MetaTalk

Hello Metafilter! Welcome to the first of many regularly-scheduled updates on the state of the site. Comments will be turned off for these, as they’ll cover far too many topics for an unthreaded conversation to manage, but we’re happy to hear from you via the Contact Form. If you want to discuss a particular subject with the community, you’re welcome to open a separate MetaTalk thread for it.
posted by restless_nomad to MetaTalk on Jul 31 at 11:39 AM
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Hi. I'm back.

I'm not gonna be modding. I'm going to be handling the administrative work behind the scenes, managing policy discussions, and processing user feedback. For those of you who don't know or remember, this is my professional background - I've done community management for companies large and small, and I'm excited to be putting those skills to use more directly than I did when I was concentrating on moderation.
posted by restless_nomad to MetaTalk on Jul 23 at 9:03 AM
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This is that thread. The trans thread. If you're cisgender, go ahead and sit this one out instead of fucking it up for us again.
posted by this one sparks joy to MetaTalk on Jul 29 at 8:56 AM
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Are any Mefites in Beirut or Lebanon right now? I want to check in to see how you are doing after the explosion.
posted by Kitchen Witch to MetaTalk on Aug 4 at 9:25 PM
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I would like to request that, when considering how to delete things and preserve privacy, we adopt these three practices:

1. Deliberately leaving empty spaces / blanked comments / deletion notices as replacements for comments in threads that have been closed to discussion and have additional comments removed (e.g. via an account purge). This will help keep discussions that have faded into site history in order while also preserving privacy
2. Provides some means -preferably not entailing any kind of download or export- for users to access their own comments on posts/questions/etc. that have been purged. This will let folks remember their own contributions, even if the context has necessarily been lost
3. If user A sends user B a memail, user B keeps that memail even if user A purges their account.

posted by Going To Maine to MetaTalk on Aug 5 at 5:08 PM
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I wanted to let you all know that we have updated our Community Guidelines, you can check them here: https://www.metafilter.com/guidelines.mefi
posted by loup to MetaTalk on Jul 27 at 1:02 PM
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It’s been more than a month since simmering octagon posted about itch.io’s Bundle for Racial Justice and Inequality. It seemed like a number of folks were considering picking up the bundle. I’m curious if anyone has had a chance to dig in and find some interesting gems.
posted by Going To Maine to MetaTalk on Jul 20 at 7:50 AM
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Let's travel back to the spring of 2011, where several Mefites had the idea of starting a Metafilter magazine.
posted by Brandon Blatcher to MetaTalk on Jul 23 at 3:28 PM
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The thread on “Racial slurs that should never be written,” was focused on racial slurs. Several people brought up other types of slurs, but they were told that that thread was not the place to address those slurs. This is the thread to discuss where to address those slurs.
posted by NotLost to MetaTalk on Jul 27 at 6:48 AM
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Recently I discovered a recipe for so-called one-ingredient watermelon sorbet. It's basically frozen, seeded watermelon chunks that you freeze, then break up in a blender, then refreeze. It was unexpectedly tasty. Also, on a podcast today I heard Colin Hay and his song "Come Tumblin' Down" for the first time, which was fun. What tasty and/or lovely things are helping you cope during these sad, hard times?
posted by Bella Donna to MetaTalk on Jul 17 at 12:26 PM
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There are at least 2 prolific Twitter accounts that have been actively harassing Mefites (including myself): Mefi Outsider and Go Mefi. It's high time we actually talk about them.
posted by divabat to MetaTalk on Jul 12 at 6:33 PM
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We need to talk about how trans issues are handled on MetaFilter.
posted by xchmp to MetaTalk on Jul 10 at 11:09 AM
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Not having updated my preferences for a while, I was a little taken aback when posting a comment today that I had somehow gone back in time two hours. I then realised it was the whole Australia having moved onto DST while the US has moved off it thing. So a small pony request: instead of having to manually adjust the time offset in terms of +/– hours from the server time, would it be possible to choose a particular time zone, so that it would automatically change along with local changes such as daylight savings?
posted by Athanassiel to MetaTalk on Nov 20, 2017 at 3:09 PM
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MeFiWriMo! As discussed in this year's NaNo thread, let's do a Metafilter Novel Writing Month from January 15th to February 15th - the deadest time of the year, and so a good one to have a nice concrete goal to work on.
posted by restless_nomad to MetaTalk on Jan 10, 2013 at 10:13 AM
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Happy weekend, MetaFilter! This weekend, I want to know, what's a delightful little thing in your neighborhood? Plants, dogs, children, sidewalk art, a charming fence -- anything!
posted by Eyebrows McGee to MetaTalk on Aug 1 at 7:34 PM
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I can't speak for other people, but I miss seeing some of the people I usually see. At the same time I've been seeing some new people, either because they're on my same-y walk route, they're in a place that I am in, maybe they're doing an online thing that I've attended, or maybe they're just a new author or poet or actor or performer or activist that I've discovered. They may not be a person at all, maybe a pet or a plant our an outside animal you've been glimpsing during time at home. Who is new with you?
posted by jessamyn to MetaTalk on Jul 18 at 2:10 PM
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The first version of the digital-only music swap 2020 is up for comments / testing.
posted by signal to MetaTalk on Jun 28 at 4:00 PM
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I've noticed more and more posts that make use of Unicode characters to simulate fancy fonts in FPPs. This breaks screen readers, often in very annoying ways. For example, “𝒎” is read out by my screen reader as "mathematical bold italic small m". So whole words or sentences of this makes a post impossible to understand. Please avoid.
posted by Space Coyote to MetaTalk on May 19 at 8:08 AM
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[more posts]

