MetaTalk

Episode 102 was recorded yesterday and completed moments before we made my retirement post live so things are a little weird and scattered since I didn't know how people would take it yet. It runs about 90min long and covers the month of February on the site. [more inside]
posted by mathowie on Mar 5, 2015 - 64 comments

After 16 years of doing a bit of everything under the sun here, I’m stepping away from the day to day of running MetaFilter and moving into the background. Never fear, I’m leaving it in the best of hands and things are looking good for the future. [more inside]
posted by mathowie on Mar 4, 2015 - 944 comments

I gussied up your user pages. Leave a note if anything is broken and throw a screenshot up on flickr if you spot any show-stopper visual bugs. Danke!
posted by mathowie on Dec 6, 2006 - 131 comments

Hey everyone, I got 1,000 vox invites to give to users of MeFi. If you haven't checked it out yet, here is your chance (and feel free to post links to your vox page when you have some posts up).
posted by mathowie on Sep 22, 2006 - 131 comments

oops, I accidentally killed Decani's thread, which was:

A matter of idle curiosity.

Why did Meatbomb's post asking for examples of racist jokes get shat on from a great height yet this one seems to be perfectly acceptable?

I'll move the comments to this post.
posted by mathowie on Jul 31, 2006 - 56 comments

Sorry for the downtime, I was tweaking one small aspect of the server when a comedy of errors ended up with two hours of hair pulling before the server was reachable once again. Everything should be back to normal now.
posted by mathowie on Aug 15, 2005 - 10 comments

Not our most shining moment, as spotted by Leonard. Hopefully it's just holiday stress manifesting itself as assholery that'll blow over after the new year. One can hope.
posted by mathowie on Dec 22, 2004 - 223 comments

Holy mother of god. It's official, even though I was kind of worried about ponying (heh) up the dough for a couple of high ticket servers, I made enough money off the $5 signups today to pay for one year's hosting. So I want to say thanks to all the new users for ensuring the future of this place. I love ya. Some more news inside
posted by mathowie on Nov 18, 2004 - 67 comments

Moving on up... If all goes well, I'll start moving everything over to our new servers later today. When that happens, I'll be shutting the site off during the move (to conserve bandwidth for moving actual files). Just a heads up that the site may be down between now and say, Monday at the latest.
posted by mathowie on Oct 29, 2004 - 34 comments

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 on Jun 14, 2004 - 37 comments

I can finally retire on my earnings! woop!
posted by mathowie on Apr 1, 2003 - 57 comments

In an attempt to conserve resources, I've streamlined a good deal of the code for non-members, who should be getting a new flat homepage every five minutes. This shouldn't affect logged in users, but if anyone finds any problems, either post here or email me. I'm going to do the same with MetaTalk in a few minutes.
posted by mathowie on Mar 20, 2003 - 30 comments

Grab a modern browser (looks best in mozilla) and try hover over some of the links shown here in y2karl's posts. Is this annoying or informative? [code from here]
posted by mathowie on Feb 11, 2003 - 97 comments

Success! (I think)

Thanks to some in-person help, I remotely did a backup of the old, corrupted hard drive's web folders and deployed everything onto the new drive. Now that everything's back up, it all seems to be working again (disturbingly smoothly if I must say). If you find any problems, let me know here.
posted by mathowie on Jan 12, 2003 - 49 comments

News posts: done right and not so right [more inside]
posted by mathowie on Oct 29, 2002 - 17 comments

Plain text theme for MetaFilter:


Now available on the customize page.
posted by mathowie on Oct 17, 2002 - 39 comments

Is it time to call a moratorium on posts linking to typical op-ed pieces? Special ones, outlandish ones, or provacative ones are fine, but one columnist's opinion (often of the "I think he/she/it/foo is bad!" type) doesn't offer much for discussion, they rarely have much in the way of supporting evidence or links, and their appeal is wearing thin.
posted by mathowie on Aug 26, 2002 - 48 comments

quite possibly the one feature that was the longest time coming. I finally did it.

