Export Comments Counted? August 25, 2008 7:05 PM   Subscribe

I didn't realize that we could export our comments. That is fricking awesome. But what does this mean: Once you start your download, your weekly export will be counted. Counted? I don't understand.
posted by SeizeTheDay to Feature Requests at 7:05 PM (78 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite

I have no idea what that means either.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:06 PM on August 25, 2008


I think it means you're only allowed to download your comments once a week. So once you've started, don't try to stop, otherwise you won't be able to do it for another week, no matter if you got all your comments or not.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:11 PM on August 25, 2008


And yeah we could make that clearer.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:15 PM on August 25, 2008


Huh? Export how? Export why?
posted by dobbs at 7:16 PM on August 25, 2008


Mine failed part way through.
posted by orthogonality at 7:23 PM on August 25, 2008


One, one export... ah ah ah.
posted by starman at 7:24 PM on August 25, 2008 [14 favorites]


Our comments are being exported to China in exchange for cheap clothing. Didn't you know?
posted by languagehat at 7:24 PM on August 25, 2008 [1 favorite]


To try to decrease the trade deficit, dobbs. I'm sending my pithy snark to China, where it can teach some indolent youth sarcastic English.
posted by klangklangston at 7:24 PM on August 25, 2008 [4 favorites]


How about this:

"Warning: You may only download your comments once a week and clicking on the 'export comments' button counts for that one time, so don't cancel the process once it has started.

Downloading time depends on the number of comments you've made."
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:26 PM on August 25, 2008


"jonmc, you're going to want to go get a beer."
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:27 PM on August 25, 2008 [10 favorites]


Oh, if only I'd been a little faster. Now some poor Chinese boy's drollery will lack zing, preëmpted by his countryman's Book of Languagehat.
posted by klangklangston at 7:28 PM on August 25, 2008 [2 favorites]


Can we import comments? I have 100 "I'd hit it"s ready to go.
posted by found missing at 7:28 PM on August 25, 2008 [1 favorite]


"jonmc, you're going to want to go get a beer.""

You can pretty much just put that across the bottom of the site.
posted by klangklangston at 7:29 PM on August 25, 2008 [14 favorites]


Here's where the feature debuted, dobbs, and you can find the link at the bottom of your Preferences page. Don't worry, clicking the link down there won't 'count'; it sends you to this page (where the click does count).
posted by carsonb at 7:38 PM on August 25, 2008


MWAAhaahaahaa! what it really means is that when you download your comments, you set off alarm bells at NSA HQ, and get put on their watch list! MWAAhaahaahaa!
posted by Class Goat at 7:58 PM on August 25, 2008


That happens every time you log into mefi, actually.

Which is why I never log out.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:01 PM on August 25, 2008


How about this:

"Warning: You may only download your comments once a week and clicking on the 'export comments' button counts for that one time, so don't cancel the process once it has started."


Don't quit your day job.
posted by timeistight at 8:12 PM on August 25, 2008


Can we stream comments through a Flash player so that we can embed them in our blogs or post them to CommentTube, where random people can comment on our comments and build comment playlists?
posted by ardgedee at 8:15 PM on August 25, 2008 [3 favorites]


I logged out once to see what someone was talking about with the particular layout or something that non-logged-in users saw.

It was scary. I - don't want to talk about it that much.
posted by yhbc at 8:22 PM on August 25, 2008


I once logged out and I wasn't allowed to even go to the bathroom without logging in again. All I could do is unzip and then it wanted a password to continue.

