This supports my long-standing theory that Britons are totally bollocky at naming things.

Flagged as racist, 'cos you're behaving like a [redacted].

1. The female external genital organs. Cf. QUAINT n.
Its currency is restricted in the manner of other taboo-words: see the small-type note s.v. FUCK v.

[c1230 in Ekwall Street-Names of City of London (1954) 165 Gropecuntelane.] a1325 Prov.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 8:28 AM on July 10, 2008

It's not a record either for total number, or most in 6 months. Postroad has 18 listed on deletedthread, which only started in December 2002. By all accounts, Postroad's most prolific period was way back in 2001.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 12:54 PM on June 4, 2008

In my alleged "best answer" I also contributed information suggesting that risk can be assessed based on the timing of intercourse in relation to the menstrual cycle. It's not fool-proof, but doctors use it professionally, and lots of people use it personally, and it does give some information about risk. In this case it served to increase, not decrease the perception of risk, which isn't a bad thing.

I totally agree that medical questions are often danger... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 7:46 AM on May 16, 2008

I don't think there's any acceptable dividing line between the teen pregnancy threads and other health questions. People like asking and answering health stuff, and we have extensively discussed the problems before (1, 2).
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 8:26 AM on May 16, 2008

Not that anyone is going to want to read any of these books, or have the £870 required to buy them all, but I have written or co-authored chapters in the following books:

Handbook for Surgical Cross-cover

The Overactive Bladder: Evaluation and Management

Textbook of Female Urology and Urogynecology

Textbook of Reconstructive Urologic... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 10:34 AM on February 23, 2008

This isn't just posted in the wrong MetaTalk category, it's posted in the wrong website entirely. MetaTalk is for discussing MetaFilter. Even if you could be absolutely certain that richmondparker was indoctrinating the children of Marietta Georgia with his extracurricular anti-communist views, this isn't the place to try and put it right.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 10:32 AM on February 22, 2008

While we're posting only tangentially-MeFi-related links:
So I guess I got kicked off another My Little Pony forum.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 5:43 AM on February 1, 2008

Sorting search results by number of favourites would be excellent.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 1:23 AM on January 31, 2008

Some interesting probabilities from the postdata file:

1.89% chance of a MeFi post getting 0 comments
3.70% chance of a MeFi post getting >100 comments
0.05% chance of a MeFi post getting >500 comments
0.01% chance of a MeFi post getting >1000 comments

0.04% chance of a MeFi post getting >100 favorites
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 2:24 AM on January 23, 2008

skorgu my entirely unsophisticated analysis technique consists of importing the data into Excel, sorting it by whatever looks interesting, and then using the COUNT function.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 6:21 AM on January 23, 2008

Many of the "best answered" questions are answered in the first comment correctly. If you could separate chatfilter from actual questions, you could make a more meaningful analysis.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 2:36 AM on January 22, 2008

Consistent failure to use the shift key appropriately (or indeed, ever in bruce's case) ought to be reason enough for a time out. [NOT BAUHAUSIST!!]
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 1:37 PM on January 6, 2008

Who knows how often this has happened in other threads, with well-intentioned, authoritatively stated, wrong advice?

It is undeniable that there is terrible advice offered in medical AskMe threads, and that it sometimes verges on the dangerous. Here's a recent clanger in which the OP expresses concern about latex anaphylaxis, and someone suggests wearing latex gloves as a challenge.

About 2 years ago when I was a genuine $5... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 6:52 AM on December 6, 2007

That's facetious. There's a gulf between getting bad advice on how to bake a cake, and bad advice about what to do about an alarming black mole that seems to be growing. Medical threads often have a very real potential for psychological or physical harm that is absent from almost all other threads.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 7:24 AM on December 6, 2007

Imagine a situation where anonymous is a 60 year old man sitting at home with blood in his urine, secretly terrified he has cancer. He posts a question in AskMe to try and get some (false) reassurance:

I have some symptoms of a bladder infection like rushing to the toilet, burning pain when I pee, and a little blood. Is it OK to use an over-the-counter medication or should I see my doc right away?

