Once per seven days or once per calendar week?

February 18, 2005 3:27 PM

Once per week questions: Once per seven days or once per calendar week? Did I miss something on the first post page that said if I post, I can't post again for the next 7 days? (I'm normally attentive, but the first I noticed about this was just trying to post and being denied). Is once per week really appropriate on AskMe? Questions tend to bunch up, but then there are long quiet periods - how about no more than 4 times per month instead?
posted by Caviar to Etiquette/Policy at 3:27 PM (16 comments total)

This question was discussed earlier this week.
posted by anapestic at 3:29 PM on February 18, 2005

It's once every 168 hours to the second of your last post, because it's really easy to calculate that and I don't have to keep track of big windows of time either in more complex calculations or separate posting tables.

Once a week really is appropriate for ask mefi I've found. We've got about 5k active participants posting away, and yesterday saw 50 something questions, many with fewer than five answers. That's too many. The time limit was added to cut down on folks using it more than once a week.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 3:32 PM on February 18, 2005

it was? I searched for "once per week" and nothing recent came up. Something about time limits on Metatalk that wasn't really relevant.

Anyway...

Of course, I understand that throttling the load on both the number of questions and on the server in performing the former are important. I'd just like to register that as an otherwise very appreciative user, I find that I'm unduly annoyed by this particular limitation. If I have to live with that, that's fine too.

(On a somewhat related note, since this just came up and I can't ask another Metatalk question for another week, by which time I will have lost interest - why does the spell checker want to replace "Metatalk" with "mettle"?)
posted by Caviar at 3:40 PM on February 18, 2005

why does the spell checker want to replace "Metatalk" with "mettle"?

Mettle is probably the closest match in the spellchecker, it's a third party spell checker, and adding words to it (MetaTalk, snark, Mefi, etc) is either hard or impossible, if I remember correctly.
posted by Bugbread at 3:44 PM on February 18, 2005

why does the spell checker want to replace "Metatalk" with "mettle"?)
To generate more Metatalk posts regarding members making misspelling errors;P
posted by thomcatspike at 3:45 PM on February 18, 2005

There's a great spellchecker for firefox/mozilla. It's basically exactly what I offer here, with your own personal dictionary to add corrections to.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:13 PM on February 18, 2005

It was, in fact, discussed just yesterday.
posted by smackfu at 4:22 PM on February 18, 2005

Anyone want to ask a question for me? AIM: ruinationday

(say, this could be a completely useless website on the side, like the Gmail invite spooler site. Share your unused questions!)
posted by keswick at 5:06 PM on February 18, 2005

It's once every 168 hours to the second of your last post, because it's really easy to calculate that and I don't have to keep track of big windows of time either in more complex calculations or separate posting tables.

I hear there is a Firefox extension that will count down the seconds until you are eligible to post.
posted by fixedgear at 5:13 PM on February 18, 2005

We've got about 5k active participants posting away, and yesterday saw 50 something questions, many with fewer than five answers. That's too many

Boy howdy! I asked a question yesterday and was surprised at how fast it disappeared from the front page. I figure cycling time was about 13 hours. That might be fine for a question like the Alice in Wonderland riddle which can be answered quickly and easily, but I asked an open-ended question (I like X-type of books, can you recommend anymore?) with no definitive answer. It would have been nice to stay on the front page longer and rack up some more answers.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 5:15 PM on February 18, 2005

One solution to that would be to have questions be markable as "really truely finally answered", and then they would go straight to the archive page.

But now you're getting into a pretty complex system...
posted by smackfu at 5:29 PM on February 18, 2005

Personally, I think you should choose a random member (me), and if a posters post to response ratio is less than this random member (me), they're not allowed to post. Trust me, it'll work.
posted by seanyboy at 6:47 PM on February 18, 2005

Don't think it has anything to do with server load, but rather the abilty for enough people to see the question and answer. Once a week seems good, and will keep people from asking pointless questions.
posted by delmoi at 7:48 PM on February 18, 2005

I still think people should strongly consider getting six additional accounts and then they'll have a one a day limit.
posted by Arch Stanton at 9:51 PM on February 18, 2005

Yup, don't blow your load until it's important. Questions move fast enough as it is. Pretty soon we'd have people asking for 52 questions a year once they used up their month's quota, or asking for 'rollover' questions from last month. Matt's made it clear that one a week is how it's gonna be.

And is there some kind of rule that this needs to be posted every week in MeTa? Did I miss the memo?
posted by rooftop secrets at 11:42 PM on February 18, 2005

One solution to that would be to have questions be markable as "really truely finally answered", and then they would go straight to the archive page.

Already proposed and shot down. The bigger MeFi gets, the more of a problem it's going to be.

But we got categories now, which is a HUGE, HUGE, HUGE improvement. I'm sure Master Haughey is working on some kind of AxeMe layout that will better use these categories to maximize displayed questions.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:58 AM on February 19, 2005