June 14, 2004

12:16 PM

Ask Mefi update: all the questions and answers are in a new database, meaning that new features will be coming soon. First up will be links to all questions and answers on your user page, probably done tonight. Then categories, keywords, and all sorts of cool shit. Let me know if you find any errors in the meantime.
posted by mathowie to feature requests at 12:16 PM (37 comments total)

I can't load Ask MeFi actually, I get a timeout.
posted by riffola at 12:22 PM on June 14, 2004

all sorts of cool shit

Now that's a feature I can live with. Thanks!
posted by DrJohnEvans at 12:24 PM on June 14, 2004

Ok it works now. Odd.
posted by riffola at 12:24 PM on June 14, 2004

riffola: WFM.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 12:24 PM on June 14, 2004

WFM? Who Framed mathowie?
posted by riffola at 12:26 PM on June 14, 2004

"Wait for me!"

???

Anyway, this is great news.

Next up: MOJO!
posted by soyjoy at 12:28 PM on June 14, 2004

Matt, since you probably might read this thread again, I got a minor request, if you aren't going to add a Title field to Ask MeFi, could you please change the title in the RSS feed to include the poster? For example... "Question number 8000 by RandomPieChuckingGuy" instead of just "Question number 8000"
posted by riffola at 12:37 PM on June 14, 2004

"Who Fixed MetaFilter"
posted by DrJohnEvans at 12:40 PM on June 14, 2004

Well Fuck Me?
posted by Witty at 1:01 PM on June 14, 2004

PONY: I've fallen in love with the "label" concept in gmail. The notion of being able to apply a category-type label on the fly would be neat. And a label would carry more weight if more people consistently applied it. So if Shane asks a question about swedish penis pumps, and I looked at it and added the label "penis pump" and someone else added "sweden, swedish" and then a third person added "penis pump," then this question would place higher in a search for "penis pump" than it would for "sweden, swedish", and place in the top ten for someone searching for "swedish penis pump." I dunno. It seemed like a revolutionary idea until I typed it.
posted by vraxoin at 1:05 PM on June 14, 2004

I love it when good things happen!
posted by Hildago at 1:05 PM on June 14, 2004

yes, vraxoin, that's coming soon.
posted by mathowie at 1:18 PM on June 14, 2004

Whoa. Matt, you spoil us. Seriously.

Wanna go back to Iceland?

(checks wallet)

Uhhhh, okay, how about Oakland?
posted by chicobangs at 1:23 PM on June 14, 2004

http://swedishpenispumps.metafilter.com
posted by DrJohnEvans at 1:28 PM on June 14, 2004

Honestly, it's not my bag, baby!
posted by keswick at 1:34 PM on June 14, 2004

It seemed like a revolutionary idea until I typed it.

Discussed at exhausting length sometime in last coupla weeks. I leave you to find the thread!

Also : cool shit! Woohoo!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:24 PM on June 14, 2004

Crap. Apologies, #1, for not seeing this before I posted a bug I found.

http://metatalk.metafilter.com/mefi/7943
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 5:20 PM on June 14, 2004

JKF, the posts are in a new database so they won't be available at a metatalk.metafilter.com URL any longer. Eventually, the links to the threads showing up in the MetaTalk interface will be gone, replaced by a search engine working off the ask metafilter database.

So it's not really a bug at all.
posted by mathowie at 5:24 PM on June 14, 2004

what will happen to the comments posted on the metatalk version. Will they disappear, or be merged into the new version?
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 5:27 PM on June 14, 2004

I mean, the comments posted on the metatalk version after the split that occured earlier today. Obviously they are identical up until that point.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 5:27 PM on June 14, 2004

JKF, the posts are in a new database so they won't be available at a metatalk.metafilter.com URL any longer.

Ouch! How many broken inward-bound links is that? I'm always in favor of supporting/redirecting a URL more or less forever once you publish it (unless the content itself needs to come down, which isn't happening in this case).
posted by scarabic at 5:56 PM on June 14, 2004

what will happen to the comments posted on the metatalk version. Will they disappear, or be merged into the new version?

