MetaTalk posts tagged with favorites

Favorite Posts in the Last Year?

I am the Walrus — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 11:12:21 -0800

Can it be added to see: "Most Favorited Posts in the Past 365 days"? Since it is the end of the year, and I am seeing the "Best of 2009" stuff everywhere, it sure would be neat to see a Mefi best of the past year. I regularly use the Popular Favorites; is it possible to add a new option for the past year, both for the blue and the green?

Most Favorited Posts By Year?

entropicamericana — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 13:07:31 -0800

Now that MeFi has over a decade under its belt, can we get "Most Favorited Posts in the Past Year?"

Can you beat 5.47482014?

dirtdirt — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 09:59:37 -0800

What thread has the highest T number, where T is 'number of favorites given to comments' divided by 'number of comments'? That Sexy Geeks thread got me thinking about it. There's a comment with 53 favorites right out of the gate, a bunch of big ones and a 100 something a bit later on. It seemed like a lot of favorites getting thrown around. I clumsily crunched the numbers on threads on the front page with more than 100 comments (an arbitrary limit, but since I'm doing this sort of manually I wanted SOME threshold). Sexy Geek: 139 comments, 761 favorites, 5.47482014 Dragon Sex: 149 comments, 489 favorites, 3.28187919 I am Tiger Woods: 157 comments, 412 favorites, or 2.62420382 Twitter: 113 comments, 221 favorites, or 1.95575221 Dr Who: 111 comments, 137 favorites, or 1.23423423 Nothing serious,and I'm not trying to start any sort of favorites war, this was just an "having a hard time working on work while everyone else is still on vacation" thing. The thematic similarities among those first two (three?) threads do crack me up though. I wonder if that sort of tendency would stand up to a larger study by someone who can actually use the infodump. Oh, the T is for tehloki.

Can I limit my favorites by category?

youcancallmeal — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:38:09 -0800

Miniature pony request: The ability to see categories while looking at favorites. For example, I'd like to be able to see all of the 'food and drink' posts that I've favorited. The trouble is, when I go to my favorites page, the categories don't seem to show up on the posts. Or am I just missing something?

Can we have a Fuzzy Favorites option

JDHarper — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 08:56:04 -0800

Minor Favorites Pony Request: has favorites, lots of favorites, favoritest In the last podcast (at 09:17), jessamyn mentioned that she has a greasemonkey script that replaces the numerical favorites with "has favorites," "lots of favorites," and "favoritest." I think I've tracked down the original greasemonkey script, but I was wondering if we could get that baked in as an option in the profile panel too. I don't know if you'd want to have that replace the current "has favorites" option, which seems half way to fuzzy favorites already, or you might want to add it as it's own option. Don't worry about it if it's a huge ordeal to add. Thanks for considering it!

47: Creepypasta

mathowie — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:57:05 -0800

Our last podcast of the year was recorded on December 11th and covers the last month or so on the sites including the charity drive/raffle and the favorites kerfuffle. It runs about an hour long, with notes inside. 100k user raffle charity drive (video of the raffle pulls) MeFi Music douce nuit by nicolin Texas 89 by crapples MeFi Jobs Tenure Track Faculty position in New Media MeFi Projects The Secret of Invisibility comic book by interrobang Bart's Blackboard by McGuillicuddy Wallet Garden by Alt F4 How is boo_radley's performance in Team Fortress 2? StackOverflow-like cooking site by kbrower3 (posted to MeFi) MeFi Posts How to Start Reading Comics Bop the Alligator successor to Rocky's Boots Grand Canyon 1983 Mapping the Choose Your Own Adventure books (featuring beautiful visualizations and script to change spelling) Holiday stuff: Cookie Exchange and MeFi Shops DARPA Challenge (MIT won, we came in 26th out of 40?) Secret Quonsar 2009 Muppets do Bohemian Rhapsody Great comment from a former casino employee about big gamblers Mike Rowe TED talk on Dirty Jobs and honest work Ask MetaFilter Questions Christmas presents for under $20 also Gift Ideas on the MeFi Wiki Is cheating cheating in Clue? Show me videos that make me cry / show me stuff that is super creepy (creepypasta) Google Wave, can anyone explain it? (Google Wave whiteboard comic) etc terrapin's one year on the farm time lapse Meeting MetaFilter

You've got your Facebook in my Metafilter!

