I think there is a post that could be made about the misogyny that Hillary Clinton faced (didn't Salon do a roundup?) but two links to the washington post without any context, leading with a somewhat inflammatory "bros before hos" phrase didn't seem like that kind of good post.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 3:37 PM on May 16, 2008

huh, I tried a bunch of "Bill Murray [keyword]" searches and it looks like that blog entry comes up in the top 4 results when you put "write Bill Murray" into Google. The first three are obvious bio pages about Bill Murray, so maybe people are posting on the blog because it appears a human wrote it and it looks like a personal essay from Bill (that is being quoted, but blockquotes are subtle) and there's a big comment form below.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 9:31 AM on May 10, 2008

Afroblanco, you were the guy mentioned with no Title on your project. I'll go add one.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 4:23 PM on May 10, 2008

Wow, that's some awesome wave sounds, thanks Pronoiac!
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 6:55 PM on May 15, 2008

When we take out the pictureless frame, the layout goes all wonky and mis-aligned.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 9:03 AM on May 15, 2008

When someone asks for removal of a question they asked that might get them in trouble, we comply.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 7:08 PM on May 13, 2008

It seems a bit jerkish to ask the question and then ask for it to be closed, to me.

It's not jerkish, people ask a question one day and then realize later on there is way too much detail and that it is potentially very damaging to their life if anyone referred to in the question were to find out. That's not pulling out the rug on the community, it's one person regretting saying too much and asking that we relieve their worry by removing something... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 8:00 PM on May 13, 2008

How about I'll give a garmin edge 705 to the cyclist with the most consecutive days riding. I have a 705 and it's the best bike computer I've ever used.

Are we tracking most consecutive days of running? I could give a garmin forerunner 405 to the winner of that.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 3:36 PM on May 11, 2008

well, if the runners want in, let's say the same as bikes -- most consecutive days running between May 1 and Aug 31, at least say, 2 miles per day.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 7:44 PM on May 11, 2008

It's tracked by honesty for now, hopefully no one would fake their way through this for an entire summer.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 11:19 PM on May 11, 2008

Matt, curious why you chose most days in a row.

Because that's what makes it a challenge, to go out there and do it every day, day after day. I can't muster more than maybe 10 consecutive days in an entire year given my travel, sickness, etc schedules, but Chuckles was trying to think of something really hard to give a big award for and that seemed like it. It's crazy, it's dumb, it's hardcore. Most mileage is what we've done for the past year and it... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 7:27 PM on May 12, 2008

Yeah dobbs, we're talking about two challenges. As always, there's the "who won the month with the most mileage" but Chuckles also thought of "who can ride the most consecutive days for the four months of prime summer riding" which is what I was talking about.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 12:09 AM on May 13, 2008

Yeah, not a bad idea. Really we should internally write some code that scans user accounts and "if comments on mefi = 3 and total words used = less than 10, then EMAIL THE ADMINS ON THE RED FUCKING PHONE WE HAVE A SPAMMER TO BE"
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 3:51 PM on May 12, 2008

interesting that they put stuff in Music

we're thinking it's probably not their own at this point.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 3:52 PM on May 12, 2008

I think the better option for weeding out spammers is to have everyone's first mefi post be pending until one of the mods approves it, then letting people post normally after that. It would suck a little and lose some timeliness and also put us on the spot when we approve stuff, but it would kill all these drive-by spammers dead. Of course, there would be an out where you leave one meh post to get past it then follow it up with your crap, but at worst we'd be at the same place we are now with... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 4:49 PM on May 12, 2008

Miko, you do consistently post really cool museum/library jobs, which we mention pretty often on the podcast, but yeah, lately it's been nothing but tech jobs but I think cortex has it right -- if I personally was going to be listing something it'd be for a designer or programmer because that's what I have access to on hiring help.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 11:29 AM on May 12, 2008

Do people respond to the tech job ads, or no? If it's not doing anything for anybody, is it a useful part of the site?

Since there are no comments on the Jobs section, it's tough to gauge whether anything is working or not, but I get an occasional email (maybe one a month?) from people with great stories of finding jobs that saved them at the right time or from people employing other mefites saying they got such great applicants that they felt they... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 1:27 PM on May 12, 2008

I'm pretty sure it was a nonsensical phrase that a few people repeated a lot in the early days then it thankfully just died.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:33 AM on May 11, 2008

It's not a self-link by any measures I can check against (wrong area of the country, no identifying info matching anyone at nissan.com, etc), so I agree with krautland and others -- it's just a meh first link.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 7:37 AM on May 11, 2008

It should be fixed now.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 6:33 AM on May 10, 2008

If someone wants to take a crack at that, sure I'd be happy to add it to the site's code.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:54 AM on April 29, 2008

beerbajay came through! We now have a super clean print stylesheet on every section of the site.

Here is a PDF of what the front page of MetaTalk looks like when you hit print.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:26 AM on May 1, 2008

neetij, I added your adjustments to the stylesheet, thanks for the extra work.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:24 AM on May 6, 2008

ok, I made the links all black instead of blue.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 12:38 PM on May 7, 2008

neetij, I made those changes, good call.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:06 PM on May 8, 2008

our princess is in another castle is a pretty good joke, I woulda conceded the win too.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 7:58 PM on May 8, 2008

Yeah, we've always had auto-closing tags, and it's a good idea because before we had the feature (going on four years ago), we would routinely have a whole thread bolded or hit with a trailing small tag, etc, so we close open tags at the end of a post.

