MetaFilter

I don't like this idea of sponsoring a stranger just to get the 7th continent represented.

Word. People, think this through:

You want to do this semi-organically.

Locate some folks in Antarctica who are doing something interesting that's worthy of a post that will not, itself, be a double. Collect some interesting web resources on the subject, ideally including a decent blog or site run by one or... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:58 AM on May 16, 2009

"Cause, whether you call it stealing, illegal, copywrong, copyright, whatever. It's just fucking freeloading, it's rude, it's anti-social. Hey, there are plenty of websites that you all can create that don't have any ads. Go ahead and create one, dreamhost is like barely anything a month. Go to Wikipedia.. Hey, an awesome place, no ads! (But, you did donate, right? I did, because I'm not a fucking freeloading dick) Spend $5 on metafilter, and barely anything to upset your sensitive... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by klangklangston at 6:31 PM on May 11, 2009

With chatfilter we typically delete things 1) that aren't solving a problem, 2) where every answer is as valid as any other answer (no one is correct or wrong) and 3) feature the question asker saying "I'll go first" with their answer.

Now, it's not black and white where borderline questions lie and you dug up a bunch of other borderline questions that could have been deleted but for one reason or another they had enough of a slight problem to be solved for... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 7:59 AM on May 9, 2009

I saw the gal from the Brooklyn Museum give a talk about the user generated content stuff they've been doing on the site at the Computer in Libraries conference. My best guess as to why they want you to register is so that they can get numbers for grants. In the non-profit world, especially with libraries and museums, you can't just say "oh look we've got this 2.0 gewgaw that people like to screw around with" and expect people to pay you for it. But you can say "we've got 125... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jessamyn at 5:30 PM on May 1, 2009

Why register? Because as soon as I saw this I was ready to tag everything with "penis", when I saw you had to register I dropped the idea. That's why you make people sign up, as an extra step to keep out the punks.
posted to MetaFilter by Science! at 4:11 PM on May 1, 2009

METAFILTER NEEDS TO OPEN UP A CHATFILTER SECTION.

Man, I would COME!!!!

So, no. You've needed for a long time now to close up your chatfilter instincts. We've basically asked you to do it a bunch of times. I had to ask you to do it again, today, in the green. And now you're basically starting it up again in here, and, jesus christ, enough. Benefit of the doubt gone, patience expended, hope you got something out of your... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:49 PM on April 28, 2009

is there a hinterland of things created by friends, relatives and other loved ones that are too self-linky for FPPing, but aren't yours and so can't go in Projects?

Yes, yes there is. There are a chunk of things that currenty have no good place on MeFi. Family/friend projects, gigs, classified ads, chatfilter type questions, questions about suicide, excessive porn and a bunch of other stuff.

Where can I post this... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 6:25 AM on April 25, 2009

As for where the line gets drawn between "interesting", "interesting but controversial enough that a few people will need to be told to chill out", and "so interesting that MetaFilter can't be trusted to even attempt a discussion", I respect the mod's judgment.

Part of the mods' judgment at this point is that you have kind of a shitty track record for not stirring things up around here, and while you tend to be fairly... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:41 PM on April 21, 2009

So, insulting and mocking IS an acceptable tactic to use?

No, insulting and mocking is not appropriate.

Telling people "oh hey we don't really do that here" is actually a better way to solve the problem than starting some "I am a twitchy irritable person, please do as I say you'll make friends and influence people!" sidebar commentary. Though people seem to prefer the latter method and I do not know why.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:02 PM on April 21, 2009

To selectively delete entries, use arrow keys to select and then press shift+delete
posted to Ask MetaFilter by labnol at 9:53 AM on July 23, 2006 marked best answer

But not allowing someone to simply delete their entire history is a bit squicky if you claim they own the copyright.

If Neal Stephenson showed up at my door and told me to burn my copy of Snow Crash, I would find myself in the unlikely position of telling Neal Stephenson to go fuck himself.

