I love DaShiv too. It's ruined my chances of parole, but nobody blocks my sun during exercise hour, fuck the warden's rules.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 9:49 PM on June 7, 2008

I'm only coming if our hostess is a pirate again.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 8:00 PM on April 14, 2008

Does 7:00pm work?
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 4:30 PM on May 22, 2008

The real bottom line here is Matt's commitment to minimal moderation. Encourage a committed and intelligent community and allow them to moderate themselves.

The mods do a great job, but compared to any other large community out there, the moderation is not "minimal." MeFi is distinguished by an unusually large amount of moderation.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 6:51 PM on April 28, 2008

I have a habit of claiming I can making these and then having conflicts come up at the last minute, but I'm planning to be there.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 7:35 AM on March 11, 2008

Peedro indeed did a fantastic job. Finally, something for the show-offs in NYC to feel jealous about.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 9:01 PM on March 28, 2008

So did peeedro.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 9:07 PM on March 28, 2008

In re: Stynxo...

these democrats or "independents" like to believe that they have the critical thinking skills to see the world objectively and to make a valid and progressive judgement of how the US really is. And these individuals sip their coffees, buy their carbon footprints, shop at Trader Joes and donate money to Obama's campaign feeling they are part of something - that they are actively making the world a better place. And they get to drive... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 9:58 PM on March 18, 2008

I don't think there was anything particularly revealing of her mood those deletes, except maybe the second one. But if she is having a bad day, a MetaTalk post inviting everyone to discuss her mood might not be the best way to alleviate it.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 4:48 PM on March 17, 2008

Don't forget the MetaFilter redesign contest. If you visited the site before, you'd hardly recognize it.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 3:04 PM on March 16, 2008

Chances are, IMO, that SVG is the future.

I'll bet cash money on that.

Unfortunately, neither IE6 nor IE7 support SVG. It's a wonderful, wonderful tool, but the chances of major websites being built around it in the next 3 years are nil.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 7:45 PM on March 13, 2008

This is a great idea, and a neat example of something that probably no other large general-interest web community could pull off. I'm looking forward to recordings.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 9:23 PM on March 12, 2008

A few weeks ago, I described MetaFilter as the worst general interest community on the internet, except for all the others.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 5:17 PM on March 2, 2008

I'd also like to have the ability to draw little doodles of what we think each user looks like, and have those appear next to their comments.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 8:07 PM on February 28, 2008

For the record, a few months ago I started putting together a post about Pope Benedict's unusual offer of papal indulgences to pilgrims to Lourdes this year, barely 5 months after the Vatican announced a deal to sponsor flights from Rome to Lourdes with Italian airline Mistral Air, which, it wasn't widely reported, the Vatican owns a minority stake in. But I decided not to, because I didn't think a pleasant or interesting discussion would result.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 8:22 PM on February 18, 2008

Also, could answers given by me be shown in a slightly larger font size?
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 1:51 PM on January 15, 2008

Part of it is undoubtedly the barrier to entry. We may be a little like The Well, which had a few years of celebrity, then was surpassed by less exclusive derivatives. Also, the site design probably doesn't look trendy enough.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 12:22 PM on December 11, 2007

Maybe this will bait Ethereal Bligh into returning.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 4:20 PM on December 6, 2007

This rarely happens, but this is a change to the site I'm fine with.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 5:33 PM on November 30, 2007

I have poor luck with meetups, but am planning on driving up from Alexandria if anyone in that area needs a carpool.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 2:59 PM on November 29, 2007

Not that this is an argument for closing signups, which in my gut I feel like is not a great idea, but Matt's said more than once that the income from new accounts isn't a major chunk of the site's revenue.

You could jack the price up (temporarily) to $10 if that's an issue, which I've wanted for years now. Not because there haven't been plenty of excellent new contributors, but because I wish there were a bit less content,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 1:08 PM on November 28, 2007

I think it would be more useful if we did some of those trust fall exercises, where someone from the site that you think has a hard time expressing his feelings with you stands behind you, and then you close your eyes and fall backwards, trusting him to prevent you from falling all the way down. You learn to trust more, and he learns how to be there for someone he was previously uncomfortable with, and it's really a great experience for everyone involved.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 6:52 AM on November 27, 2007

That "close your account" button has turned out to be a bad idea.

I'm not sure what the point of it is. Is it supposed to be a clever way of ridding the site of melodramatic people? Lots of websites provide a way for users to delete their accounts, of course, but I was under the impression that those are generally provided for two reasons: to get the provider to delete your data, if you don't want to use the site anymore and have privacy... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 1:20 PM on November 23, 2007

(b) just walking away without any indication that they were leaving

I guess that makes sense.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 1:21 PM on November 23, 2007

I've been donating my spare cycles to BOINC for quite a while now; it's another distributed-volunteer-computing broker.

