Sure! I just added a "Page: 1 2 3 ..." to the bottom of the all time popular page. You can click the page numbers to see more popular questions.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 11:02 AM on October 6, 2008

dog food sugar, on that page you're seeing posts and comments "marked as a favorite most often in the past seven days", so that's all there is. It's just a look at what's popular recently.

We've gone around and around here in MetaTalk about having a master "popular posts and comments of all time" list that you can page through, and we probably won't put that together.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 1:08 PM on October 6, 2008

ok, MeFi all-time favorites has paging now too.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 1:36 PM on October 6, 2008

thanks mrzarquon, _self has been targeted.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 7:58 AM on October 7, 2008

We strip line breaks from questions for the front page to keep initial questions there concise. If you have more than one paragraph it should probably go in the More Inside section. But you're right that preview should match what you'll end up with, and I updated the post preview so it matches how Ask treats line breaks.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 10:02 AM on October 6, 2008

Here's the current copy: "This will show up on the front page, so try to ask your entire question while keeping it to a paragraph or so (if you must go on longer, use the optional extended area)."

It's a bit casual, but I think it gets the idea across without going into formatting details. And yep, line breaks work in More Inside and the preview reflects that.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 11:00 AM on October 6, 2008

heh ok, "or so" has been removed.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 11:18 AM on October 6, 2008

It's not members only, but if you haven't logged in within the last six months or so, you might have to go through the login process once. We made a few more security changes recently so we can get rid of an older identification method based on the user_pass cookie. It's supposed to happen silently behind the scenes, but that cookie swap probably caused your login headaches.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 1:30 PM on September 30, 2008

sagwalla (and anyone else with this problem), please hit this page and send me the results via MeFi Mail. That will give me a bit more information to go on.

Though if you're able to post here in MetaTalk you should be fine everywhere else, the identity verification stuff is the same across all sites. You might make sure that you delete all cookies across all metafilter domains, including ask.metafilter.com. And it couldn't hurt to click the sign out link above, shut... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 10:47 AM on October 2, 2008

Yep, I updated the feed to include titles.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 10:19 PM on October 1, 2008

tellurian, that was definitely a bug. The 'favorite removed' page hasn't been used since the first version of favorites back in '06. I removed the bad code so you shouldn't see [remove] anymore.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 8:29 AM on September 29, 2008

Division by zero? That's a paddling.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 10:45 AM on September 29, 2008

It looks like there might be a bug with IE7/Vista. The problem here is that the return false in the onclick event is not stopping the browser from visiting the URL (just a # in this case) like it should. I googled around for IE7 "return false" and it seems others are experiencing this problem. Unfortunately there's no clear fix, and it's not happening for everyone. I'm hoping this is a problem that will be solved in a newer version.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 8:35 AM on September 29, 2008

Those aren't specific spans of time. They're assigned randomly when something is less than a minute or so old.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 9:56 AM on September 25, 2008

netbros, look at the the current firestorm around a few synonyms for recent. I think we've done enough damage.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 2:44 PM on September 25, 2008

It has always been possible to block messages from specific members. You click the "block this sender" link at the bottom of any MeFi Mail message.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 2:10 PM on September 24, 2008

Favorite counts are reset every night at 1:05 AM Pacific. We have a batch job that runs at the time and removes favorites on deleted comments. So you won't see a miscount more than 24 hours or so.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 9:23 PM on September 22, 2008

Have you seen the "My Posts" tab?
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 12:02 PM on September 15, 2008

bigmusic, "My Posts" should be working for you now. There was a glitch with changing the timeframe left over from the filtering change. Change the time to 2 weeks and you should see your Ask post.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 1:14 PM on September 15, 2008

Unfortunately it's not that simple, Dethalicious. Comments and posts are stored in different tables with different data structures, and the RA query for each is scanning six or more different tables for activity, and joining up across even more. The query grabs comment counts, new comment counts, favorite counts, and latest comment IDs with filters by site, personal filtered threads, different timeout values for different sites, and some old Ask/Meta weirdness thrown in for good measure. It's... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 2:00 PM on September 16, 2008

We're considering ways to completely restructure RA on the backend so changes will be easier in the future. But it would be a complete overhaul so we want to make sure it's worth the effort.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 2:09 PM on September 16, 2008

We have photos linked from the Past Meetups page now.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 11:12 AM on September 16, 2008

And I added the bjork tag. We'll get proper filtering working there.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 3:17 PM on September 14, 2008

hmm, we're not doing anything tricky with those links on this end. There's no JavaScript executing when you click a link and all of the URLs should be valid. Some browsers don't like the pound (#) notation at the end of URLs, but those would only exist on "x new comments" links.

I don't know anything about the LG Voyager. Does the browser modify pages from the web to reformat them for a small screen? If so, it could be choking on HTML in larger threads? (That's... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 8:43 AM on September 11, 2008

You might try bringing up the completely unsupported and possibly broken text-only version of the site to see if that works for you. The links there don't include the stub (/Googles-speedy-little-red-browser in your example) and those might be too long for LG Voyager. That's also a complete guess.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 8:51 AM on September 11, 2008

Nope, nothing new in the works for the mobile site that I know of. We threw together the iPhone interface as a proof-of-concept and we haven't been discussing it much since then. Matt and I both have iPhones and we both read the standard site exclusively afaik.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 10:25 AM on September 11, 2008

I can verify that this has been added to the shortlist of our current priorities with a general readiness level of yellow, elevated.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 9:28 AM on September 3, 2008