Nothing is being "lost" I'm just fixing a bug that was previously in place.

Anything and everything ever posted to Ask MetaFilter will continue to show up at ask.metafilter.com/foo, just like they always have. The metatalk "look" of ask metafilter questions was a mistake, and will be removed. If you bookmarked them that way, I suggest you change the URLs to point at ask.metafilter.com instead of metatalk.metafilter.com.
posted by mathowie at 5:56 PM on June 14, 2004

Ouch! How many broken inward-bound links is that? I'm always in favor of supporting/redirecting a URL more or less forever once you publish it (unless the content itself needs to come down, which isn't happening in this case).

Fine. All broken-ass old links to Ask MetaFilter questions that are being called up MetaTalk's template will be redirected to ask.metafilter.com instead. Sheesh.
posted by mathowie at 5:59 PM on June 14, 2004

See... I'm not sure you're quite getting my question....

But I'm also not sure that it isn't ME who is confused, so if this is a "yes, damn it, I answered you!", I wholeheartedly apologize.

I don't care about the links and the URLs. That makes total sense.

Somewhere along the line, between 9:57 and 11:18 am PST, the databases diverged. At this point, most new comments started going into the ask db. But a few comments were still entered into the MeTa db.

Case in point, every comment dated after 9:57 am PST on this thread (MeTa) DOES NOT show up on the 'duplicate' thread here (Ask). And vice versa.

I get that the MeTa link above is going to disappear, and that makes total sense, but what I'm wondering is, when the page at THAT URL is deleted, will the post-9:57 comments that are not in the "duplicate" 'ask' URL disappear as well?

(not that those are esp. crucial, but if it affected that one thread, I assume it affected others)
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 6:08 PM on June 14, 2004

There done. Redirects are in place forever.
posted by mathowie at 6:09 PM on June 14, 2004

Ah, ok, I see JKF. The problem is that I shut down the front page of ask metafilter, but left the other pages working for about an hour while I copied the database over. I suspect some folks were making comments into the old db still after I copied it, but before I rewired the pages to point at the new database.

So during an hour or two while the space was in limbo, any contributions made weren't carried over. It's not worth shutting the site down again to copy over those last few comments though, so we'll just have to live without them, sorry.
posted by mathowie at 6:13 PM on June 14, 2004

Fair enough.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 6:14 PM on June 14, 2004

In case you don't know: Searching for threads by a certain user doesn't work.

(though on preview, it looks like this may be implemented later tonight. It *appears* a script wasn't copied over, or hasn't been added yet.)

here
posted by sleslie at 7:03 PM on June 14, 2004

(ahem... i see it is being worked on now.)
posted by sleslie at 7:05 PM on June 14, 2004

cool!
thanks Matt!!!
posted by matteo at 7:07 PM on June 14, 2004

Good work, Matt. Preserving legacy URLs through an infrastructure change is no one's idea of a good time, but it's in there with all the other best practices.
posted by scarabic at 7:17 PM on June 14, 2004

Viewing all MetaTalk comments by a user shows AskMe comments also. Is that a by-product of preserving old URLs?
posted by ALongDecember at 7:18 PM on June 14, 2004

Assuming Matt's still reading this, I have a request:
In AskMeFi, upon "Preview," can the box to edit the post still remain instead of having to keep on going back?
posted by jmd82 at 7:52 PM on June 14, 2004

You mean for posting new questions, right?
posted by scarabic at 9:30 PM on June 14, 2004

Oh, yea, that's a pretty important detail!
(in other words, yes)
posted by jmd82 at 9:47 PM on June 14, 2004

The date changed, but the threads from the previous day are now listed under June 15th.
posted by riffola at 12:12 AM on June 15, 2004

Matt, frequently the spell checker, especially in MetaTalk and AskMe although I don't know why that should matter, just sits there with the little bars pumping up and down and never goes any further. Is this a bug, or just due to overloaded resources?
posted by caddis at 9:01 AM on June 16, 2004