I think MeFi has gotten a bit too integrated.
posted by Dipsomaniac at 8:39 PM on August 25, 2008


You get one download of comments every week. That's 7 days, got it? Don't even think about trying to export comments more often, you weaselly, 5-buck pipsqueak. Sockpuppets will do you no good here. And don't rush things; it's a busy server. We're keeping an eye on you.
posted by theora55 at 8:43 PM on August 25, 2008


in soviet russia, comments export you!
posted by pyramid termite at 8:48 PM on August 25, 2008


We were worried about the load on the server, the load on the database server, and users abusing the feature, so yeah, we put in a limit of just one download a week, which gets counted when it begins. If your download died halfway through, email us and I'll remove the 1-week limit on your export feature.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 8:50 PM on August 25, 2008


I have announced a voluntary deportation program for my comments. It is called Operation Scheduled Departure. For those comments that come forward willingly, they will have 90 days to get their affairs in order, to prepare themselves to live their lives outside of MetaFilter.
posted by found missing at 8:54 PM on August 25, 2008


I didn't realize that we could close our account. This is frickin awesome. But what does this mean: Once you start closing your account, you will die in seven days. Die? I don't understand.
posted by bertrandom at 8:54 PM on August 25, 2008


God! And to think of all the money I wasted paying a monk to transcribe an illuminated copy!
posted by Astro Zombie at 9:05 PM on August 25, 2008 [1 favorite]


1. Download Metafilter comments into a .txt
2. Rename .txt to .wav
3. Open in Winamp
4. Shit bricks!
posted by turgid dahlia at 9:16 PM on August 25, 2008 [1 favorite]


Oh my dear sweet Lord. Since I joined under the name Astro Zombie in January of 2006, I have contributed 4694 comments consisting of approximately 226,000 words. That's two and a half novel's worth of writing. Or one Stephen King book.
posted by Astro Zombie at 9:21 PM on August 25, 2008


Plus that one.
posted by Science! at 9:30 PM on August 25, 2008


And Stephen King got paid and you just paid 5 bucks.
posted by pjern at 9:32 PM on August 25, 2008


So you're saying I'm owed money?
posted by Astro Zombie at 9:36 PM on August 25, 2008


A thing is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. (Nada from me, though.)
posted by Class Goat at 9:41 PM on August 25, 2008


(Or for me.)
posted by Class Goat at 9:41 PM on August 25, 2008


So you're saying I'm owed money?

I've been authorized to offer you 10th of 1 percent of anything your comments make over $400 million after break even.



/woody allen
posted by found missing at 9:48 PM on August 25, 2008


I want to use the MarkovFilter to automatically import comments for me so I can go on a Mefi vacation.
posted by desjardins at 9:53 PM on August 25, 2008


Why can't we download comments posted since our last download? You're making us clog the tubes with this crap!
posted by Mr. President Dr. Steve Elvis America at 9:54 PM on August 25, 2008


Which is why I never log out.

Wait, there's a log out?
Cue a Hotel California parody! I know at least one's been posted!
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:51 PM on August 25, 2008


A truly brilliant person would take the database of MeFi posts and comments, and build an entirely new Markov of the web. Populated by robots.

Pancake cameras willingly forgo blighted GITMO dumping the bastard, while declawed cats are fat bicycles. Google marijuana for Apple iPod updates on Microsoft laboriously sucking. Snark threadshit pantsfish bacon crapflood. Should I eat Steve Jobs or should I punch him in the dick? Fuck kittens. Dawkins BoingBoing hacks steampunk balloon smock fetish rule 34 jonmc chili beer fries.



This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by loquacious at 11:00 PM on August 25, 2008


Nobody fakes markov very well, dammit.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:08 PM on August 25, 2008


Nobody fakes markov very well, dammit.

I dunno, your little example there sounded exactly like Cortex to me. So I am guessing you are on to something.
posted by Wolof at 12:54 AM on August 26, 2008


Nobody fakes markov very well, dammit.

What's a markov? That's just what I had for dinner.

