old threads on a rewatch. But it might be the sort of thing where if the idea above is workable to implement, marrying that to the My Fanfare feed in some way might also be workable.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:45 PM on December 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

Clicking on "Recent Activity" will show you any comments made since your last comment in any thread you've recently contributed to, but it won't show you comments made in threads you've never commented in, or commented on years ago, and I know some people just want to read the discussions without commenting themselves at all.

This is incorrect. Right now I am following a bunch of Fanfare threads through Recent Activity where I never commented. Yesterday, somebody made a comment in a Fanfare thread I'm following that hadn't had a comment since 2018 and it popped right up in my Recent Activity. There is an "add to activity" button right next to the "add to favorites" button at the bottom of every post on the site. Recent Activity works great for following shows on Fanfare that only get sporadic comments, even if you never post in them.

Also, if you aren't checking Fanfare very often, the Watercooler view is nice. Where discussion on FanFare has been the most active in the past seven days.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 5:10 PM on December 7, 2021 [4 favorites]

Right - Recent Activity shows you any new comments, no matter how old your last comment is.
posted by soelo at 5:37 PM on December 7, 2021

I think a show-level subscription or feed would be great.
posted by michaelh at 8:47 PM on December 7, 2021

Related: This is also why I disapprove of people posting a flood of movies to FanFare that few people are watching. FF works like the rest of MetaFilter -- only discussions on the front page attract any attention, and once they're gone they never pop back onto it, even if a lot of MeFites finally watch the movie and start commenting.

This also means if a film is in limited release now (Oscar qualifying season), it's better to wait a few months until it's really out in public before making a FF post.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 9:32 PM on December 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

I think people are talking about two different things: Recent Activity, which is only for logged-in users and shows recent activity in all threads you've either commented in or manually added - which you can filter to only show FanFare threads; and the Recent Comments view on FanFare, which displays FF threads sorted by most recent comments. The latter is great and my default view for the site, and also it's almost completely undiscoverable from the modern mobile theme (you're supposed to somehow understand that the thing that looks exactly like a button or heading titled "Recent Posts" is actually a dropdown menu showing not a list of things related to recent posts, but alternative features like FanFare Talk, Clubs, etc. Yes, there's a tiny white-on-white dropdown arrow. No, I never noticed it until way after I happened to discover the Recent Comments view when someone linked to it, and went hunting for some way to access that from mobile. And yes, this is an issue everywhere that ridiculous concealed dropdown UI is used, in multiple places on the site - there's nothing about it that makes you think "hmm, tapping here might show alternative options to thing this button/heading says". It breaks pretty much every UI rule for dropdown menus.)
posted by trig at 2:04 AM on December 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

ActingTheGoat, the watercooler view just blew my mind a little. Thank you for pointing it out.
posted by veggieboy at 7:46 AM on December 8, 2021 [3 favorites]

FF works like the rest of MetaFilter -- only discussions on the front page attract any attention, and once they're gone they never pop back onto it, even if a lot of MeFites finally watch the movie and start commenting.

To some extent... But posting about lesser-known movies/shows is also like planting seeds for discussions later. There may be no one who wants to discuss the thing today, but you may find several people later. It took like a month, but I'm getting to talk about the Korean drama Stove League with some more people now, and that is pretty cool.

Really what would be great would be if the posts on the front page of FF weren't strictly based on post times. Or if there were an alternate view that weighted multiple factors (new comment activity, a re-release, a new-to-streaming release) in addition to the post date/time.

We've actually talked about a "bump" feature to nudge things back onto the front page before.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:38 AM on December 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

This is also why I disapprove of people posting a flood of movies to FanFare that few people are watching.

I haven't made a ton of FanFare posts but they've been almost entirely about things that few people are watching. I did so because I've found them worth discussing, not necessarily because they were popular. I've also discovered things via FanFare that I wouldn't have ever heard about if not for the posts. Those instances prompted me to make the posts that I have.

