MetaTalk posts tagged with preferences

Pony: Option to hide "Favorited by Others" on profile?

potrzebie — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 22:31:31 -0800

I am trying to cut social-media-style dopamine hits out of my life as much as I can, and I have noticed myself checking in more than I'd prefer on my "Favorited by Others" count, and clicking through to see what comments I've made that are getting lots of favorites. I'd rather not do this, but it's a longstanding habit at this point, and it's been surprisingly difficult to kick it. Would it be possible to add a preference to hide the count and link? I was thinking about just writing a Chrome extension to do this for me at some unspecified future date when I get around to it, but given that we do have other favorites-related preferences, and given that I think I may well not be the only Mefite who'd use this preference if it existed, and also given that I sure *hope* it'd be a one-line sort of change, I figured I may as well ask if others think it'd be worth adding, and whether it's a possibility. Or, better yet, maybe this is already implemented and I just haven't found it.

MyPony request

cichlid ceilidh — Sun, 27 May 2018 14:09:20 -0800

Would it be possible to let users set My Mefi and My Ask sites as their default views when signed in? Partly to save clicks and partly (mostly on Ask) because there are some topics I'd rather not read about here. From Googling, I found a 2016 MetaTalk thread on the overwhelming number of obit posts on the blue. Some users there suggested a similar setting (plus making the sidebar visible, so they are functional front pages). It sounds like there was a mod discussion that followed.

Time zone pony request

Athanassiel — Mon, 20 Nov 2017 15:09:38 -0800

Not having updated my preferences for a while, I was a little taken aback when posting a comment today that I had somehow gone back in time two hours. I then realised it was the whole Australia having moved onto DST while the US has moved off it thing. So a small pony request: instead of having to manually adjust the time offset in terms of +/– hours from the server time, would it be possible to choose a particular time zone, so that it would automatically change along with local changes such as daylight savings? Extra bonus: avoids the interpretation that whichever time zone in the US the server lives in is the "proper time" and all the rest of us who live in different time zones are inferior variations away from the norm. Linguistically, marked/unmarked.

Profile Visibility Preferences

melissasaurus — Mon, 18 Jan 2016 09:47:38 -0800

A proposal for changing the public visibility of certain profile information. What is the proposal? Add the option for users to make the Contributions and Social sections of the profile page visible only to members. What isn’t the proposal? Hiding individual comments or posts, deleting your history, having no public profile page, or any of the things mentioned by Cortex in this comment. What would a nonmember see when looking at a profile page? Current view when logged out Proposed view when logged out (for a user that chooses this privacy preference) The logged in view would not change Why would someone want their contribution and social information visible only to members? People - particularly women - who write about or comment on social justice topics (or really, anything) are increasingly subject to harassment and threats. In addition, some users have personal circumstances - harassers, stalkers, abusive exes or family members, etc. - that mean they may benefit from having additional roadblocks to someone compiling their information. A random comment on a thread about, e.g., street harassment, sexism in the workplace, abortion, child support, or really any topic could be pulled out of context and highlighted by a Buzzfeed-esque site, a subreddit, or any random individual or group. Anyone who then takes issue with the comment can currently click through to the user’s profile and see all comments they’ve made and, in many cases, determine their real identity from that information. A small speedbump in that process would be helpful. Privacy through obscurity. This issue arose via this recent MeTa. This is a public site, people who don’t want to be found shouldn’t post anything personally-identifying, right? I imagine this will be discussed below. A lot of comments are not personally-identifying in isolation, but are identifying when aggregated with the user’s other contributions. Since someone’s credentials or personal story are often essential to a comment -- particularly on the green -- expecting members to never share those details diminishes the quality of the site’s content. But if someone wants to mine a user’s comment history for information, can’t they just [pay $5, Google it, figure out the link, etc.]? Won’t this make people feel artificially safer than they are? In the interest of facilitating a productive discussion, let’s assume that users are familiar with how the Internet works. It’s not a perfect solution, but small roadblocks, like the $5 fee, stop a lot of would-be trolls/spammers/harassers. Like with the other visibility preferences, users will be aware that the information is visible to logged-in members. Can’t people just create a sockpuppet for personal stuff? Unless a user creates multiple sockpuppets for each aspect of their persona, this seems unworkable to me. That is, answers-cat-questions-sock, answers-[profession]-questions-sock, comments-on-politics-sock, relationshipfilter-sock, comments-on-abortion-sock, identifies-as-a-woman-sock. This would, in my opinion, be similar to the Reddit throwaway model and not really “what we do here.” Also, that’s a lot of $5s. What if I don’t have these privacy concerns and/or I want my information to remain public? This is proposed as an optional feature. Folks who want some, but not all, of their contribution history hidden, could opt-in and then link to specific comments or their post history or favorites in the freeform About section. This doesn’t solve all of my privacy concerns; why isn’t your solution better? This is a single feature; a starting point that provides a minimal layer of privacy through obscurity with minimal impacts to the site ethos. Haven’t we discussed this before? See these related previous MeTas: announcement: non-logged in users can no longer see contact info. (2002) I have a question about personal info privacy concerns on MeFi (2006) All about sockpuppets, privacy accounts, Brand New Day, and other multiple-mefi account things (2012) Doxxing Policy (2012) Member websites, members only? (2013) How to make profile photo/info unfindable to an internet search engine? (2014) What is different now? The internet is changing. Doxxing, swatting, rape and death threats, and threatening people’s children are becoming more commonplace. Metafilter has made great strides in becoming less of a boyzone, but women (and other marginalized groups) are increasingly at risk of harm for merely existing on the internet. We should attempt to balance the site’s public nature with the reality of being a woman on the internet in 2016. Again, some background can be found in this recent MeTa.

