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October 17, 2011 9:03 AM

Could Recent Activity include the date the post was made?

I was on a Recent Activity clearing binge recently and noticed that while it's generally easy to tell from the dates on comments that a thread is closed or has long been inactive, there were several cases where I couldn't tell if a thread was old or new based on comment activity. In those cases, it would save a click if I could just look to the left and see "posted by [user] on [date]" under the title to decide whether I want to keep the thread in Recent Activity or not.

Or maybe I just need to clear Recent Activity out more frequently so my memory of a when a thread was posted is better. I would accept that as an answer.

posted by EvaDestruction to Feature Requests at 9:03 AM (36 comments total)

Hmm, space is pretty tight on that sidebar, I'm not sure we could easily fit it in without cluttering things up.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:07 AM on October 17, 2011

My sarcasm meter is broken.

Just put it under the name of the poster?
posted by cjorgensen at 9:10 AM on October 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I'm not following how space is problem--there's virtually always tons of blank vertical space under the post, unless yours is the last comment in the thread.

OTOH, I'm not sure I follow the OP's use case for this. Would a "This thread is closed" note like the one for deleted threads suffice?
posted by Horace Rumpole at 10:04 AM on October 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

Basically, in weeding out my Recent Activity, I'm looking to get rid of closed threads, open threads that I'm no longer interested in, and threads that have gone dormant and look unlikely to revive.

About the only case I can think of where having the date might be a more interesting data point than "this thread is closed" is a one where an old thread gets revitalized by new events, as the follow-up after a break would be likely to pique my interest. But for purposes of quickly culling threads that will no longer have activity in them because they're closed, a note would suffice.

And yeah, eyeballing my current RA, I was thinking that there's plenty of room for the date on the sidebar, but I also don't have any posts in there where I've made the last comment, or where the OP is the proud owner of a particularly long user name, which would be complicating factors.
posted by EvaDestruction at 10:20 AM on October 17, 2011

When I'm talking space, I mean more the horizontal space after a username on posts in that narrow margin. Throwing in a date at the end might stretch it out a bit and wrap a few lines.

pb is working on a mockup that we're testing internally today.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:28 AM on October 17, 2011

Just curious if there are many users like me who never look at RA.

I don't really understand it. You have the front page portion of a post on the left, then 1 - 10 comments either immediately following yours OR the last 10 comments of the thread, which may by now be hundreds or even thousands of comments after your comment, which isn't displayed, only linked to.

My brain just doesn't find much utility in that organization. Basically I just want to see my last comment (so I remember what I said) and read the entire thread (or decide not to) that follows it. I go to my profile page and find my comments from there, or just surf back to the thread I'm interested in and read it.

Just me? How do you use Recent Activity?
posted by Edogy at 10:47 AM on October 17, 2011

Recent Activity is handy for just showing you what has changed since you last looked at the site for just the parts you left a comment in. It's handy if you only check MetaFilter a couple times a day and wonder if anyone responds to your comments.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:52 AM on October 17, 2011

Ok, we've tested this out and it's a totally minimal change and looks good so we'll roll this out today.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:52 AM on October 17, 2011 [4 favorites]

How do you use Recent Activity?

If you use it regularly enough there's not much of a gap between "last ten comments" and my comments. I open that up and then decide to open the threads in tabs that seem to still be having an interesting discussion or that I want to follow up with [also for threads that I've left mod notes in]
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:53 AM on October 17, 2011

That looks really good.
posted by shelleycat at 11:10 AM on October 17, 2011

Just curious if there are many users like me who never look at RA.

The Recent Activity "My Activity" tab is the most requested page after the home page. And that counts both members and non-members. So people are using it quite a bit.
posted by pb (staff) at 11:12 AM on October 17, 2011

Is there a reason not to just break it to the next line? On my iPad, I'm seeing

Posted by Horace Rumpole 2
days ago

which looks kind of odd. Even on my big widescreen monitor, the number and the hours/days are split.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 11:17 AM on October 17, 2011

That looks really good.

Seconded. I'm not having the number and hours/days split issue on my (definitely not a widescreen) monitor.
posted by EvaDestruction at 11:20 AM on October 17, 2011

If you have the small font size bumped up in your site preferences, or if you make the font sizes bigger with browser settings it might break into two lines for you. The default small font size is 8 and I don't think it shouldn't wrap very often at that size. I have mine set to 9 and I'm not seeing any wrapping right now.
posted by pb (staff) at 11:26 AM on October 17, 2011

If you have the small font size bumped up in your site preferences

Ah, that's true, I do. If it's just a me-specific problem, then nevermind.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 11:28 AM on October 17, 2011

Edogy: “Just me? How do you use Recent Activity?”