You can't double-post a comment in either MetaFilter or MetaTalk ever again.
posted by mathowie on Jul 24, 2002 - 76 comments

Just a note to future posters to MetaTalk, I've removed the option to make new posts about "general weblog-related" items, as Blogroots is a much better place to do it, and designed for that subject matter. The site is just getting off the ground but will turn into a resource that is much more fully featured than anything MetaTalk can offer. I also took the "ticketstubs related" category out as I've languished on that idea for two years and it didn't make much sense to keep it around for now. I'm planning on going back to it this summer with the hopes of finally launching it, between the code here, at sportsfilter, and blogroots, I've got everything I need already written somewhere for it.
posted by mathowie on Jun 13, 2002 - 19 comments

I improved the search "previously found" feedback. Here is what you see if you search for something that was posted less than 5 times in the database, and here is what you see if you post a URL that is in there more than that. Hopefully this will cut down on double-posts.
posted by mathowie on Nov 3, 2001 - 9 comments

Just so you know, I was in LA for the last couple days, unannounced (because I didn't want people to take advantage of it).

I guess it's pretty clear now that I spend my time cleaning crap off metafilter 24/7 these days, and now that I was away, maybe everyone can appreciate how much work it is to snub double-posts, fix html errors, and ban malicious, callous users. I'm not looking for an inbox of thank-yous or twenty brown-nosing comments on this thread, I just feel it's worth saying. Admin duties on metafilter are a lot of work and more than a full time job.

My first attempt at supporting myself with this site will launch on Monday. Some people may not like it. I made it as harmless and innocous as possible. It won't make me rich, but it'll hopefully provide enough money for server upgrades and upkeep. Keep the last couple days in mind if you find anything not to like about The New Thing That Launches Monday.
posted by mathowie on Oct 19, 2001 - 44 comments

It was like the tour de france.
posted by mathowie on Aug 5, 2001 - 10 comments

The new server is online and working great. Let me know if anyone finds any problems, I'm still adding all the subdomains (metafilter.net, ticketstubs.org - no I didn't forget about that project, fairvue.com, etc.) to server, so they should be back within an hour.
posted by mathowie on Jul 11, 2000 - 0 comments

I finally, finally, finally did the preview-before-comment-posting.

I should have done this a year ago. Sorry everyone. It should cut down considerably on the spelling/grammar/HTML errors.
posted by mathowie on Jun 21, 2000 - 14 comments

Moderation
I've been working on the image upload part of the site, and realized there's no way to limit what type of content gets uploaded.

So I've come to the conclusion that the only way to keep out off-topic scans & stories (like porn or pictures of your cat) is to induce a moderation process. Pretty much anything resembling a story along with an image of something that looks like a ticket stub will get through and posted (guidelines will be posted along with the site so this is clear).

Do you have any objections to such a setup? It would induce a bit of lag, but I don't know if submissions would be that substantial on a day-to-day basis. Also, I'll set it up so I get an email the instant something is submitted and after a simple glance at it, will approve it with a single click.

I know metafilter has always been wide open, but since this site is starting from scratch, I don't think it will affect the growth too much. Do you think it's a good or bad idea? why? Is there possibility that human intervention (i.e. me or some other possible moderators) would spoil the growth? Or would it ensure a quality site?
posted by mathowie on Jun 4, 2000 - 17 comments

How should the site be arranged and navigated? Personally, I want to see ticket stub stories of all kinds, and not have it bound to just rock concert show reviews. But that begs the question, should the first page you see have a list of entries by last posted? by category? (thinking generally here, like movies, concerts, etc), or list by author?

Since it's all in a database, the list can be any or all of them, depending on what the user wants to see, but I'm still wondering what the default arrangement should be.

What do you think?
posted by mathowie on Jun 3, 2000 - 6 comments

I just made this live, and will be adding the About MetaTalk and MetaTalk archives later this weekend.
posted by mathowie on Mar 3, 2000 - 0 comments