TrishaLynn — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:23:33 -0800

In taking the Favorites survey and dipping into the Mike Rowe/TED Talk thread, I discovered something completely new about how I use them. One of the things I dislike about Facebook is how you can't "dislike" anything because it feels as if they don't want to encourage actual discussion there. I don't have a lot of time to read MeFi extensively and often end up chiming in after 20+ comments or a day goes by, so I don't know if the people whose thoughts I'm responding to are actually still reading the thread. The thing I found myself doing was as I read the entire thread, I'd go, "Agree with that guy, disagree with that, etc." but I could only "leave feedback" with the people I agreed with by marking their comment as a favorite. If I did the same with the people I disagreed with, then it would sound like I agreed with them when I certainly didn't. Anyway, I think an agree/disagree option might be a good thing because it would let people know who disagrees with them but don't have time to explain why and they can MeMail for more details if they're really curious. Thoughts? (Disclaimer: I'm fairly new to the blue, please don't hurt me if this has been discussed before?)

Comment instead of thread number in Fuzzy Favorites.

Monday, stony Monday — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:29:42 -0800

On this activity page, the "more" on the first item links to http://www.metafilter.com/2839866/We-know-what-happened-because-he-said-yes#2839866; unfortunately, we haven't reached 2.8M posts on MetaFilter. Also, the same comment appears as item 3 of the list, but this time the "more" link works (gets to the right comment in the existing thread). Windows 7; FF 3.5.5; logged in.

November Favorites Experience concludes. New preferences! Survey! Discuss!

cortex — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:36:15 -0800

November is over, and favorites are back to normal. In addition, we've got a couple related things to mention: a survey about the November exercise and favorites in general, and a couple of new display options for folks who want to alter the default favorites view. Survey You can get to the survey here; we tried to keep it relatively short while covering some of the main points of discussion that came up during November and previously. There's a free-form field at the end of the survey, so if you feel like anything was omitted or have additional commentary, that's totally welcome. Results are tied to userid behind the scenes, so you can only take it once and the admins will know whose results are whose, but the identity of respondents will be kept secret in any results we share. If you run into any bugs with the survey, let us know here as well. Display options The new options can be reached from the Preferences page, under the "Comments favorite style" option. The three options are: - Show Favorite Counts (the classic style, and the default for everybody) - Show "has favorites" (the November exercise's default) - Hide Favorites (no indicator of favorites at all in comment bylines) Note that in "has favorites" mode you can mouse over the text for a favorite count if you want to peek without a clickthrough to the favorites list. General discussion It's been an interesting month; there's been a lot of discussion in the Oct. 31 announcement thread and a more recent thread from a few days ago, if you missed those. And now that November's over and things are back to normal, this seems like a good time for folks to discuss the whole experience and talk about what they got (or didn't get) out of it. Have at it.

Favorites in December

aniola — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:57:26 -0800

Woot! Favorites are back. I think I missed them.

This is a thread for discussion of November's favorites experiment.

lalex — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:15:33 -0800

This is a thread for discussion of November's favorites experiment. The favorites experiment is ending in three days, and the old thread is kind of long. I thought it would be nice to have a new thread for people to post their impressions of how the experiment affected the tenor of discussion, the usage of favorites, and their general usage of the site.

Yay. Another favorites discussion.

yhbc — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:28:41 -0800

Maybe we shouldn't be able to favorite our own comments?

Favorite counts went away again

xmutex — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:05:40 -0800

WTF? I turned back on favorite counts and now it's back to showing me "has favorites" WHAT GIVES METAFILTER?

Has Favorites

Mike Buechel — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:27:47 -0800

I just noticed "has favorites". When did that start and why? Just about every post has favorites, doesn't it? Personally, I liked the old system better. I just read the number of favorites and I knew whether or not I should favorite it too. The way it is now, how am I supposed to know what's good or bad without actually going in and counting them?

How many times was this post faved? Who knows?

kingjoeshmoe — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 10:28:07 -0800

Can we vote about this new favorites policy? I'm speaking, of course, about the fact that you now can't tell how many people have favorited a comment. All favorited comments, whether favorited once or a thousand times, only show "[faved +]"* I understand the reasoning, but it seriously breaks usability for me. Look, I come late to the party sometimes. I'll come to metatalk and there are 350 comments on the latest allegation of sexism or racism. I can't read them all, or even most of them. So I look for the greatest hits version, and I leave knowing I haven't missed anything huge. I can't do that anymore. My only options now are to read at random, read just the beginning and miss late valuable comments, or read the end and miss the early ones. This is not ideal. I understand the desire to make this more of a community and less of a popularity contest, but some comments really are more valuable than others. I would have clicked right by this reading the thread on my own. I don't want to miss that. I thought the lack of a downvoting feature was a nice compromise. You get community approval for well-taken and insightful comments and anecdotes, but no group rejection. Anyway, I'm sure you've thought about this a lot, and maybe it's a done deal, but it's one that makes me unhappy. Can we reconsider? * In copying and pasting this, I see that the number of favorites is still there, just hidden. Was this intentional so that someone can write a greasemonkey script? If so, anyone know how to write a greasemonkey script? Ideally one that plays nice with this?