*big inhale* I'm a trans woman. I was planning to come out on National Coming Out Day in October, but fuck it, my entire life is an absolute mess, I'm losing hope by the day, and the whole goddamn country is on fire, so nothing matters anymore. I'm 40 years old, AMAB, and I spent most of my life in denial and slowly killing myself by neglect... [more]
posted by Faint of Butt to MetaTalk on Jul 29 at 9:03 AM
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Several friends are in the hospital; several are missing. The devastation is extraordinary. Parts of Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhael are flattened. The rage is palpable, with more destruction from the hands of Lebanon’s political elites/warlords. [view]
posted by Ahmad Khani to MetaTalk on Aug 5 at 8:59 AM
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I wasn’t intending to say this here and now either, but I have also come out as a woman recently. I’ve been living as one for the past 6 months, I’ve talked to my family, my friends are of course all wonderful, I have the support of my psychologist, I’m not on HRT yet but I’m on the path, another appointment on Tuesday. My name is Audrey. [view]
posted by Acid Communist to MetaTalk on Aug 1 at 5:00 AM
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This framing of "if you don't want other users to be able to delete your site contributions, you don't care about the safety of marginalized users!" is really gross. The pony request, as I understand it, is literally just: can we preserve the safety of marginalized users without also deleting whole comment threads by hundreds of... [more]
posted by mstokes650 to MetaTalk on Aug 6 at 9:19 AM
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sweetjane: "Think about safety. Think about people. Are people more important than an internet archive?" Homo neanderthalensis: "Some people in this thread are really outing themselves as Cis men who’ve never been stalked/threatened/assaulted and therefore prioritizing an “archive” over peoples safety and it’s just super... [more]
posted by Rhaomi to MetaTalk on Aug 5 at 10:01 PM
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I agree with saeculorum's concern. I sometimes write lengthy, detailed comments about topics on which I have expertise, which other members appear to appreciate. I put a lot of work into these comments and post them here because I believe in this community. However, knowing that these comments may be completely deleted, without my input or... [more]
posted by biogeo to MetaTalk on Aug 5 at 8:26 PM
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We live in the country, a farming area. The neighbors raise beef cattle. The field next to us is where the cows and their calves and Daddy bull live. I get to watch the mommas give birth early in the spring. The relationship between the animals is fascinating. There was a late birth in April. The momma cow was pacing and as the other cows noticed... [more]
posted by LaBellaStella to MetaTalk on Aug 2 at 6:41 AM
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Trans MeFites in this thread (myself included) are saying that a blunt instrument is sometimes necessary for our safety. But this is incorrect. We haven't seen anything like this, where the blunt instrument approach--i.e., deleting an entire thread of other people's comments--increases anyone's safety over a more delicate approach. We... [more]
posted by mittens to MetaTalk on Aug 6 at 5:17 AM
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I would also like to see a function where someone could retroactively anonymize their participation in a post, so the post and/or comments were still present but attributed to an anonymous username, and there was no way for anyone but the user themselves and the mods to know who the user was or to connect the dots across multiple anonymized posts... [more]
posted by expialidocious to MetaTalk on Aug 5 at 5:32 PM
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Having been on this site since i was 16, it feels kind of strange to realize i was on here, pretty consistently, for an entire decade before i came out. Hell, i found mefi around the same time i figured out what the hell being trans was... which seeing as how it was The Internet Classic, was like terrible fanfiction and equally terrible... [more]
posted by emptythought to MetaTalk on Jul 30 at 7:15 PM