The site filter is available now as a drop-down menu under the page title. Look for "Showing activity from: [All Sites]", and change the site. The page should reload with recent comments activity filtered to that site.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 4:05 PM on September 3, 2008

Yep, that looks good. thanks stavros.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 10:07 AM on September 5, 2008

¹ should be working on comment preview/post now. Thanks for the extra info Pronoiac, the digit in the named entity was throwing off our server side filter.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 9:53 AM on August 29, 2008

I'm here (and asking in MeTa is great), but implementing something like this isn't up to me. It's technically possible to include a flash player in comments but there are several reasons we wouldn't want to. We exclude the object tag from comments because there are lots of malicious things people can do with it. And we have a general rule that we don't embed things from other servers within conversations (like images) to limit security risks among other things. That would rule out embedding MP3s... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 9:16 AM on August 25, 2008

Is that awfully complicated?

It's all a matter of trade-offs. We can build it, but do we want to give folks another thing to consider when adding a comment? There's something nice about the simplicity of a single textarea for commenting. We would build it to be solid, but there are always issues to work with when you complicate a form. It adds in more failure points, so it's just something we'd need to consider carefully. I don't think anyone is... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 12:10 PM on August 25, 2008

It works, it's just that the owner of that particular video has "Embedding disabled by request". So the video won't come up in windows like the MeFi video player. If we wanted to get fancy we could probably index every YouTube link that crosses MeFi, hit the Youtube API to see if it's embeddable, and not show the player link for those videos. But until we do that, the player will be hit and miss due to non-embeddable videos.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 9:22 AM on August 18, 2008

fearfulsymmetry, it's possible, but it would be a bit of a project. We'd need to set up a table here that stores every YouTube link posted to MeFi as a separate record. Then we'd use the YouTube API to see if a particular link is embeddable, and set a flag for each entry in the link table. Then as we write out a page here, we'd do a quick lookup in the YouTube link table to see if a particular link is embeddable.

It would still be a little sketchy because someone could... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 5:04 PM on August 18, 2008

Not that I know of, Artw. But if there's something simple we can do to make it happen I'd be all for it.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 5:50 PM on August 18, 2008

I threw some spaces into long words and that should help everything wrap.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 9:37 AM on August 10, 2008

From the Acronyms page at the wiki: "SLYT: Single Link You Tube. A post that points to one video clip, usually (but not necessarily) hosted at YouTube.com."
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 10:40 AM on August 4, 2008

I think the BoingBoing thread is throwing this feature off right now. That thread is always at the top of Recent Activity on My Favorites, though I always get a kick out of it so I don't mind. But that thread is about to close to new comments (no!) in a day or two, and without new comments it won't show up there anymore. Beyond extremely long-running threads that veer terribly off course, I think favorites in Recent Activity works fine as is.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 8:34 AM on July 30, 2008

thanks for letting us know, should be working now. It was a bug left over from the move to public comments.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 2:35 PM on July 29, 2008

Yes, we're using the stock JW FLV Media Player and we don't have any control over the interface beyond colors. You could mention your suggestion to the player developers in their Support forum, but I haven't had much luck getting a response to issues there in the past.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 10:48 PM on July 19, 2008

flapjax, I have no idea how they got the scrollbar to work for that example. There's no info about the scrollbar there, just info about displaying extra info from a playlist below the player. I know the scrollbar works there, but how it's working is a mystery to me. They might have a customized version of the Flash player that includes a different scrollbar control in the code.

I'm not a Flash developer, so that kind of monkeying with the player source code is out of my area.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 11:18 PM on July 21, 2008

This happens quite a bit with work/school caches, and we added an entry to the FAQ about it: While reading metafilter at work/school, rather than seeing You're logged in as:USERNAME/logout I see some random person's username. What's up?. But there shouldn't be any security issues to worry about beyond finding out who your co-workers/schoolmates on MetaFilter are.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 12:33 PM on July 21, 2008

Tags are included in the feed as RSS categories, but not every reader displays that information. I know Google Reader doesn't show categories anywhere, but Bloglines shows the first category under the post title. So that's hit and miss, but you might be able to find a reader that displays them.

I agree that putting the tags in the description after the post body would be noisy.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 4:35 PM on July 18, 2008

Here's the update announcement, with a link to the updated script.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 8:37 PM on July 17, 2008

...does it that take into account favorites that have been unfavorited?

Nope, it's all favorites based on an incrementing ID.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 4:51 PM on July 16, 2008

There is a podcast feed that includes every song. Every playlist also has a podcast feed. You could subscribe to any of the feeds in iTunes on your computer, and sync that podcast with your iPod.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 8:59 PM on July 15, 2008

I added m3u support, but I had to send it back to 2001 where it would be useful. I kid. Here's the Music RSS feed as M3U, but I don't have any way to test it handy. Let me know if this is what you need.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 9:42 AM on July 16, 2008

It's no big deal. I updated the script to URL-encode the filenames.

But yeah, if your program is picky you might want to write a RSS to M3U conversion script.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 1:55 PM on July 16, 2008

We're supposed to only allow English letters and numbers in tags, and we need to beef up our tag input areas to enforce that rule. We do this because the tags are used in URLs. So you're not missing anything—we're missing a step in our tag input process.

I removed the garbled tags from the post.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 11:57 AM on July 14, 2008

skynxnex, we decided to go the English-only route so tag URLs are readable/guessable (as smackfu pointed out).

And thanks, Plutor. T-Shirt: Ordered.
posted to MetaTalk by pb at 1:02 PM on July 14, 2008