Good deletion, I'm afraid. An answer that can be seen as giving legal advice or a legal opinion, written in a definitive and authoritative tone, needs to be qualified. (Acronyms like IANAL and IAALBIANYL get used for a reason, folks.)
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 6:52 AM on April 26, 2013

Angry people on the Internet lashing out at moderators who, trying to pound some civility into the message boards on which they vent their rage, stifle the expression of their anger? Not new. Never mind "MeFi doesn't do x well," the Internet in general doesn't do anger well.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 8:57 AM on April 8, 2013

I would hazard that game threads derail out of the gate about "Windows only" when the original post talks in universal terms about a Windows-only game, as was the case here. I imagine the same thing can happen with links to YouTube and Hulu videos that have geographical restrictions, and non-U.S. members note that a video can't be seen outside the United States. While derails should be cleaned up, and going on and on about it or having it degenerate into an... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 12:56 PM on October 21, 2012

Considering that I was once called "MeFi's own" when one of my projects hit the MSM, I don't think you should read too much into the designation.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 5:29 AM on July 9, 2012

You know, if you had put as much effort into the original post (five words, one link) as you did into complaining about its deletion (617 words, five links), it might not have been deleted in the first place.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 10:28 AM on November 28, 2010

A report this morning says that Hoder has been sentenced to 19½ years in prison.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 5:31 AM on September 28, 2010

I'm so proud of you guys I could plotz.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 7:37 AM on May 21, 2010

Outrage junkies get outraged when you prevent them from expressing their outrage. It's outrageous!
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 5:42 PM on May 5, 2010

No. Um, what?

Hold on. Does this have something to do with the chatfilter entry in the FAQ?

This isn't a case where everyone's answer is equally valid, because only people with experience taking mirtazapine would have a valid answer. Ditto your Stanford example. Similarly, if someone writes in asking if anyone has any experience using a Nikon D90, I can answer that, because I have that camera, but if someone writes in asking about a Canon 50D,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 6:19 PM on April 12, 2009

I pronounce "wfrgms" as "Christ, what an asshole," but admittedly my own dialect is pretty abstruse.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 6:12 PM on April 12, 2009

Who the hell do you think you are -- Robert Scoble?
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 5:00 PM on February 18, 2009

Dude, that's like ... seven people. Unprecedented for O-town!

We had 11 at the first Ottawa meetup four years ago.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 3:50 PM on February 11, 2009

Before we go all "WHAT. THE. FUCK. MATT?" on the poor guy, he wrote that nearly four years ago. That's, what, 48 million Internet years? A lot of water under the bridge, you know?

And yeah, ad revenue is down quite a bit for a lot of us, I'd imagine. Is for me.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 3:26 PM on February 11, 2009

@jack_mo: Two words: Zahra Kazemi.

I'm writing the Canadian foreign affairs minister about this right now; fortunately, I'm one of his constituents, so I might actually get a response.

More news coverage: Haaretz, Times, UPI.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 10:42 AM on November 19, 2008

• Huffington Post
• Internet sans frontières (en français)
• Facebook group
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 2:30 PM on November 19, 2008

The Globe and Mail reports what one of the reporters on the story told me last night: that DFAIT says it has not been informed by Iran of hoder's arrest. If Tehran doesn't recognize his Canadian citizenship, though ...
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 6:49 AM on November 20, 2008

It sounds like the Iranian authorities have decided that he's propagandistically useful à la Winston Smith. Pour encourager les autres. Shudder.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 4:47 AM on November 21, 2008

There are several ways in which this could work. Next weekend is one of them.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 4:33 AM on February 8, 2008

It'd be nice to have one that -- for once -- wasn't in the dead of winter.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 8:02 PM on July 26, 2007

I think you flabbergast too easily.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 11:47 AM on May 23, 2007

Ranking people is a bad idea. Full stop.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 9:20 AM on May 7, 2007

It is not without reason that communities/governments have laws.

The instrument that communities use to administer laws without caprice or bias is called a "bureaucracy." Be careful what you wish for. Complaints about inconsistent treatment will go up as rules get more strict.

I've said this before: you may not agree with the call the ump makes, but you have to accept that the ump had to make a call. Let them do their jobs and move on.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 2:25 PM on April 13, 2007

I wasn't aware that being ahead of all the other sites was somehow a problem, and that we had to engineer a solution to it.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 11:59 AM on March 6, 2007

It has often been so.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 11:23 AM on March 3, 2007

You don't know what you're talking about, or what you're asking for. AdSense filtering is on a per-domain basis, not by keyword, nor is there a slider that Matt can simply turn up a couple notches higher on the anti-skeeviness scale.

