I'm kind of baffled as to why it doesn't already

September 15, 2008 11:59 AM

Pony: How about adding any thread that you post to your Recent Activity, rather than requiring you to comment in it?
posted by Pope Guilty to Feature Requests at 11:59 AM (19 comments total)

Have you seen the "My Posts" tab?
posted by pb (staff) at 12:02 PM on September 15, 2008

That said, it's not a terrible idea.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:04 PM on September 15, 2008

I would quite like this, mainly because I look at My Comments and I don't look at My Posts.
posted by Artw at 12:10 PM on September 15, 2008 [3 favorites]

I would quite like this, mainly because I look at My Comments and I don't look at My Posts.

This exactly. I just click "Recent Activity". It seems like since I posted a thread, it's part of my Recent Activity.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:19 PM on September 15, 2008

The "My Posts" tab doesn't seem to work - for me at least. The steamed rice ask.me doesn't show up at all. I would also like to see my recent posts added to the front page of "Recent Activity".
posted by bigmusic at 12:33 PM on September 15, 2008

Yes, it should work this way.
posted by ikkyu2 at 12:34 PM on September 15, 2008

This is a brilliant idea. Pony, please.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 12:49 PM on September 15, 2008

Shameful admission: I have responded to my own question in Ask just to get it to show up in Recent Activity.
posted by smackfu at 12:49 PM on September 15, 2008

I think we kept My Posts separate from My Comments due to it being a fairly substantial amount of querying to get the data for each page, so we thought combining them into one page would be a recipe for disaster in terms of resources, but I agree it kind of makes sense to have the recent activity have both things listed together so we'll consider combining them in the future.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:53 PM on September 15, 2008

bigmusic, "My Posts" should be working for you now. There was a glitch with changing the timeframe left over from the filtering change. Change the time to 2 weeks and you should see your Ask post.
posted by pb (staff) at 1:14 PM on September 15, 2008

yep it works now on - thanks.
posted by bigmusic at 1:50 PM on September 15, 2008

As I suggested before, I would love it if you had a tab where you could combine all three, for all of your recent activity. I understand there is a database hit for this, but it's the same hit when I check these tabs individually.
posted by grouse at 5:07 PM on September 15, 2008

Holy crap. I was just about to post a MeTa about this. Good thing I usually read things first!
posted by Deathalicious at 10:09 PM on September 15, 2008

I think we kept My Posts separate from My Comments due to it being a fairly substantial amount of querying to get the data for each page

Couldn't you just add OR Threads.thread_creator = %member% to the query[ies] in question? I mean, I'm guessing you're either pulling the most recent comments posts that that member is in and then grouping them, or doing a query of the posts the member is in, looping over them, and then outputing the comments. Either way, simply adding in that the member can either have posted a comment OR have created the thread should let the rest of the page display normally without an substantial changes other than adding something like

if (previous_comment_id > 0) then   print comments_since + ' since <a href="'+comment_link+'">your most recent comment</a>..."end if

posted by Deathalicious at 10:20 PM on September 15, 2008

Damn you Preview! Damn you to heck!

if (previous_comment_id > 0) then
   print comments_since + ' since your most recent comment..."
end if

posted by Deathalicious at 10:20 PM on September 15, 2008

Argh. You get what I mean. Hope.
posted by Deathalicious at 10:21 PM on September 15, 2008

Unfortunately it's not that simple, Dethalicious. Comments and posts are stored in different tables with different data structures, and the RA query for each is scanning six or more different tables for activity, and joining up across even more. The query grabs comment counts, new comment counts, favorite counts, and latest comment IDs with filters by site, personal filtered threads, different timeout values for different sites, and some old Ask/Meta weirdness thrown in for good measure. It's really quite a thing to behold and no change is simple.
posted by pb (staff) at 2:00 PM on September 16, 2008

Could you put some kind of invisible proxy comment in the comments table that's used to point at the post? Just a thought, probably too hacky of a solution to work.
posted by Artw at 2:06 PM on September 16, 2008

We're considering ways to completely restructure RA on the backend so changes will be easier in the future. But it would be a complete overhaul so we want to make sure it's worth the effort.
posted by pb (staff) at 2:09 PM on September 16, 2008