Anyone have an antacid? *urp*
posted by loquacious at 2:04 AM on August 26, 2008


Markov? I barely know of!
posted by DU at 2:55 AM on August 26, 2008


I save my export-grade comments for other sites; I'm afraid MeFi gets my family economy standard twaddle like this.
posted by Abiezer at 3:04 AM on August 26, 2008


all of my comments have been subject to extraordinary rendition.
posted by quonsar at 4:30 AM on August 26, 2008


All of my friends use Kwine0174; brand premium economy internet comment product! Kwine0174;: the branded premium economy internet comment product that meets your needs without breaking your budget.
posted by Kwine at 4:32 AM on August 26, 2008


bork bork bork
posted by Kwine at 4:32 AM on August 26, 2008


I, like, fed mine into a word cloud generator. It reminded me of Chicken Run: "I saw me whole life flash before my eyes... it was really boring."
posted by Wolfdog at 5:10 AM on August 26, 2008


"One!" said the comment exporter.

"Von!" echoed every little old gentleman in every leather-bottomed arm-chair in MeFivotteimittiss. "Von!" said mathowie's screen also; "von!" said the screen of his moderators; and "von!" said the screen of the Astro Zombies, and the little meme repeaters on the tails of the LOLcat and troll.
posted by yeti at 5:41 AM on August 26, 2008 [1 favorite]


turgid dahlia - I'm afraid to follow your procedure as I have no wish to 'shit bricks', especially bricks of shit in wmv.
Wolfdog - 'Loading Java Applet Failed' then "Wordle applet notinited'.
Has anyone done anything useful/interesting/funny with this feature that they'd like to share?
posted by tellurian at 6:09 AM on August 26, 2008


It reminded me of Chicken Run: "I saw me whole life flash before my eyes... it was really boring."

Wordle is an awesome layout engine, and can produce some interesting results for smaller corpora, but it doesn't do anything interesting with big piles of normal conversation from fluent speakers—you just end up with a nicely laid out standard word frequency chart (minus a few super-common words that they strip out by default—articles and prepositions and such).

When I put together the Word Clouds script, I tried to correct for that by weighting individual word use against a big chunk of the overall mefi corpus—so if you use the word "like" only about as often as people in general do, it won't show up as interesting. Better yet, the same goes for site-specific jargon like "metafilter" or "FPP".

As a result of that, we get to find out that Wolfdog says "weberns" and "poincaire" and "homotopy" more than most, which is more fun than finding out that he, like every other English speaker on the planet, says "like" a lot.

Tuning for individual baseline corpora is probably beyond the scope of what the Wordle folks want to bother with, but I'd love to see them support at least weighting against a couple of English corpora: one for American English and one for British English, at least.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:09 AM on August 26, 2008


I made the language on the download page a little more sensemaking.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:13 AM on August 26, 2008


And I made a Wordle fish out of my comments after removing all the HTML that was borking it.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:24 AM on August 26, 2008


HEY, YOU SAY 'LIKE' A LOT TOO OMG
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:26 AM on August 26, 2008


I like a lot of things.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:33 AM on August 26, 2008


Cortex, you ought to consider making it possible for your statistical analysis to pass the results (perhaps a bit larger fraction from the top) to wordle's pretty layout engine. I like the felicitous little phrases and clusters that emerge when they're arranged like that.
posted by Wolfdog at 6:56 AM on August 26, 2008


Hmm. You know, one brute force way to accomplish that would be to generate a file that just repeats each word according to its weight (so if "cromulent" rates high on a users weighted word list, repeat it a hundred times in an output file; "fishpants" less common, repeat it twenty times). That, fed to Wordle, would do the trick. I'll think about it, yeah.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:07 AM on August 26, 2008


fishpants fishpants fishpants fishpants fishpants fishpants fishpants fishpants fishpants fishpants fishpants fishpants fishpants fishpants fishpants fishpants fishpants fishpants fishpants fishpants
posted by languagehat at 7:18 AM on August 26, 2008 [2 favorites]


My word cloud: $25/hr +6 641 amirite anorak attica basel bitpim blighters blue_beetle blurst brillig c_ canyonero carrot-top consitantly counter-act desjardins eight-foot election-night elimate facebook favoriting favouriting five-year-olds freakn freakonomics fv greasemonkey insufficent iphone langlais liberté momatoes monoprix moops p30 pasghetti post-crisis pourquoi shelbyville somesort tomtom truecrypt weizenbaum westphalia yorkshireman yould zig' print

I'm so proud... <sniff />
posted by blue_beetle at 8:15 AM on August 26, 2008


Alvy Ampersand: Cue a Hotel California parody! I know at least one's been posted!