"Gee, I wonder what activity has happened recently on the threads I've been following?" That's how I use Recent Activity. If a thread really blew up, and there are thousands of comments after my last one, at least I can see that – and if it's something I want to look into, I will.

Really, the most important thing about "Recent Activity" to me is that it helps me focus on the conversations which are active in order of their activeness. If the conversation on a post from yesterday has just stopped, it won't show up there; but if the conversation on a thread from almost a month ago picked up again, Recent Activity will tell me about it. That's what's nice - finding out about random, backwater comments or threads I wouldn't have gone back to check, while keeping abreast of whatever's happened in current threads, all on the same page.
posted by koeselitz at 11:29 AM on October 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

How do you use Recent Activity?

I use it to track all the conversations I'm involved in with a minimum of effort, basically. How I actually use it from day to day and hour to hour differs a bit, but the nice thing is that it Just Works and so I can use it in more than one way and know that it'll reliably be there.

I use it for two major things:

1. To follow multiple conversations happening in real time. If there's more than one thread I'm following closely, reloading RA periodically is simpler than monitoring the 2+ threads independently, and if I'm reloading it at a good pace with those threads then I'm basically always getting the last ten comments when there's been less than ten new comments. Voila, continuity.

2. To get caught up when I'm not monitoring stuff in real time. I can hit RA, go through the various threads I've been conversing in, and if I see a comment I don't recognize or see that the timestamp is a lot more recent than when I last read anything in that thread, I middle-click one of those recent comment timestamps and then scroll back up to wherever I left off.

3. To get notified when a thread that went dormant gets updated. I don't keep tabs for threads open for days at a time generally, but I like seeing that something came back to life a week later, etc.

Number 1 is what I'm doing all day, generally. It's complemented lately by the "load new comments" functions in threads themselves, which is handy in its own right and is a better way to monitor extremely fast-moving threads or for following a thread when it's really the only thing I'm paying attention to.

Number 2 is what I do in the morning, and what I do if I've had a busy day that's more about moderation work than reading for pleasure or has had gaps where I've been away for a while.

Number 3 is just a nice bonus.

So Recent Activity is enormously useful as a feature if and only if it happens to be useful to your style of reading. Lots of people love it, lots of people don't seem to have much use for it.

I think it mostly comes down to how you like to read mefi, how much "I commented in this thread" tends to correlate to "I am interested in following this thread" for you, how much of your memory you're willing to delegate to the function vs. manage yourself (RA remembers threads I've been in a couple days ago better than I do, I'm good at remembering where/when I left off in a thread if it's been more than ten comments), whether you acclimate to alternate views of site content (RA isn't color-coded by website and has mild display differences from actual threads), etc.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:47 AM on October 17, 2011

Mine wraps sometimes. I have small font set at 8, I'm using IE 8 (at work, can't install anything else), and I have it at zoom level 85%, medium text size. I have a normal screen size. It's sort of aesthetically unpleasing -- I'd prefer it just be automatically on two lines -- but not a huge issue. What I'd really like is to be able to see the actual time/date posted, instead of "approximately x days ago" for the posts (I like comments as is), but this might be just me.
posted by jeather at 11:54 AM on October 17, 2011

How do you use Recent Activity?

I use it to figure out if there are new comments in a thread since the last time I looked at it. I found it was kind of easy to miss these with the page as-is, so I made a greasemonkey script that inserts a summary of recent activity at the top. It shows just the thread title and byline of the last comment in the thread.

Using this, I can see at least a dozen threads before I have to scroll. I can click on the byline of the last comment to visit the thread. The byline will then show up in the "visited link" colour in the recent activity summary. When a new comment is posted, the byline shows up in the "unvisited link" colour, so I can tell it's a new comment since the last time I looked.
posted by FishBike at 1:19 PM on October 17, 2011

i use RA a lot. it's an easy way to see where a conversation is going after your comment. sometimes i can see the few things after my comment and not have to load the page. sometimes, when it's 129 comments after mine, i can see the bottom of the thread and quickly figure if it's worth seeing how the conversation got there.

it's also really, really useful on my phone. i can read a bunch of threads i was commenting in/following without opening each and every thread.
posted by nadawi at 1:37 PM on October 17, 2011

What I don't quite get is the use of clearing out Recent Activity. If a thread seems dormant I don't see how it remaining in RA is any problem since the only things it's pushing down the page are even older and dormant threads; what's more you never know which threads are going to come back to life. I pretty much only clear things out of RA if I'm not finding the thread worthwhile or if I said something stupid and I'm sick of seeing it.
posted by villanelles at dawn at 3:11 PM on October 17, 2011

Edogy: " How do you use Recent Activity?"