This system acutally runs on BOINC too- BOINC is a generic framework for writing distributed computing applications, a library for developers to make projects, not a project itself. I've spent many, many hours working with the BOINC code and setting up systems like this. Whether or not each individual application uses CPU while... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 5:13 PM on November 4, 2007

I think this is a horrible idea, but I usually do.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 7:48 PM on October 24, 2007

Using this should be called sending someone a mema.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 5:05 PM on October 19, 2007

*smacks spinturtle*
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 5:07 PM on October 19, 2007

If we opt out of this, can the little mail icon be removed from our headers?
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 5:13 PM on October 19, 2007

If I understand this correctly, I really don't like it. In a general sense, email is a universally accepted standard for electronic messaging, and there's a huge array of tools out there to help people deal with it efficiently. Specifically:
Users will have to visit MeFi regularly to check for messages. What if a user wants to contact, say, MiguelCardoso about something he wrote years ago, but Miguel no longer visits the site? You might answer that this is a feature not a bug,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 7:55 PM on October 16, 2007

We must have working email addresses so that people can fetch their password or change it.

This strikes me as bizzare. You already require working email addresses during signup, I thought, and those email addresses are already totally hidden from other users. Many people, like me, use throwaway email addresses for basically everything online, and that won't change no matter what you do in the user profiles.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 12:01 AM on October 17, 2007

EB's non-comment may be the best summary I've read of what infuriates me about DailyKos, when I make the mistake of reading it. I wish it had stayed.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 10:19 PM on October 9, 2007

Google personalizes search results based on what you've searched for before, I believe. I do plenty of "site:metafilter.com ..." searches, so I think that increases their rank in general results for me.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 2:19 PM on September 23, 2007

(if you have an account, are signed in, and have search history enabled)
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 2:20 PM on September 23, 2007

Letting users change their own passwords is one of the upcoming things on the To DO list.

And it always will be.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 7:22 AM on September 14, 2007

I love that all 3 moderators have shot this down in flames, but have left the thread open, so that you can receive as much punishment as possible. Which will still not be enough, because this proposal is insane.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 7:45 PM on September 3, 2007

Crazy idea.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 8:23 PM on August 4, 2007

I'm not sure how we'd manage to wrangle enough book content to make a sub-site worth it, and content is pretty much king around here.... we can't really share books via the internet, nor consume them in ten minutes and jump into a lively discussion.

I think these are practical issues that could be solved, and are worth solving, given the large desire for book discussion demonstrated on Metatalk and AskMe. Off the cuff, one workable solution might be... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 8:43 PM on July 11, 2007

Hey, yeah, I'm doing an internship with Grameen working on the project described. It's a really cool place, and I strongly encourage people to apply for it. The development team is really small right now- my boss and I are currently the only full time developers. And its just about the coolest software project that I can imagine working on. The code base its kinda ugly right now, so people that have a thing for refactoring will be welcome. Feel free to contact me with any questions.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 3:26 PM on June 2, 2007

Struts suuuucks, dude.

This is the topic of 75% of our workplace conversations. *cries*
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 7:47 PM on June 3, 2007

There's a delay between when questions are posted and when they appear. The site caches the AskMe frontpage to improve performance. It's up now.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 6:23 PM on June 2, 2007

Huh. The same thing happened when I attended my 5-year-old cousin's birthday party after reading Fark.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 3:30 PM on May 29, 2007

At most 14.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 10:30 AM on May 15, 2007

The universe is conspiring against me to prevent me from ever making a DC meetup. Hopefully it won't end fisticuffs, so we can do another soon.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 5:49 AM on May 15, 2007

The perfect gift for all my friends who MetaFilt.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 3:31 PM on May 9, 2007

Got mine. Beautiful!
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 1:03 PM on May 14, 2007

I should be there at 7.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 10:31 AM on May 11, 2007

Don't forget the Tower of Babel, from which the Miguel signal is broadcast.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 4:36 PM on May 2, 2007

OMFG, I would love a BookFilter that was integrated into MeFi proper. PLEASE DO THIS. This is one of the few communities on the internet whose members are both numerous and serious enough to make this work. The feature that jbickers describes would also rock- AskMe is my #1 source for book reccomendations.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 12:01 AM on April 29, 2007

The neat part is that it makes it pretty likely that Ebert will read the thread.
posted to MetaTalk by gsteff at 3:57 PM on April 25, 2007