Yes, I know technically you can leave a list item unclosed in HTML 4, but in order to fix a lot of broken and incomplete HTML, we auto-close everything we see get opened.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 5:01 PM on May 8, 2008

It's an old bug when comments look spoofed. I've been meaning to change it something more descriptive like "you're trying to spoof the way comments appear, go back and remove the small tag" instead. We'll go ahead and do that now.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 4:12 PM on May 8, 2008

There's no standard for comment feeds (it's not even mentioned in any spec), so I'm pretty sure we just follow what Wordpress does with feeds for comments.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 5:02 AM on May 8, 2008

You mean comments, not posts, right? Because every post has the year on it in the date stamp.

I'd consider this for old comments if they were posted in a year previous to this one (so it won't say 2008 on posts made today, but an old thread in the archives will say the full year between 1999 and 2007). It may be necessary on very old threads, if you're popping into them from links on the web to single comments located in the middle of old threads, but otherwise in... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 5:13 PM on May 7, 2008

My peace treaty FPP without a link on the front page was an honest mistake, Matt.

I unbanned you soon after and did admit my decision was kind of rash but I thought you were messing with the site purposely at the time. It's tough to tell the difference between a new very enthusiastic user and a new very fucking-around-with-everyone user. If I didn't apologize then I'm sorry about that and consider this a formal apology because yeah years later you're... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 4:58 PM on May 7, 2008

Speaking of which, what happened to fortuito.us?

That site brought me nothing but pain from every angle and in every way possible. I just wanted to do a little essay site every once in a while and I got the ugliest email of my life after it launched. The few things I posted garnered awful and insulting emails and comments (that I never set to publish) and literally cost me thousands of dollars in business with people that disagreed strongly with... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 5:02 PM on May 7, 2008

Yeah, we're in the middle of completely redoing that page, so expect a brand spanking new version in the next day or two that solves this problem and basically makes the usercontacts page a zillion times more useful.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 6:10 PM on May 5, 2008

Are these references to a plugin or greasemonkey script?
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 11:14 PM on May 4, 2008

You could mail it to me or cortex and get the other signatures since we're all kind of local to one another.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 9:23 PM on May 4, 2008

(my po box is on the whois record)
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 9:23 PM on May 4, 2008

we have small edit/delete buttons on stuff and IP addresses, but that's about it.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 8:02 PM on May 4, 2008

Yeah, kinda weird that their "letters to the editor" section includes a random quote from another website. But cool mention otherwise.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 8:10 AM on May 4, 2008

Yeah, sessions take 20min to time out and reset, for the reasons Plutor described. Once in a while firefox doesn't update for me even after several hours but for the most part, it works as described if I truly come back in a few hours.

If you ever want to reset it, logging into the site in a new browser seems to do the trick.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 11:17 AM on May 2, 2008

There will be an IHOP in Vermont when Cleveland gets an IKEA.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 8:13 AM on May 2, 2008

Well, we do have random, which is like a funner version of the same thing.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 7:34 AM on April 30, 2008

I look at the website during all waking hours. I probably spend half my waking hours doing admin/mod stuff like checking new posts for spamminess, emailing people their forgotten usernames, tending the flag pile, etc.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 4:46 PM on April 28, 2008

Video of the big crowd from the bar. Pretty much everyone you can see near the bar is with the mefi group. It took a while for me to meet everyone.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 8:46 PM on April 26, 2008

Like pb said, it's the low-tech way to save resources by saving it locally with cookies, with a minimal server check only when saving your prefs. Also, I like it because I can have the plain theme on other devices like a Wii browser or a iPhone and keep the regular one on my own browser.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 8:41 AM on April 26, 2008

Yeah, I thought it was a pretty flat barely amusing reason. I had no idea it was only 9 minutes when I deleted it, I thought it was several hours.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 6:13 PM on April 25, 2008

I'm open to new ideas on rejiggering the layout as well as a complete visual redo, but I think of them as two separate projects. The first one, I think everyone can come around to having a better nav bar and improved layout on posts, the second is definitely up to personal taste and I know it's an uphill battle.

Early this year I did contract Airbag Industries to try mocking up a few ideas, with the intention of eventually floating redesign ideas here, refining, and then... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 5:27 PM on April 25, 2008

Hey remember how we had a redesign contest and then we were going to implement the winning design and then one of the designs was declared the winning design?

People keep forgetting that I did implement it when Projects launched. People thought it sucked, so I got rid of it. It was nice to get some ideas out of it though, so it was far from a total loss.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 5:36 PM on April 25, 2008

Poor bastard. Even if he got into the NFL people googling him would think he's a dork that writes a lot about bike seats.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 3:10 PM on April 21, 2008

Dooce and her hubby need to be Metafilter members

Jon is here and I gifted an account to Heather eons ago but she never completed the signup :(
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 8:49 PM on April 19, 2008

It says this above the post comment button:

"note: Ask MetaFilter is as useful as you make it. Please limit comments to answers or help in finding an answer. Wisecracks don't help people find answers. Thanks."

So yeah, nothing has changed as we still regularly clean threads of throwaway jokes. Also keep in mind wisecracks get favorites fairly often but the flags always outweigh them.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 8:11 PM on April 18, 2008