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.

Time for the Biannual Timezone Offset Shuffle

pb — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 11:15:26 -0800

Daylight saving time is coming to end in Europe tonight. It is not coming to end in the US until next week. This means that if you live in a country that is doing the switch tonight, and you want posts and comments to show up in the correct local time, you'll need to adjust your site preferences. To do that, click Preferences at the top of any page and scroll down to the last option in Display Settings. Check the text that shows current server time and your preferences time and make sure your preference time is correct. If not, adjust the offset and save. Then check again to make sure it's correct. Then you'll need to set your offset back next week when the US catches up. Or you can leave things an hour off for a week. Because we store dates and times in US Pacific Time, they shift as daylight saving time shifts in the Pacific timezone. We plan to move to storing dates as UTC and gathering timezones in preferences instead of offsets but we haven't made that move yet. If you're in the US and your area observes daylight saving time you won't need to make any changes at any point. If your area doesn't observe DST, you'll need to change your offset next week. If you want to look up when and if your country observes DST, here's a handy chart of Daylight Saving Time Around the World 2013. DST shifts are already a pain and we apologize for adding to the hassle.

A new preferences option to hide titles on Mefi

cortex — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 14:03:50 -0800

We're putting together a new preferences option to toggle off titles on the front page of Mefi specifically, and we'd like some input on wording. Based on a month or so of feedback on the change toward having post titles visible on the front pages of Mefi, AskMe and MetaTalk, we've seen two major positions emerge from folks not sold on having titles everywhere: 1. Some folks would like to just not see titles on the front page of any of Mefi, AskMe or MetaTalk. We have a solution for that in place already: set the title fontsize to 0. 2. Some folks find titles disruptive on Mefi but find them helpful on Ask (and mostly don't seem to mind them on MetaTalk either). That's what this new preference option is for: a compromise that gives that group the option of splitting the difference without having to use an external hack to accomplish it. At this point we're mostly just not thrilled with any of the phrasing we've come up with for the preference option, since it's a really small footprint on that page for labels, so we'd like some feedback/suggestions specifically on that front. You can see a few possibilities (and get a sense of the space issue) in these examples: - Hide titles on the www.metafilter.com front page? - Hide titles on www.metafilter.com? - Hide titles on www.metafilter? The tricky part is that the intent is pretty clear in the context of a thread like this one, but we'd like it to not be mystifying to someone coming to that preference page pretty much cold. That "Mefi" and "Metafilter" can refer to both the site as a whole and specifically just the blue, and "front page" can likewise mean the front page of a given subsite or the front page of the blue, is also a little tricky here. So, opinions? Ideas?

Reminder: Please update your Mefi contact email if it's getting moldy

taz — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 09:00:32 -0800

This is just a PSA to remind you that we use the email you have attached to your account to answer contact emails from you (unless you change it manually in the email field on the contact page), and sometimes to get in touch with you if there is a problem with a post or comment, so please make sure that it is a working address. You can change or update your email in your profile preferences under "Contact Preferences," as well as choose whether you want it to be visible to other users, and if you want Mefi mail forwarded to your email. On our end, we only use your email to contact you about site issues specific to you, or to respond to a contact form query; member emails are never used for any other purpose, and never disclosed to anyone else. Related to this, the contact form is the best, most efficient way for us to respond to site problems and requests since it comes to all of us, so someone can respond right away. Moderator schedules vary, but we answer every legitimate contact form mail from a member (barring occasional, rare oversights or special circumstances) right away. If you contact us via the contact form and don't hear back, check your spam folder to make sure that our response didn't go there. Responses come from the individual emails of the moderators who answer. Thanks!

Title customization options added

mathowie — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 10:00:07 -0800

As a compromise over the recent release of titles, we've added the ability to set your title font faces and sizes just like the body and byline fonts/size options on the preferences page. This feature will let you change the size (works best to decrease if you're in a smaller viewport), it will let you change font faces (works best when body faces are already customized), and also offers the option to hide them on front pages (of www, ask, metatalk) if you set the size to zero. As always, preferences are cookie-based so this will work per-device at the moment you save your preferences page. So if you'd like the Plain Theme and no titles on your mobile device, you can set that and save it, and still have the default theme and titles on your desktop computer. I do want to also take a moment and say that we made a change and didn't communicate it well beforehand. That's my fault and I'm sorry. Second, whether you love it or hate it, we're very appreciative of the feedback and thoughtful responses to the ideas in Monday's thread. In the future, big changes like this will not be launched without communicating to the community first, floating ideas for feedback, showing mockups where appropriate, and getting more feedback before releasing to the site.