Even if everyone else... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 12:01 PM on December 6, 2007

There is far more likely to be a dozen other opinions in the same thread, many of which will call out the phony advice for what it is.

This paper: Accuracy and self correction of information received from an internet breast cancer list: content analysis provides a good model for an analysis of AskMe. If anyone else is keen, I'd be happy to help assess a sample of health posts and see how often potentially dangerous information is being left uncorrected.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 6:15 AM on December 7, 2007

I thought this thread was almost a candidate for the sidebar, violation of ToS or not. For a non-MMOGer the answers were really interesting, and about a topic that has been of increasing interest even in the mainstream media.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 7:18 AM on December 6, 2007

Do we have any acceptable mattamyn-like moniker that incorporates pb yet? Because I vote for pattamynorteb.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 12:00 PM on December 5, 2007

Is "take it to BBQ" now official policy? I know it's Cortex's baby and all, and it got to be on MeTa not projects, but that's still iffy.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 8:06 AM on December 2, 2007

Can someone point me to the MeFi origin of this tasing in joke before I resort to another misguded MeTa thread?
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 4:26 PM on November 29, 2007

I'm really glad this call out was made because I have a similar concern about unwarranted claims of otter paraphilia, but I already used up my weekly metatalk allowance on some other damn thread.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 4:22 PM on November 29, 2007

I still like jwz. Are we talking about the same one?
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 5:24 PM on November 28, 2007

I don't have much more to add after Kattullus and Stavros. I agree that it's time for more openess about the way the site is run, and more care given to the way changes are implemented. When changes come seemingly unannounced it makes me uncomfortable, because it reminds me that this is an oligocracy, when I wish it was literally a democracy.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 12:59 AM on November 29, 2007

I flagged it as "other" just for being a piss poor FPP. It's so naively unironically offensive, that I didn't really find it offensive. There is no actual animal cruelty or dwarf cruelty that I could find, although the grouping of links does make it kind of W00T! animal cruelty.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 5:08 AM on November 28, 2007

I asked a similar question about this in Sept 2006, and we got some neat usage pie charts. It doesn't answer the question though about whether people venture across borders so to speak. I also believe however that there is a morass of AskMe-ers who couldn't give a damn what happens elsewhere in the MeFiniverse.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 1:28 AM on November 27, 2007

Since when did we overload servers? Someone linked to my blog earlier in the year in the blue, and I got exactly 343 hits only. Obviously some FPPs must be more "must clickable", but we're no slashdot or digg.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 3:03 PM on November 25, 2007

So these 144 comments were posted this morning in a MetaTalk thread without any banhammer, pitchforks, or flameout. I read right to the end and, being that I loathe MetaTalk threads without any banhammer, pitchforks, or flameout in the first place, it got me thinking...Why isn't there a policy against MetaTalk threads without any banhammer, pitchforks, or flameout ?
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 6:26 AM on November 21, 2007

I lurked forever, and signed up 11-19-2004.

Ditto.

Ditto. (Happy birthday to me, etc etc)
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 2:17 AM on November 19, 2007

Sadly I have no time now to read 1027 comments re: portobello mushrooms. Please can someone briefly summarise why that thread was not deleted and why it has 107 favourites.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 7:10 AM on November 9, 2007

I also had Chrisbucks problem above, in identical circumstances.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 7:05 AM on November 9, 2007

Micro-pony: Can we have an option to receive a mefi mail or an indication on the recent activity page when we get a best answer? That would save us all from the indignity of adding ourselves as contacts (although I did it anyway).
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 10:31 AM on November 6, 2007

While we're calling out new features, I'm not that into the "welcome back roofus" at the top of the page. It seems artificially "matesy" in contrast to the usual mefi diet of flame-outs and pedantic pile-ons.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 4:05 AM on November 6, 2007

Does Cortex's lightning reflexes in deleting Caddis' parking double count as a "goose egg"? Because if so we ought to update the wiki.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 11:59 AM on November 5, 2007

Would it set a precedent if this MeTa thread was sidebarred?
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 9:51 AM on November 2, 2007

I enjoyed the responses to my question about the world's worst foods.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 2:17 AM on October 31, 2007

In practice, the cost of reading a blog is not simply proportional to the number of posts, since we also need to navigate to the blog (which takes constant effort per blog). Hence, a combination of unit and NP cost is more realistic.