Ayup.
posted by Pronoiac at 8:51 AM on August 26, 2008


I tried to export my comments once, but like heavy duty cryptography, the US government maintains strict controls over what can and can't be sent. And they determined that any efforts of mine to broadcast my works outside of the borders to the international community would be met with criminal investigations.

At least, that's what I deduced when I was given the message "This Program has performed an Illegal Operation" when I started the download on my Windows 95 machine.

I've been living underground, like a fugitive, for months now as a result.
posted by quin at 9:01 AM on August 26, 2008


I have contributed 4694 comments consisting of approximately 226,000 words. That's two and a half novel's worth of writing. Or one Stephen King book.

Only if a novel is 90,000 words long. I think you meant to say that you have written four and a half novels and that math is not your forte.
posted by Ryvar at 9:27 AM on August 26, 2008


Well, NaNoWriMo benchmarks notwithstanding, 50K is a pretty short novel.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:34 AM on August 26, 2008


Just remarking randomly, but I always hated Hotel California because it reminds me of Manos: The Hands of Fate.
posted by JHarris at 10:43 AM on August 26, 2008


Most publishers want a novel manuscript to be 80,000 to 120,000 words long.
posted by Astro Zombie at 11:34 AM on August 26, 2008


"jonmc chili beer fries" sounds like it should be on the menu somewhere like Double Down Saloon. Or somebody should set up an endowment to provide "jonmc memorial chili beer fries" at NYC meetups in the distant future. Or something.
posted by nowonmai at 11:36 AM on August 26, 2008


I am, however, legitimately terrible at math.
posted by Astro Zombie at 11:39 AM on August 26, 2008


Your golf game could use some work, too.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:52 AM on August 26, 2008


Maybe the two are related?
posted by Ryvar at 12:02 PM on August 26, 2008


God I'm snippy today, sorry about that.
posted by Ryvar at 12:02 PM on August 26, 2008


I can't actually figure out an insult in there, so I think you get a pass for surreality.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:05 PM on August 26, 2008


How dare you suggest my golf game is related to my math skills ...

Oh, you already apologized. All right then.
posted by Astro Zombie at 12:16 PM on August 26, 2008


Well, the first comment was snippy. The second was just said in a snippy tone of . . . text.
posted by Ryvar at 12:51 PM on August 26, 2008


You know who can be really snippy?

Barbers.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:08 PM on August 26, 2008


How dare you suggest my golf game is related to my math skills ...

No Zombies allowed, thank you.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:56 PM on August 26, 2008


WHEN THERE'S NO MORE TEE TIMES IN HELL...
THE DEAD...
WILL WALK THE COUNTRY CLUBS.

GREENS FEES OF THE LIVING DEAD
a film by George Romero

posted by cortex (staff) at 2:11 PM on August 26, 2008


1. Why would I want to export my comments?

B. Assuming one has a use for exported comments, why would one need to do so more frequently than once a week?

Three: Chili beer fries sound tasty.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 2:59 PM on August 26, 2008


dobbs: "Huh? Export how? Export why?"

Yeah, ditto. It's like shitting in buckets and leaving them around the house. My comments, anyway.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 7:21 AM on August 27, 2008


Sometimes you want to be able to just sort through your shitbuckets in the text editor of your choice. (Or do fun data crunching.)
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:36 AM on August 27, 2008


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