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February 10, 2010 3:12 PM

Location-specific AskMe pony.

It would be really cool to be able to see all AskMe questions that relate to a particular geographic area. Could something be instituted where, in the posting of a question, there's a field that asks whether you want the question to be location specific and let's you plug in a location?

Then, have a tab akin to "My Ask" that shows region specific questions (as well as to have the ability to monitor questions from multiple regions). Or a sidebar panel showing "AskMes near you"

Sure, this could be accomplished with tags, but I think this way would be way cooler, cleaner and convenient.

posted by Cat Pie Hurts to Feature Requests at 3:12 PM (20 comments total)

Not that this isn't a cool, clean and convenient idea, but I don't think the work needed to implement it is worth it for the relatively small number of AskMe questions that really need to be location-specific.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 3:16 PM on February 10, 2010

Not all AskMes are pleasant. I'm not sure I want to know about certain things happening in proximity to me.
posted by anniecat at 3:17 PM on February 10, 2010

I'd get sick of answering questions about why is it constantly raining and who stole my car.
posted by Jofus at 3:18 PM on February 10, 2010 [5 favorites]

NO JUDGMENT!
posted by anniecat at 3:18 PM on February 10, 2010

not directly related to your pony, but you might find this metatalk thread and the wiki page it talks about useful and fun to participate in.
posted by nadawi at 3:26 PM on February 10, 2010

oh wow, nadawi. I missed that when it came up. It looks like it's coming together well.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 3:28 PM on February 10, 2010

It'd be interesting to cross-reference the outputs: you could plot, geographically, the regions with the greatest concentrations of already-ditched-motherfuckers, and refer all the lonely heart askers to move there.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:30 PM on February 10, 2010 [1 favorite]

I usually feel pretty conservative about changes to beloved MeFi, but this actually sounds pretty cool. At least, it would be good to have an extra reminder near the "tags" entry field to add tags for location. But I would vote for an optional "location" field of some kind for AskMes, if this were a democracy. Since it is not, I submit to the will of the Cabal, which does not exist.
posted by Salvor Hardin at 4:53 PM on February 10, 2010

Location information ought to be required for any legal question.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 5:11 PM on February 10, 2010

I think this is a brilliant idea. A+++++ WOULD PONY AGAIN!
posted by pompomtom at 6:21 PM on February 10, 2010

Can I sort AskMes by gender and hair color as well?
posted by davejay at 6:45 PM on February 10, 2010

This is a much better idea than TravelFilter.
posted by blasdelf at 4:25 AM on February 11, 2010

I'm pretty sure that there are only five or six people on the site who I can't beat up so if we can use this for a fight club I'm down.

MetaFighter? Feature requests can be called pwnys.

All jokes aside, I also think this is a great suggestion.
posted by oulipian at 8:53 AM on February 11, 2010

I don't see how this would be better than just subscribing to an RSS feed for the tag of your city/state/nation. BUT, I totally love ponies. so hear hear! give the man what he wants!
posted by The Esteemed Doctor Bunsen Honeydew at 8:55 AM on February 11, 2010

Can we get a special sub-pony that pops up when you enter Ireland for the location you're asking about that says "No, you do not need heavy waterproofs, no you do not need a passport to cross the border, and nobody gives a shit what whiskey you order."

That would eliminate at least half the questions right there and be really, really useful.
posted by DarlingBri at 1:39 PM on February 11, 2010

I already did this a few months ago with just tags and RSS. You're right that it's messy and inconvenient. One of the challenges you face with tags though is agreed semantics. For example, we agree that the 'resolved' tag should be used, rather than 'fixed' or 'solved'. A quick query of tags indicates that not everyone agrees with this, even as late as Nov 18th, 2009. But the numbers tell a different story: 8 'fixed' versus some 9817 'resolved'.

In my case, I have kansas in my feed list, as well as some of the tags mefi thinks are related. It gets messier when people use 'kansas city' with a space and therefore two tags. But I don't think mefi has the quantity of asking / tagging activity to generate common knowledge of the suburbs of 'kansascity', to where someone can tag with one of the many KC suburbs and miss kansascity and still show up on a feed somehow based on my profile location.

But the semantics point does raise an interesting problem. The most popular tags cloud is done by the tagger, but it would be neat to see a cloud based on popular tags subscribed to. Good luck teasing that data out of webserver logs though.
posted by pwnguin at 4:20 PM on February 11, 2010

Personally, I don't have a big need for ask.metafilter to be more site-specific, but it would sometimes be nice if it were more watery and/or domestic.
posted by koeselitz at 9:15 PM on February 11, 2010

A week and no feedback from a mod. This is the 2nd feature request I've posted with no mod response. Do my ideas really suck that much?
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 6:52 AM on February 17, 2010

If it's feedback you want....
posted by pompomtom at 12:45 PM on February 17, 2010

Sure, I could do that. But then what's the purpose of having a "feature request" category? I've gone back through previous feature requests and, unless something is specifically addressed and resolved by another user, a mod responds with a "yea" or "nay" or "wtf are you thinking, NO!"
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 2:22 PM on February 17, 2010