A community website is slightly weirder territory, as I said, and so I think there's room for a little bit more discussion about this stuff,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 4:01 PM on April 19, 2009

but if they really own the copyright, they also have the right to destroy it.

loquacious, you're conflating copyright with terms of service. It's currently implied that any site you contribute content to is also being granted a license to display it, defaulting to forever unless stated otherwise. I'll make this clear in the Terms of Service I'm working on with a lawyer now, but the copyright notice is so no one makes a book out of good ask mefi... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 3:48 PM on April 19, 2009

Here's where I think we are on the defending copyright vs. compulsive deletion thing:

1. We don't really know.

How copyright extends to a public/community context like this is weird and hazy territory. If there's someone on the site who has or can point to really clear documentation of exactly who the law treats these things, I'd be genuinely interested to hear it but I think it's safe to say that we are to a vast majority laypersons on the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 3:47 PM on April 19, 2009

I think that the mods have generously exposed themselves to extra aggravation by technically being required to delete content or needing to ban users who try to take advantage of this technicality

Actually we've been very clear and consistent in practice that you having copyright to a specific comment does not in any way mean you can tell us what to do with it. We've discussed this in MeTa before and it's the sort of thing that mathowie would have to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:44 PM on April 19, 2009

I wrote angrybeaver a note. This sort of thing is not okay. I appreciate that sometimes someone might look back on a question that was asked a few years back and be embarassed about it, which is why we have this option available, but doing it like this takes advantage of the community in a way that isn't cool.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:03 PM on April 19, 2009

No, that sucks. I'll drop a note to angrybeaver telling them to please not do that in the future. We'll go back and anonymize old AskMe posts if we think the question was asked in good faith and now regretted, but this sort of thing is really not okay. Not to say we probably won't do it this time, but we won't do it again.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:00 PM on April 19, 2009

Finding out where they came from is an interesting research project idea. But:

Alphabet threads are just a silly thing that happens organically occasionally. Not, usually, because the thread is "unworthy", and not usually as an intentional derailment, but rather as something that just sort of kicks in when people are feeling silly and there's no momentum carrying the thread forward in any other direction.

You don't make this clear, so... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:17 AM on April 13, 2009

Cortex: That's fine, you obviously have separate criteria from the stated ones that are the actual criteria for chatfilter deletion.

No, we have the stated criteria. What we lack is some crazy robo-laser zero-tolerance DEVIANCE SHALL NOT BE TOLERATED, THESE ARE THE RULES, KLAXON, KLAXON, KLAXON method of moderation. You seem to want either an all or nothing thing here, which, hi, welcome to Metafilter, we don't really work that way.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 2:23 PM on April 3, 2009

Help finding sources is fine. Help explaining terms is fine. We draw the line at people who basically copy/paste the question from their homework into AskMe and seem to be asking people to write things for them, or math problems where they're like "and show your work!" But yeah like everything else, it's a grey area. There are a lot of nice librarians and others on AskMe who can give good informed responses, but people have also been pretty forthcoming in some questions asking... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 1:25 PM on April 2, 2009

They way I tend to break it down is this:

- "Where do I start / where do I look?" is fine.
- "What is the answer?" is not okay.

Not everything falls perfectly into one or the other of those, but the stuff that's more like the former than the latter will generally get a pass. It's always kind of a judgement call, though.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:24 PM on April 2, 2009

editorializing in a post is bad form because we're here to share links to interesting stuff on the web. So if your post is three sentences about interesting stuff, then a sentence at the end saying "Oh and I think this is all bullshit and the people that make this stuff are wasting their time" it's editorializing tacked on that will derail a thread.

Editorializing makes a post aimed at the entire community slightly about the poster themselves, which is also a... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 1:38 PM on March 30, 2009

 oooh. this is kinda neat. 

 whee!

posted to MetaTalk by yeoz at 5:20 AM on March 25, 2009

We were going to do a New Orleans meetup, but I have grand plans for a multi-city thing instead, and a way to coordinate all of the cities on the site. I was going to announce it around May, and I was planning to explain it fully on the next podcast, because it's kind of a lot of things at once. I'd explain more here, but we're still working out some details and I think talking it out over a recording with other mods will help solidify the ideas and we can debate the finer points then.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 1:15 PM on March 17, 2009

On tallying the numbers, I think your discrepancies may be solved by one of these:
- AskMe may reach 10,000 people. The rest of the accounts are sock puppets.
- 38k-40k paid accounts, with the rest of those being before-the-$5 days.

Heh. Well, let me reframe those numbers a little, because I was just looking at them last week to put some bullet points together for Jessamyn for SXSW:

There are ~41,000... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 6:47 AM on March 16, 2009

Ask MetaFilter hits an audience of maybe 10,000 people from various backgrounds and you never know what you're going to get in terms of expertise and experience in matters. There have been insanely specific questions asked that I never thought would get an answer only to see a dozen people had in-depth experience in identical situations, and then there are fairly general questions that get nothing for some unknown reason.