Is there an ignore/block function? Should there be?

désoeuvrée — Fri, 25 May 2012 16:17:54 -0800

Am I correct that there is no option to block/ignore all posts from a particular member? If so, could I please request that as a feature? I realize that if it's not a feature, there's probably a good reason for that, but I figured I would put in a request.

Can we increase the amount of space allowed for specifying our "favorite tags" for controlling what is shown in My AskMefi and My Mefi?

philipy — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 09:55:02 -0800

Can we increase the amount of space allowed for specifying our "favorite tags" for controlling what is shown in My AskMefi and My Mefi? I like to use tags to filter what is shown on those pages, and I like to use a large number of narrowly focused ones. That means I bump into the 800-char limit, which lets me have 90-100 tags. Any chance of increasing that limit? If it helps, I don't need different tags for Mefi and AskMefi. In fact I would prefer if I only had to specify tags once, and the same ones were used for both. These features are especially useful to me when I haven't been spending much time on Mefi and want to quickly scan days or weeks worth of entries for ones that are especially relevant to me.

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!

Timezone fix

defcom1 — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 21:34:33 -0800

Timezone offset feature fix request in profile customization I'm in GMT +9:30 , can there be a +16.30 offset on the server time? (in the website settings Or conversely, switch the time selection to be standard GMT offset instead of server offset, including all the vagaries of Daylight Saving?

Show favorites in Ask only, hide them everywhere else

insouciant — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 02:17:56 -0800

Tiny favorites pony: a preference setting to show favorites only in Ask? I enjoy reading Mefi proper without the favorites displayed. It takes away the focus from highly-favorited snark/one-liners/etc. and lets me enjoy the whole conversation without my eyes wandering to the favorites count of a comment. But I miss them in Ask, where they play more of a "Yes, this is good advice"-role and are more helpful. Could there be a setting in the preferences to show favorites in Ask only and hide them everywhere else on the site?

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.

Edit this.

dawson — Sun, 04 May 2008 23:11:46 -0800

Here is an opportunity to mock stupidity! I imagine this is crystal clear to most, but I'm clueless, which probably means leave it alone. But what, in edit mode, do "MefiQuote preferences" and "Contact contribution display preferences" mean and how does one utilize them? I just ate a bowl of dicks, so perhaps you can suggest something to drink instead?

Why aren't my preferences saved globally?

desjardins — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 06:37:00 -0800

Are preferences saved per machine only? I have the plain background at my work computer and on my laptop, but my home desktop is the default colors even though "plain" is chosen on the preferences page for all 3 computers.

Cry JRun Cry!

blue_beetle — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 18:17:41 -0800

Blank fields for font sizes in Preferences make JRun cry. Possible SQL Injection attack point?

PonyFilter: Remove titles from URL via preference setting?

jeversol — Wed, 09 May 2007 13:32:14 -0800

PonyFilter: Can we add a preference to remove the post titles from URLs? I occasionally read Metafilter from work. I clicked the Baby playing with a snake post and had a moment of terror as I viewed the URL.

New stuff on MeFi.

mathowie — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 20:33:19 -0800

I finally fixed this, I gussied up the preferences page (more readable, easier to use), and I added inline magical youtube video streaming, which mostly works (enable it then click the icons you see on posts). Full explanation of the YouTube feature.

dhtml titles still showing up even though I don't want them to.

pwb503 — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 23:35:33 -0800

Yesterday I decided to explore editing my user profile and decided to try out the "Show dhtml link titles." Upon giving it a try I decided I didn't like it and turned it off, then saved my preferences. The dhtml titles still show up though. I just double checked and my preferences are still set to "no" for that setting. Anyone else having trouble turning these off?

Wots up with the My Comments page only lists the past 7 days?!!?

xtian — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 10:56:19 -0800

I was using My Comments to locate a previous post via my comment. Wots up with the My Comments page only lists the past 7 days?!!?

Ok, Maybe I should post more often. Then, I use search, and using my user ID I get nada. Then I used google site search with time limit of 3 months and I get posts from 2004. Oddly, this Google results page is missing the "sort by date/relevance". Same for Yahoo; no date on results sort.

Regardless, this leads me back to a simpler question. Why does the My Comments page limit the results to 7 days? Now I can't rememebr what the post was to begin with, but I would like to hear why the forced limit on this page.

-Long Time Lurker

Unexpected font size in comments

Neiltupper — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 10:09:49 -0800

When I view comments (in AskMe, MeFi, or MeTa), about half the time the called page comes up in a smaller font with ads displayed. I am logged in when this happens. This behaviour has just started in the last couple of weeks. Suggestions? (FF/XP2)

Favorites Interrupts Music

aberrant — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 09:55:23 -0800

Musical pony requests: could the "add to favorites" flag be set so that clicking it does not interrupt songs in progress, and could the volume settings be saved somewhere?

How do I change my email in my profile?

zia — Fri, 05 May 2006 10:13:02 -0800

How do I change my email in my profile?