Filtering favorites by tag?

August 21, 2008 12:27 PM

Pony request: The ability to filter favorites by tags. Or is this already available and I'm missing something?

If I favorite a bunch of threads tagged "gardening", I'd like to be able to see all of those threads on one page, rather than having to sift through all of my favorites to find the one I want.

posted by youcancallmeal to Feature Requests at 12:27 PM (11 comments total)

Yeah, not a bad idea. We'd have to think of how to implement this UI-wise, but we could do this eventually.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:51 PM on August 21, 2008

I like it.
posted by desjardins at 12:56 PM on August 21, 2008

We've got favorite search already; one solution might be to just include tags in what's searched by that. It wouldn't be quite as clean as a tag-specific search, but it'd certainly get you to 95% without making any changes to the current interface.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:13 PM on August 21, 2008

Filtering by popularity would help too. When I was responding to this 'favorite favorites' thread, I remember thinking that it would have been real useful to organize the search results by number of favorites. For example, I was looking for the "I slept with a russian spy" post, and searched my favorites for the word "spy". If I could have then organized the results by 'most favorited', I would have found it instantly, because it would have been right at the top. This makes sense to me too, because often times the post/comment you're searching for is something that others found popular. It could also be useful when looking for something obscure, and you'd be able to get all the popular stuff out of the way.
posted by iamkimiam at 1:21 PM on August 21, 2008

Why can't there be a list on a sidebar on the favorites page of tags that you've favorited in order of prevalence? That seems like it would be easy enough to implement and would be so useful.
posted by youcancallmeal at 1:22 PM on August 21, 2008

Filtering by popularity seems like a bad idea, because it's a further step down that slippery slope of moderation by what the lowest common denominator found funny. The initial suggestion sounds good,though.
posted by dg at 2:36 PM on August 21, 2008

I'm a big fan of this suggestion. Glad to hear the people in charge are amenable.
posted by vytae at 2:43 PM on August 21, 2008

Sorry to derail... is there already an easy way to browse or search archived posts that have been sidebar'd?
posted by acro at 3:42 PM on August 21, 2008

acro - there doesn't seem to be. But since the sidebar is powered by Blogger, I'm guessing it wouldn't be too hard to make a version we could browse and search, which would be fun. I've not used Blogger in years, but assuming the sidebar is just a file published to the MetaFilter server from Blogger, mathowie could have it publish an archive to sidebar.metafilter.com or whatever; either that or publish the whole thing on blogspot and pull in the latest stuff from the feed?
posted by jack_mo at 6:20 PM on August 21, 2008

I'm not suggesting ordering by popularity. Rather, if your favorited tags could be linked to on a sidebar in decreasing order of how many related posts there are, that would rock.

ex:
Gardening (7)
NYC (5)
Vermont (3)
etc

Everyone's would be different.
posted by youcancallmeal at 7:22 PM on August 21, 2008

Hey, I asked about this a while ago. It'd be cool to actually get this pony.
posted by Phire at 8:15 PM on August 21, 2008