MetaTalk posts tagged with alerts

Pagination and Alerts

marienbad — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 08:33:13 -0800

The recent Malheur threads were huge, and my browser struggled to cope with them. I would like to propose pagination. And alerts to notify people of active threads. On the Malheur threads I had this strange effect where, when I mouse-overed a link, it would move up a few pixels but also leave the bottom of the characters in place, giving them a strange doubling effect. It also took ages to load the page, even with the "load more comments" refresh. This didn't happen in the past, even though my current laptop has way more memory and power than my old computers. I know pagination has come up in the past, and would be interested to hear from staff and Mefites whether they feel this is an idea whose time has now come. Also, in the second Malheur thread, it was quiet for a while, and then it all went crazy when the FBI moved in. I got lucky, I was reading the thread and just as I got to the end people were posting about how the FBI had moved in, and links to the phone streams with Fiore. Someone even commented about sending out alerts to people who had participated in the thread, but there was no way to do this. And then, the next day, someone else commented something like "why didn't you guys tell me this was going down?" So is there any way we could institute an alert system? It wouldn't have to be in mefi, and I am not technical, so I don't know how this could work, but could we use twitter, or if this then that or something, so people can be alerted when a silent thread takes off again? I am not sure how this would work, and again, don't think this should be on mefi, but surely there would be a way to do this. Like, say, add $thread to my alerts, when there are more than x comments in a minute in $thread alert me?

IRL Regional Event Alerts

pb — Fri, 15 Jan 2016 14:29:34 -0800

Today we added the ability to make an IRL event regional so that IRL alerts for the event go out to a wider audience. And now in addition to letting us know what distance you consider nearby, you can let us know what distance you consider regional. A few months ago we had a discussion about some problems with IRL alerts and regional events: Pony Request: IRL Regional Meetup tools. For destination events like camping or festivals where people drive hundreds of miles, there wasn't a good way to notify a wider group of people via IRL alerts that the event was posted. We just added an option to make an event regional when you post a new IRL event. This will send the alert about the event to a wider group of folks based on a new Regional is x miles setting in site preferences. We’ve set the default regional alert distance to 300 miles, but that's going to be too big or too small for some folks. So just click Preferences at the top of the page and set what you feel like is a good distance for destination-style events you might be interested in. (Need to convert between miles and kilometers? Google works well!) - Don’t care about regional events? That's ok, you can set your regional distance to zero, and you'll only be notified about events that fall inside your Nearby radius, regardless of whether the event organizer marks them as regional. - Want to turn off IRL notices entirely? You can do that by unchecking the Receive IRL alerts? in your Preferences. - Don’t currently use IRL alerts? You’ll be unaffected by the change. If you decide you’d like to try them out, check Receive IRL alerts? in your Preferences. Regional events at IRL have been posted a few times each year and we don't expect that volume to change, but we’ll monitor use of the new Regional feature to make sure folks are using it appropriately, and provide feedback as necessary. We hope this new alert system helps more people participate in regional events when they do happen.

Pony request: IRL Regional Meetup tools

hippybear — Fri, 16 Oct 2015 09:22:19 -0800

At a recent MeFi regional campout, there was some discussion about the need for the ability to post campouts that can somehow be regional. As in, it would have been helpful for this campout to be announced to IRL-interested folks who live in Portland, Seattle, and areas of eastern WA and OR, people who might not have their IRL radius set very wide because they mostly want to do local meets, but a big annual thing like this might be of interest even if it involves travel. The immediate work-around suggestion is, of course, to post the meet at its actual location and then get people in the individual areas to post IRL pages that all point to the actual meet page, sort of dummy pages to get people's attention. But it would be nice to have some ability to designate certain meets as "regional" and then somehow be able to select IRL "locations" in which to announce the meet. I could also see a need for sometimes maybe national meet announcements, such as if MeFites wanted to arrange to find each other at one of the major music festivals. Or, as a historical example, we've talked about doing a major MetaFilter camping trip or something. I'd preemptively suggest that there be a moderated queue for such things. I wouldn't necessarily see the need for moderation of the regional meets unless it becomes obvious it's getting abused. Does this seem like something that is a peculiar interest for this one corner of the US because we have this annual campout thing we're trying to do? Or would this be a more generally useful feature for IRL to have in general?

IRL alerts still buggy?

scody — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 17:06:45 -0800

IRL alerts still buggy? I proposed a Los Angeles meetup earlier today, and just received a MeMail from a fellow L.A. Mefite to tell me that he didn't receive the usual IRL notification. I'm not following up in this thread because it seems like there may be a separate issue from what we discussed there as the possible culprit (i.e., accidentally setting the location at first for Hollywood, FL, rather than Hollywood, CA). Is there a ghost in the (meetup) machine? Or is it (bizarrely enough) just L.A.? FWIW, I did receive the auto-confirmation after I posted it.

Bug with IRL alerts?

dobbs — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 08:51:51 -0800

Bug? At last night's meetup in Hollywood, multiple attendees remarked that they did not get an IRL alert even though they've enabled it and have (sometimes) gotten alerts in the past. (More than half of the attendees showed because I memailed them about it.)

IRL Alerts

pb — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 11:38:50 -0800

Introducing: IRL Alerts. Find out when someone posts an IRL event taking place near you via MeFi Mail. Ever since we launched IRL in August we've had a steady stream of requests for making IRL events more visible. We've discussed several options, weighed their pros and cons, and decided to go with nightly MeFi Mail Alerts. Around midnight Pacific Time, the server will check and see if any new events have been posted near you within the last 24 hours. If so, you'll get a MeFi Mail listing the events. The alerts will include all event categories and proposed events. If that sounds like something you'd like to get, here's how you can turn on IRL alerts:

Make sure you set a longitude/latitude for your profile if you haven't already.
Check the value for Nearby is in your site preferences to make sure it's realistic. The default is 100 miles, but "near" will be wildly different depending on where you live. (Google is a handy way to convert km to miles if you need to.)
Check the new "Receive IRL alerts?" option in your site preferences and click "Save your Preferences" at the bottom of the page.

That will tell us you want IRL Alerts. If you have the option checked to "Forward MeFi Mail to email?" you'll also receive IRL Alerts in your email inbox. And of course IRL Alerts won't be an option if you don't have a longitude/latitude set or if you have MeFi Mail disabled. Post here if you have any questions, concerns, or problems. Thanks!

AskMeFi Tag Alert?

Bora Horza Gobuchul — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 15:19:46 -0800

A rainbow-brite pony request: AskMeFi tag alerts, sent via MeFi mail or sidebarred? I really like answering AskMeFi questions, but I tend to restrict myself to those for which I have personal experience, or are within my area of expertise. I'm finding that with the frequency of my visits to AskMeFi (about every three to five days), I have too many questions to look through. The existing sidebar in Ask is very good, but I'd like to be able to drill down to my particular fields quickly ("woodworking", "Mac", "web design", "films" etc.) I know such a system would lose some accuracy (as some askers wouldn't think to tag their questions in ways that match my expectations), would increase server load, and remove some of the serendipity of the AskMeFi experience... but it could also create greater engagement, too. My apologies in advance if this is something that's already been considered, or if there's a method to achieve it at my end that hasn't occurred to me.

Are we allowing doubles now?

anastasiav — Sun, 21 Sep 2003 23:04:20 -0800

Matt, has the policy on double-posts changed?
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