MeTa post: Jessamyn's coming to town. Time for another...

Weird --- I live in Chicago and I've wanted to go to a meetup for a while now, and I'm going to be out town for basically the entire rest of the month except the night of the 22nd. I think that's Divine Providence.
posted to MetaTalk by jacobm at 12:55 PM on August 9, 2006

MeTa post: I've noticed that many AskMe threads (like this...

Sidenote: mathowie writes:

If people want to anonymously respond on their own anon question, I'll have to redesign the anon system to tie anon questions to user_IDs, and just hide them when posted to the website.

Another scheme that might even be easier to implement would be that when an anon question gets posted, the submitter gets a randomly-generated password good for posting anonymous followups to that question only.
posted to MetaTalk by jacobm at 10:33 AM on December 27, 2005

mathowie:
What about when there are three anon questions posted at once. Do I maintain a table of temp ids and temp passwords for every question ever? Seems like a messy implementation to me.
I don't think the system I'm imagining would have a problem with multiple questions at once; I probably didn't explain it well enough.

I was imagining that there's some table somewhere that currently has a row for each anonymous question... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jacobm at 1:21 PM on December 27, 2005

Well, the worst a user can do is let other people post anonymously in his or her own anonymous thread if desired; I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. If you didn't want that, though, it seems like you just ask people not to do that? Throttle the rate at which anony followups get posted? Seems like a smallish and solvable problem.
posted to MetaTalk by jacobm at 2:03 PM on December 27, 2005

I agree that there are simpler systems; I just wanted to point out that it is possible to allow anonymous followups without having the database actually record which uid asked which anonymous question. If you don't care about that, then your way is definitely simpler.

Anyway, about anonymous followups, it seems like a simple-to-implement policy would be to just disable anonymous comment posting (e.g., change the password if you used my scheme or... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jacobm at 7:37 PM on December 27, 2005

It seems like it's very similar to the "random, secret password" scheme and that it would have the same problems. Or is there some subtlety I'm missing?
posted to MetaTalk by jacobm at 8:11 PM on December 27, 2005

MeTa post: Apologist!: There are too many things in this...

"I hate it when Metafilter looks like how ParisParamus imagines that we do all the time."

I agree 100%. There are plenty of places on the Internet where you can find people who are willing to agree with anything that bashes Bush, but I try not to visit them.
posted to MetaTalk by jacobm at 12:08 AM on September 7, 2005