Someone should tell them about RSS feeds.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 10:29 AM on October 30, 2007

Previous wisdom has it that postroad is the reigning deleted post king, with jonson as a contender for most doubles. However four panels has managed 13 so far this year, so he must be catching up fast.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 5:57 AM on October 30, 2007

There's a search box now in non-plain? How long has that been there? I demand parity of features for the plain users.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 5:05 PM on October 29, 2007

Coding potential spoilers in rot13 would be dire. There's already "More Inside", tags, and spoiler warnings, all to alert the wary when spoilers could potentially be present in a thread. No-one ever died from spoilers, and encouraging any use of rot13 will unacceptably disrupt readability. If people care deeply about the risk of spoilers, they just need to stay out of such threads, and leave them to the rest of us who have some kind of perspective on our popular culture consumption.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 4:58 PM on October 29, 2007

I think it's a given that stuff that has been Reddited/Dugg/Boingboinged is going to end up in the blue whether we like it or not, precisely because not all FFPers read all those sites.
However this post got picked on because the "easter egg" is exactly the sort of uber-nerd obscure tech nonsense that Digg likes. If you like tech minutiae, you probably did already see this elsewhere.
And although I'm something of a Boing-hata too, they are usually pretty good... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 2:02 AM on October 24, 2007

Well, I don't know where the $5 mark came in

I signed up pretty promptly after registrations reopened, so I'm guessing 18k onwards is the paying customers, and everyone else is the freeloaders.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 12:55 PM on October 21, 2007

You know who else's posts set a biased tone for comments to follow? (The answer being anyone who over-editorialises from an entirely partisan position) However this post is not vastly different to your first FPP, which did fine, so I don't think you can be blamed for getting this one wrong.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 2:53 AM on October 19, 2007

We got some stats on AskMe vs MeFi vs MeTa usage in this thread last year,
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 12:17 PM on October 10, 2007

I survived eating rotten shark, replaced my oven, replaced my keyboard, and never managed to bowl a perfect 300 game.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 7:15 AM on October 10, 2007

Previous Mr Fucko bannination. So glad this one
CAN HAZ BANHAMMER
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 6:30 AM on October 4, 2007

I think a compilation of metafilter friendfeeds might be more interesting than an aggregated twitter feed. I've abandoned twitter in favour of updating my Facebook status.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 6:23 AM on October 4, 2007

Given that about ten people sign up a day and maybe half as many chose to leave, wouldn't MetaTalk be unreadable if this happened more than once a week? once a day? 6 times a day?

I would guess that 99% of users that "leave" don't actively decide to quit in the style of Burhanistan. They just log in less and less frequently, and finally stop entirely because mefi doesn't appeal anymore. Equally 99% of all users would intuitively know that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 9:07 AM on September 12, 2007

Since this isn't particularly wendelling, I've got some supplementary questions for Uncle Matt and Auntie Jess (or other authoritative MeFites):

1. Who was the first unfortunate member to feel the force of the banhammer, and what did they do wrong?

2. Did Stavros invent the word "banhammer"?

3. Has Cortex been allowed to press the banhammer button yet?
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 11:30 PM on August 3, 2007

Don't know how I missed this for so many months. My nike+ screenname is RunRoofusRun. I would vote for a fastest 5km, not that I have any chance of victory over any distance.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 6:50 AM on July 30, 2007

designbot just between me, you, and the rest of metafilter, does your dad cheat by artificially recalibrating his stride length? As in he's like 4'4" but has the machine set to believe he's 6'4" and covering way more ground than he really is? I don't mean to knock an awesome record, but I'm curious.
posted to MetaTalk by roofus at 2:10 AM on August 1, 2007