It's my first stop on the MeFi Train every time I come back - the first thing I want to know is what activity there has been in threads that I've commented in - usually, it's just a matter of catching up with the comments that have been made since my last comment, otherwise I can open the thread in a new tab at my last comment and follow the conversation from there. I vaguely remember when it didn't exist, but don't know that I could keep up with things here without it now.

Different horses etc, of course.
posted by dg at 4:01 PM on October 17, 2011

Thanks for the responses. Every so often I remember about Recent Activity, look at it for a bit then just go back to my normal MeFi-browser-flow. I'll try checking it more often.
posted by Edogy at 4:19 PM on October 17, 2011

What I don't quite get is the use of clearing out Recent Activity.

Personally, I'm not that prolific, so I have closed threads on the first page of Recent Activity all the time. I don't like the clutter.

Thanks very much for the pretty pony, Matt & pb!
posted by EvaDestruction at 4:51 PM on October 17, 2011

I was on MeFi for several years before I found the RA page (yes, I'm that slow). Now I've found it though, it's my first destination to see what's changed in the threads I'm participating in. It has helped me to take more of a part in MeFei rather than single comments then never returning, which was my previous M.O.
posted by arcticseal at 4:52 PM on October 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

I access almost everything through RA. In fact, I was going to ask if there is any way to put a post in my RA list without making a comment. There was a post a few days ago that I wanted to come back to, and see other people comments as it evolved, but had nothing to say. So I added a comment: "Neat". It felt like I was cluttering up the thread.
posted by benito.strauss at 6:50 PM on October 17, 2011

You can favorite a thread and then find it on the "My Favorites" tab of RA, which acts as an analogue to the default "My Activity" tab except for threads you've favorited rather than threads you've commented in.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:21 PM on October 17, 2011

I'm probably taking the names too literally. I think of "Favorites" as things I might want to come back to weeks or months from now, 'cause they're so darn good. I just let things just build up in Favorites.

Things in RA are currently active — I check up on them a few times a day, and after a few days I remove them from RA.
posted by benito.strauss at 8:07 PM on October 17, 2011

I was on MeFi for several years before I found the RA page (yes, I'm that slow).

Yeah, me too. I was amazed. Prior to this I was using favorites as RA. The drawback here is if no one liked what I had to say in a thread then I'd lose track of it.

When I check RA and threads are flying and I see the "200 comments since your last comment" I tend to remove it, since I know I've lost the ability to catch back up.
posted by cjorgensen at 8:21 PM on October 17, 2011

The drawback here is if no one liked what I had to say in a thread then I'd lose track of it.

I sometimes consider this a feature of the "Favorites RA" method. Now I know what I use.
posted by Edogy at 8:36 PM on October 17, 2011

When I check RA and threads are flying and I see the "200 comments since your last comment" I tend to remove it, since I know I've lost the ability to catch back up.

This is one of the ways being such a heavy RA user has affected my commenting activity, I think: I tend not to comment in a thread if I don't think I'll be interested in the conversation that follows. So threads where I'm mildly curious about where they'll go but I don't think I want to deal with the volume or the persistence of the comments? I'll generally just not comment.

Every now and then I comment in a thread without thinking about the likely volume (like in quiz-type threads where everybody and their brother is going to post their score/grade/outcome which is usually not actually interesting reading), or I'm surprised that it has the legs it does, and I'll remove that from my RA. But mostly I sort of moderate my RA queue going in.

I think mostly that keeps me honest, in a useful way: if it's not a thread I'm interested in participating (even mostly passively) as a conversant, why would I throw a comment in there in the first place? People should read what I have to say but I don't really care what they have to say? Not so much the way I want to be.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:54 PM on October 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

I also make liberal use of the "remove from activity" option in Recent Activity when there was a thread I wanted to be involved in that I no longer want to be involved in.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 9:03 AM on October 18, 2011 [1 favorite]

mathowie: "When I'm talking space, I mean more the horizontal space after a username on posts in that narrow margin. Throwing in a date at the end might stretch it out a bit and wrap a few lines."

Dude. Unix Timestamp. 10 chars, problem solved!
posted by mkultra at 10:56 AM on October 18, 2011

It does, however, create other problems.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 11:08 AM on October 18, 2011

Cue joke about deciding to use a regex.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:16 AM on October 18, 2011

If it makes it easier, we could shave a few digits off by just resetting the timestamp to be ticks since the launch of MeFi. Call it Haughey Standard Time. Of course, there would be the inevitable schism over whether downtime occurred at the expense of the apostate JRun would be considered canonical.
posted by mkultra at 11:46 AM on October 18, 2011