You expect Matt to keep track of literally hundreds of domains you don't approve of? Or should a new MetaTalk thread be started every time someone sees an ad, while logged out, that they don't like? And given the way this site and AdSense... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 6:17 AM on February 19, 2007

See also this thread.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 4:50 AM on February 15, 2007

Each Amazon store has separate affiliate programs that must be applied for separately, AFAIK. (I wasn't able to pull over my amazon.com associate ID to amazon.ca when I set that up, for example.)
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 4:34 AM on February 13, 2007

What this would lead to is several new MetaTalk threads every day complaining that someone asked their question in the wrong half of AskMe. Those of us who are left-handed might get this left-side/right-side-of-the-brain thing mixed up.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 7:21 PM on February 4, 2007

The other question can be answered by someone with a background in the relevant sciences. I know of a few books, actually, that address this subject. There are people who study such things.

Your question cannot be answered because it is completely impossible according to the laws of physics. More than hypothetical -- impossible. You may as well ask what would happen if the Earth was flat or the moon was cheese or the sky wasn't blue.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 6:18 PM on January 8, 2007

Not every question needs to be georeferenced: for every instance it would be useful (local recommendations, for example), there would be another where the georeferenced question would simply show up as noise. So I can see the potential usefulness, but I think it might be outweighed by the drawbacks.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 11:27 AM on November 14, 2006

A reporter told me a couple of years ago that "everyone" read MetaFilter for story ideas.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 4:29 AM on October 31, 2006

If anyone can answer your question, including yourself, and any answer is equally valid, it's chatfilter.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 8:58 PM on October 24, 2006

The question is hypothetical. I think it's safe to assume that school administrations will have policies on what to do in such circumstances. If four panels is a teacher, s/he would look there for the answer; if s/he isn't a teacher, then the question is hypothetical.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 4:24 PM on October 9, 2006

I'M ON UR METAF1LTER, SPOILIN UR B00KZ.

The book came out in 1962.

Haven't we had enough discussion about spoilers and when complaining about them goes too far?
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 7:30 PM on September 30, 2006

but it is also capable of policing itself perhaps more than you give it credit for...

You must be new here.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 6:44 PM on September 30, 2006

We'd need to have some calendar (attendees/invitations) and location (mapping, events within a certain distance) for it to really take off. Whether that can be done via Upcoming, another system, or something home-spun, it probably matters not very much in terms of the tech.

But however it's done, it will have to be well-integrated: at Upcoming, for example, a few non-Mefi events get listed on the Mefi group, and hardly any of the Mefi events get listed there.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 12:20 PM on September 7, 2006

I have been meaning to post to MetaTalk myself about this trend, where people are posting 10-paragraph questions about life or (especially) relationships that are profoundly logorrheic, introspective and textbook cases of "too much information," and for which there is usually an obvious and terse answer (e.g., "Dump him"; "Move on"; "Get over yourself") that the questioner doesn't want to accept.

But I wasn't sure what, if anything... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 4:57 AM on August 7, 2006

Just because other sites have x feature doesn't mean we have to have it. We don't need to turn MetaFilter into a clone of Yahoo! Groups.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 9:02 AM on July 26, 2006

I have no problems with reading the feed in NetNewsWire; it even validates.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 5:46 PM on July 11, 2006

We've provided ample evidence, on numerous occasions, as to why we can't have nice things. If something can be abused, we invariably abuse the living fuck out of it.

Third-party tagging might work on a contacts-only basis, though.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 7:57 AM on July 3, 2006

Because we mustn't ever talk about such things.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 7:53 AM on June 21, 2006

That thread is an embarrassment. Yow.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 7:21 PM on June 14, 2006

Is MetaFilter now one big hipster pissing contest ...

It's been that way for a while, really -- at least part of it, anyway. As a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy than to create.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 5:15 AM on June 14, 2006

Apropos of this subject. I just posted something to the front page for the first time in eight months, and the very first comment I get is some fucktard calling SalesFilter on me. Not sure why I bothered.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 5:51 AM on June 14, 2006

It's funny; last week I was dealing with the fallout from a couple of volunteer groups' meetings. Essentially, one or two people were being difficult in each case, and the groups' response was, in each case, to propose resolutions to reorganize how the groups conducted their business, without necessarily naming names or pointing fingers. My response, in both cases, was to say that it was a mistake to propose a systemic solution to an essentially personal problem. One group was literally turning... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 11:34 AM on June 14, 2006

Solution in search of a problem.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 3:59 PM on June 9, 2006

The problem is that the number of things deemed spoiler-able keeps growing. It used to be just movies currently playing in theatres (e.g., twist endings in Witness for the Prosecution or The Crying Game); now we have to take into account broadcast schedules in different countries, people who haven't seen it on DVD, etc.

I think we crossed a line when someone bitched about having Olympic results "spoiled" because NBC's... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 10:18 AM on May 28, 2006

In general, I find the assumptions and melodrama behind the romance/sex questions from early-20-something MeFites to be terribly amusing. And by "amusing" I mean baffling.
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 7:10 PM on May 25, 2006

I don't think it's in the überpositive XFN spec, is it?
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 5:31 PM on May 11, 2006

(Of course, I missed timeistight's link above. More speed less haste.)
posted to MetaTalk by mcwetboy at 5:32 PM on May 11, 2006