November is National Let's Try Obscuring Favorite Counts Month

cortex — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 12:02:17 -0800

For the month of November, we're going to try an experiment with how favorites are displayed. [Note: if this whole experiment is driving you crazy, here's a note on reverting the changes.] One of the recurring discussions about favorites is whether or not it's a good idea to display favorite counts on comments. There have been a few proposals over the years to modify how that works, and we're going to try putting some of those ideas into action for the month of November to see how things feel. Here's what we're going to do: 1. We're removing the number-of-favorites indicator from comment bylines. 2. We're replacing the word "favorites" with "faved" for those comments that have one or more favorites attached to them. This will link to the list of favorites for a comment just as the traditional "x favorites" link always has. [After a bunch of feedback, we've changed "faved" to "has favorites". -c] 3. We're including the favorite count invisibly in the byline still, so that those who specifically want to use that information or to write/modify scripts affected by it can do so. 4. All other aspects of the system will remain as is, so various less-visible parts of the site that deal with favorites should be unaffected. And that's the plan. Here's where we're coming from on this: We've talked about how to do this for a while now behind the scenes (and in previous Metatalk threads), and the plan above feels like the best compromise we could think of to address some of the concerns folks have expressed over the years while retaining what we see as the considerable utility of the favorites system itself. Removing the count is the key thing. It's an attempt to address the concern that visible favorite counts on comments may be interpreted as voting system, while still keeping the transparency-of-favoriting function of a visible marker and a favorites list link intact. We're not removing the favorite counts from posts; the concerns about the effects of the favorites system have almost universally been regarding comments, and so we're just focusing on that for this experiment. The change from "favorites" to "faved" is in part a change just to make it clearer that there is a change, for folks who may not be as attentive to Metatalk or site UI details. We've also tried to come up with something shorter than "favorites" just to reduce the byline length a little bit, while keeping it clearly readable and clickable. If folks have suggestions for alternative link text to "faved", we're happy to hear ideas. This change will probably break various scripts that depend on specific formatting of the byline, which we're aware of but don't have any real help for. At the end of the day, we need to reserve the right to tweak the site's UI. However, by including the favorite count information in the source, any script that needs access to it can be modified to get at it, and any script that doesn't need access to that info can just be modified to work with the new layout. (And given that this is an experiment, any changes to scripts should probably be treated for now as just an experimental fork.) We think a month is long enough for folks to get more or less used to the change and develop an opinion about whether its a net improvement or not and whether there are any serious unintended consequences, etc. We're going to go ahead and launch it in the next 24 hours, and we're happy to hear feedback and suggestions in this thread now and throughout November.

how did I get here?

lalex — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:19:13 -0800

ProbablyReallyObvious Filter: While perusing the MetaFilter front page, I clicked something that led me to this extremely useful two column layout of popularly favorited comments and links. What did I click on?

Favorite cloud

bigmusic — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:56:38 -0800

Suggestion:We have a tag cloud - how about a favorites cloud? Popular favorites are great, but often I'd like to find things that are only moderately popular.

Can't add a favorite from the pop. favorites page...

disclaimer — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 11:17:09 -0800

stupid "popular favorite" question of the day: why can't I "add to favorites" from the popular favorites page? OK talk to you later.

n Favorites in the last 24 hours

qsysopr — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:40:06 -0800

Under popular favorites why is there "n favorites in the last 24 hours"? Is that of interest to any of you? I'd rather see " n answers in the last 24 hours", so I know whether or not I should revisit a thread.

URL problem in "my favorites"

flod logic — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:49:59 -0800

There's a bug in the links on the MetaTalk "my favorites" tab. On the my favorites tab of MetaTalk, the date/time link to all the favorited threads (for example, "Jul-7-09 at 9:16 PM") is messed up. The first part of the URL goes to http://metatalk.metafilter.com.metafilter.com.

Sorting search results by number of favorites?