I don't watch many movies or TV shows and when I do it's often long after they got a FanFare post. I often search out the old posts when I've recently watched something to see what others think. I don't generally comment because of the 'nobody is following this thread anymore' thing. If FanFare had "Posts with recent comments" below the recently added TV/movies widgets it might help keep those posts alive without having to reorder the main FanFare page.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 10:51 AM on December 8, 2021 [7 favorites]

I gotta be honest, I'm probably not gonna stop posting low budget horror movies and sad Eastern-European dramas just to make it incrementalky easier for someone to find like, the new Succession thread or whatever.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:29 AM on December 8, 2021 [17 favorites]

I think if the Recent Comments view were tweaked such that it also included new posts that don't have any comments yet, it would be perfect and the best default view. That's already how I use it.

There are regularly threads that come up there that were posted months or years ago.
posted by trig at 9:37 PM on December 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

Um, I just look up the show on my own when I want to comment on it, like I'm doing a Lucifer watch for the first time long after everyone else, so....
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:36 AM on December 9, 2021 [3 favorites]

I think what orange swan is getting at is that with the Supernatural rewatch, some of us are a bit behind, but we're still making the odd comment, and it would be nice if people who are ahead can see what the laggards are saying or asking, for example.

I get that it's kind of hard to revive old threads. I posted a full season take on The Flash, because I wasn't sure if people were still watching it. Last night, I added in comments about the most recent episode, but because it's not the same day the show airs, unless people subscribe to the show (which I have never done--I just tend to look up shows as they air and follow the main FanFare page to see which new shows have been added), it's likely nobody will see them.
posted by sardonyx at 8:54 AM on December 9, 2021

This is also why I disapprove of people posting a flood of movies to FanFare that few people are watching.

I like this about Fanfare. I've discovered some great shows/movies this way. It's also always neat when I independently watch a movie and then check Fanfare and there's a thread posted for it.

I think it would be cool if we had an option in My Fanfare to sort by "most recent activity" rather than "date that show/movie was posted". I know there's recent activity, but personally I don't use that much. I do use My Fanfare to keep track of shows I watch.
posted by litera scripta manet at 6:53 PM on December 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

DirtyOldTown, please don't stop posting about weird indie horror movies. You've alerted me to a lot of interesting stuff.

I'd really like the option to subscribe to shows too. I can't keep up with the Supernatural threads anymore and I miss them.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 8:03 AM on December 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

For FF, I wish we could subscribe to tags. Like, if I could pull up a FF view that was all the movies tagged with "horror," that would be pretty cool.

At this point, that's probably not that far off of being a reality, as you could probably dig through the tag function and somehow make that work. The issue would be that people don't tag very well.

Would it be possible to let people tag other people's FF posts? I recognize that there is potential for abuse there, but as a moderated community that depends on common behavioral standards, it doesn't seem entirely unworkable.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:50 AM on December 14, 2021

For FF, I wish we could subscribe to tags. Like, if I could pull up a FF view that was all the movies tagged with "horror," that would be pretty cool.

Do you mean like this? (Granted, there should really be UI for this - across the MF sites - rather than relying on people to experiment with URL structure...)

I personally would love a "Recommend" function, sort of like the votes on Projects, or "x% of people who voted on this recommend it", so I can go through the archives finding things that people especially enjoyed.
posted by trig at 12:17 PM on December 14, 2021

Okay, while we're at it, some ponies (for frimble's excessive free time, I know):

- currently movies and books get listed with "Movie: " or "Book: " at the beginning of the title. It would be great to mark everything that way (including TV shows), and possibly use some different formatting to make the categories stand out more and the post titles less ungainly.

- I could swear that book posts used to list the author at the top, near the title. They don't any more, and that was actually pretty useful. Maybe the author could be automatically included as a tag.

