I want to know exactly where I'm going.

June 4, 2013 12:07 PM

In the front page "contact activity" section, if one of your contacts has a best answer, it specifies the AskMetafilter question where the answer appears. I wonder, can something similar be done for "has a comment with X favorites," instead of just saying "in AskMetafilter" or "in MetaFilter"?
posted by not that girl to Feature Requests at 12:07 PM (3 comments total)

We don't have a lot of space to work with there so the summaries need to be fairly short. Best Answers always point to Ask MetaFilter but favorites can point to any site. So we can't remove the "in Ask MetaFilter" or "in MetaFilter" bit from the summary. Adding the thread title would add quite a bit of text per summary to those entries.

If you hover over the word "comment", you should get a tooltip that tells you the title of the post the comment is from.
posted by pb (staff) at 12:14 PM on June 4, 2013

I don't like mystery-meat links in general but I don't think internal links to comments from contacts qualify as the sort of thing I'd be concerned about clicking on just to see where it goes, though as a compromise I'd consider pulling in the top tag from the post in case the person looking at the sidebar may have an aversion / trigger reaction to the subject matter, and then abbreviating "favorites" as "faves" to save a few characters (NEVAR FORGET) and perhaps abbreviating "MetaFilter" to "MeFi," and so on with the other subsites to shave characters.
posted by lordaych at 1:07 AM on June 5, 2013

Tags can be up to 50 characters long and a single tag won't necessarily tell you much about a particular post. I think having the title available on hover gives you some more information to go on before clicking if you need it.
posted by pb (staff) at 11:33 AM on June 5, 2013