Rhaomi — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:05:19 -0800

Pony request: We can already sort the posts and comments in search results by date or by relevance. Would it be possible (or even desirable) to sort by the number of favorites each item has? A lot of people bristle when favorites or best answers or user numbers are suggested as a way to judge the value of things on the site. Thinking in those terms makes it too easy to reduce healthy community interaction into a numbers game. I generally agree with this. It would be a bad idea to filter or rank a comment thread by the number of favorites, for instance, because it would obstruct the flow of the conversation and encourage people to try to compete to make the top of the list. Likewise, showing how many best answers a user has is iffy because it might make the assignment of best answers more acrimonious. But the effects that such number-crunching has on the community is less pronounced in search, because the thing being ranked is a unique collection of disparate, mostly archived content being viewed by one person looking for something specific -- not an ongoing discussion in one place viewable to everybody. In fact, emphasizing favorites in search would be useful, since they often mark the content deemed by the community to be the most significant, insightful, clever, or helpful. They'd really help in searching AskMe, for example, by highlighting best answers as chosen by the community in cases where the asker didn't choose one. It would also return the questions that generated the best responses (like the super-helpful or Big Idea questions that typically make the podcast). And it would help in searching FPPs by identifying high-quality posts that impressed the most people. As an example of this in action, consider someone interested in learning more about Abercrombie & Fitch. Sorting by date isn't very useful for this kind of browsing, as the results would constantly change over time. And sorting by "relevance" frankly doesn't give very relevant results. But if there was an option to sort by favorites, the top result would likely be this stellar comment giving a revealing insider's look at the company. It was all about Abercrombie, received 150+ favorites, and made the sidebar, but when a search for "abercrombie" is sorted by relevance it is buried on page 17. Another example: Astro Zombie's amazing Pixar story. One of the most favorited comments ever, certainly one of the best Pixar-related ones, but it doesn't show up on the first few pages of a relevancy search for the company. I'm sure there are plenty of other cases where sorting by favorite count would pull up excellent content that a relevance search ignores. I, for one, would be fascinated in seeing the most popular comments on random topics (Red Sox, Apollo 11, Australia...) So, thoughts? Would this work as a sorting option?

Unfavorited?

AzraelBrown — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:09:49 -0800

Just the curiosity of a self-obsessed "Favorited by others" watcher: I've noticed, on a couple occasions, my 'favorited by others' number will drop by a couple digits. Not a lot; I think the last time it was from 95 to 93 or something. I'm not favorited often, and I don't think I've had any posts deleted recently, so I find it odd. Can somebody "anti-favorite" you, or are things being deleted in older stuff than I've noticed?

Could the Layout of Favorites Be More Unified and Clearer?

WCityMike — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:14:44 -0800

There are about six different places where favorites live, and I often find myself confused as hell as to the differences between the various tabs and links. There are about six different places where favorites live: the Popular item on the first line of menu items, the Favorites on the second line of menu items, two of the five tabs on the right on the main page, and two of the five tabs on the left on the Recent Activity tab. We have Popular Favorites, but we also have a different Popular Favorites. We have a tab named "My Favorites" which is entitled "Favorites from WCityMike," which to me implies authorship (e.g., if an ad says a film is from writer J.J. Abrams, he wrote it), but they're things that I've favorited. We have Recent Comments, whose displayed content inside the tab isn't comments – and which almost looks identical to (but admittedly isn't) Recent Posts. Similarly, the displayed content inside the My Comments tab isn't comments either, but posts – presumably posts in which you've commented, but I'm not exactly clear on what criteria posts posted there have been chosen. It's polite when you bitch to have a solution at hand, and I'd like to have one so as to be constructive, but I really don't. I just feel that the current situation is all over the site's layout and really confusing to boot. Does anyone else find it confusing, and if so, does anyone have any ideas for how things might be altered to be clearer? By the way, I'm grateful to everyone who works to keep the site up and functioning in all its capacities. I don't mean this question to imply otherwise.

New Greasemonkey hack for MeFi and other sites

mathowie — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 12:02:36 -0800

This is a kinda cool concept applied to MeFi: background bars for posts and comments (based on favorites) I'm not much of a greasemonkey user (I find it makes firefox crashy), but I've tried quite a few MeFi favorites highlighter type hacks, but this one does it in a less obtrusive way -- the longer the background bar on a poster's name, the more favorites it has garnered. It's an easy way to spot the popular/good stuff without the massive highlights some other scripts do.