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I had a job interview yesterday, and one of the people interviewing actually asked for my pronouns, so that they could get it right in the paperwork! I found that gesture to be especially meaningful, because, despite my legal name being 'Dwayne' and my legal gender being 'Male', I have a pretty NB appearance. The COVID hair hasn't helped. (I... [more]
posted by spinifex23 to MetaTalk on Aug 1 at 1:45 PM
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My neighbors put a pillowcase on their tree as a mask and gave it googly eyes and now they are changing its "outfit" every month and I am 100% here for it. [view]
posted by Eyebrows McGee to MetaTalk on Aug 1 at 10:32 PM
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This is a nice topic! This street corner is on my dog walk route, and is extremely charming. I'm not sure if it's ok to hang plants from the city-owned street signs, but I do love the aesthetics. One block down from this is an older couple who has beautiful flowers and yard whimsy, and occasionally they'll be sitting outside together, while... [more]
posted by Sparky Buttons to MetaTalk on Aug 2 at 6:27 AM
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And yet folks on here (the same folks in each MeTa...) are acting as if someone's gonna send the FBI to their house to wipe their hard drives. Will you please fucking stop that? And I'm a woman who has been stalked, abused, and more! Yet, I completely agree with the request outlined in this post. Please stop putting people on blast... [more]
posted by heyho to MetaTalk on Aug 6 at 10:26 AM
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I always kind of wanted to make an FPP of this talk, but then again making an FPP is kinda the last thing I ever want to do, but this is what moved me from "I feel like everybody's playing a joke on me about gender" to "maybe it's just that this sense-of-identity people talk about is something I don't have access to." Between... [more]
posted by mittens to MetaTalk on Jul 31 at 6:56 AM
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Hi all. I've been struggling for a long time (as evident in a few places including here), but in the past year I've come to understand that I'm enby. Still working through exactly what that means for me and how to bring my life into better alignment with the person I am in my head. Still scary to contemplate, my heart is racing even typing this, so... [more]
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape to MetaTalk on Aug 1 at 11:50 AM
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Dang some of the responses in this thread are really frustrating. I think we should be discussing options for anonymizing comments but I'm tired of people arguing against deletion, when deletion currently represents the only path to privacy on this site. Did any of you read the Metatalk about MetaFilter's approach to trans issues? I'd recommend... [more]
posted by sweetjane to MetaTalk on Aug 5 at 9:26 PM
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A LABRADOR WHO CARRIES A BOUY IN HER MOUTH ON WALKS! She is a chocolate lab and happy and her owner is a sweet old man who has no idea why she does this, but she won’t go on a walk without it. She is right up there on my list of best dogs with the German Shepard mix my last neighborhood had that would try to collect every stick on its walk.... [more]
posted by lepus to MetaTalk on Aug 1 at 9:41 PM
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I would strongly prefer to go further than 2) - we can use the deletion notices from 1) to extend to the post itself rather than deleting all comments in a post. In that scenario, a post that's deleted would simply indicate the post is deleted, but leaves the comments - similar to what Reddit does. We should never have cases where an account wipe... [more]
posted by saeculorum to MetaTalk on Aug 5 at 5:36 PM
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You know how fire hydrants look kinda like little robots like R2D2? For some reason, the hydrants in my neighborhood are all marked with little tags based on the street name, like S-1 and S-2 on sixth street, and PP-3 and 4 etc on Prospect Park West, that also look like droid names. My dog likes to pee on PP-8, the saddest droid. [view]
posted by moonmilk to MetaTalk on Aug 1 at 9:42 PM
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[more comments]