- On that note, and speaking to DoT's point about inconsistent tagging, it might be pretty awesome to automatically generate cast/director/screenwriter tags based on IMDB info. I can't be the only one who enjoys looking for other stuff from people whose work I like.

- I'm going to refine my Recommendations pony from before - it would be awesome to have a choice of either not tagging/flagging/voting on a post at all, or tagging/flagging/voting on it as either "Enjoyed" or "Special" - the latter being reserved for the works that really blew you away, and the former for stuff that's good but not sublime.
posted by trig at 12:37 PM on December 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

Do you mean like this? (Granted, there should really be UI for this - across the MF sites - rather than relying on people to experiment with URL structure...)

It is not necessary to futz with URLs; https://fanfare.metafilter.com/tags/horror is what you get if you click on the tag in any fanfare post and that is the same for any tag on any subsite. You can subscribe to that tag using the RSS icon after "Displaying 1 through 50 of 1008. Subscribe:"

You can also get there by searching and going to the Tags tab: Like so
posted by soelo at 5:37 PM on December 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

And you can add tags to follow at the bottom of the preferences section of My Fanfare
posted by soelo at 5:38 PM on December 14, 2021

what you get if you click on the tag in any fanfare post

Right, but then you have to go look for a post with that tag in the first place.

I didn't know about the search interface, though! I still think there should be some UI from the Tags page, which seems like most natural place for people to go when they want to find a specific tag (it's what I did, and was frustrated to find only a list of most common tags - cool, but not what I was looking for).
posted by trig at 12:59 AM on December 15, 2021

Would it be possible to let people tag other people's FF posts?

You can at the moment - there's an "add tag" option where the tags are on the post. Or at least I have an "add tag" option, and used it successfully the other day.
posted by scorbet at 1:57 AM on December 15, 2021

I believe that only works on posts where you are the author.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:09 AM on December 15, 2021

That doesn't seem to be the case. I just looked at a few random FanFare posts and I have 'add tag' for all of them.
posted by Stacey at 5:37 AM on December 15, 2021

Sorry I was a bit unclear. I added the club tag on this post (not mine) and at least from what I can tell it worked. The only difference I see is that I have the option of removing it again (and not the rest of the tags).
posted by scorbet at 5:39 AM on December 15, 2021

Huh, I don't see that option on that post (or any others). Maybe club membership matters?

I'm using the modern theme on a desktop, firefox.
posted by trig at 6:18 AM on December 15, 2021

On Android, the "Add Tag" button is there, but you cannot successfully use it unless it's your post. Also cannot use it in Chrome for Windows.

In both cases, I get a "Couldn't add your tag." message.

In both cases, I can use the "Add Tag" button successfully on posts I made myself.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:51 AM on December 15, 2021

That's odd. After trying out, I can add a club tag on someone else's post and remove it again, but I can't add other tags. I get the same message in that case. So it looks like the functionality is there, but it's limited to club tags?
posted by scorbet at 7:03 AM on December 15, 2021

You can add tags on the posts of mutual contacts on any subsite. Is that what is happening here?
posted by Rock Steady at 1:31 PM on December 15, 2021

Just adding that I tried it (logged in, of course) on Android on both firefox (with noscript, but totally whitelisted) and chrome (no extensions), and I'm not getting any "Add Tag" UI. Modern theme throughout. The only place I do see it is on the one Fanfare post I made (and I get an "Add tag" link, not a button - is that what everyone else is talking about?)
posted by trig at 1:29 AM on December 17, 2021

And I get an "Add tag" link, not a button - is that what everyone else is talking about?

Yes - I get an "Add tag" link which, if clicked, gives me a box to enter a tag, and a button to add it. I see this on every Fanfare post (on Chrome on Android, iOS and PC). However, as mentioned above, I can only add a club based tag on any of the posts I tried, none of the other tags I attempted worked. (I tried several posts, none of which were created by contacts.)
posted by scorbet at 3:36 AM on December 17, 2021