You asked something specific but something I'm... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 10:17 PM on March 15, 2009

Here ya go ... PDF and EPS with fonts converted to curves.
posted to MetaTalk by jbickers at 3:24 PM on March 14, 2009

In the beginning, Metafilter was newly formed, and the people of Metafilter were an innocent people, full of enthusiasms. And they did go forth, and find that which was funny and new, and place it on the front page of Metafilter, and it was good.

The land of Metafilter prospered, and new peoples came to live there and till its blue fields. These new peoples, full too of enthusiasms, went forth and found that which was funny and new to them, and they too placed those... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:05 AM on March 14, 2009

I've retweeted Amber Alerts in my timeline.

I think that's laudable. I actually don't have a problem with the charitable impulse of that or any other charity campaign that's straight-up. It's in the execution.

So I ask in all innocence and honesty, how could they have gone about creating a campaign that positively engage people with their brand?

Offer some content or service... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Miko at 11:35 AM on March 12, 2009

You mean this one?
posted to MetaFilter by humannaire at 10:38 AM on March 12, 2009

Are favorites meant to be a revenue generating tool by directing lurkers to the 'Popular Favorites' links?

No. I don't even know what that might mean. Our revenue generating plan is "keep the site as excellent as we can" and that's about as craven as we are about it.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:54 PM on March 10, 2009

If we pool all our favorites together we should have the strength needed to rise up and overthrow this quartet of favorite-wealthy moderators!

You think I was born into favorites? No, sir, I was not. I came to this website just a man with the clothes on his back. I built that mountain you see before you with my own two hands, the way my father taught me: one pun, one Babylon 5 reference, one metacommentary song parody at a time.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 2:13 PM on March 4, 2009

"Thoughts?"

Your post advocates a:
[x] community moderated
[x] technical
[ ] social
[ ] legislative
[ ] economic
[ ] authoritarian
solution to crappy MetaFilter posts.

I'm afraid it won't work due to:
[x] the King of the Shitpile problem
[ ] Matt doesn't have time
[ ] the code... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by majick at 7:43 PM on August 8, 2007

I wanted to add that my Kindle 2 is supposed to show up today from UPS, but I'll take another look at if after I've used it for a couple weeks. I thought it was kind of silly to charge a couple bucks a month for a free site, and I thought I heard you could browse the web freely on a kindle in "experimental" mode, but if it'd be easier to just get the front page or something via the kindle download service, I'll see what I can do.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 2:39 PM on February 25, 2009

If I put two minutes thought into composing a pithy comment, that's creative work on my part. If it takes me thirty seconds, it's work that I did quickly. In either case, it's my work.

I'm not using work in some dramatic "oh that really took it out of me" sense, but in the basic straightforward sense that this is a work of my hands; through my efforts, through the exercise of my creative ability, however nominal it might be on any given per-instance... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:11 AM on February 25, 2009

I use pasta to link to text files. Make sure you link to the original pdf as well.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 3:23 PM on February 24, 2009

There are a few conflated issues here

- content that is US-only
- content that is geographically limited in other ways (i.e. it's a bigger deal if something isn't visible in Australia since we have a large userbase there, as opposed to China, where we don't. The Chinese firewall is a topic for another MeTa)
- linking to backups to that content, if possible/available
- irritability of MeFites that the world is not how they want it to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:04 AM on February 23, 2009

My take on the post: we're not a news source, and the thread itself contains active discussion of the dispute including some clear sourcing of the comments from the last.fm guys. I don't think we have an obligation to quash the thread just because the stated (and itself nominally ambivalent) premise has turned out to be wrong.

That TechCrunch should probably do more than append an "update..." to the end of their story is another issue entirely, but we're not a... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:38 PM on February 20, 2009

I'm more curious about the original question and why it is still up. It is really no different from asking "How do I get rid of the smelly homeless guy hanging outside my favorite coffeshop?"

Everything that happens happens in matters of degree along lots of different vectors, so I can't give you "it's no different" at all there, really; that said, I'm not sure your example would be deleted either—it'd depend (as a lot of... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 3:45 PM on February 18, 2009

The Literary Marketplace (website or book) is a listing of publishers and most importantly, agents. Other books in the writing section at any book store will direct you in writing a very good book proposal.

Once the proposal is written, find an agent. Major publishers will not look at your work until you are agented, period. I work at one of the top four publishers in the US, and that's the only way we do business. Agents will vet your proposal, help you make it better,... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by peanut_mcgillicuty at 7:00 PM on February 17, 2009

Now how about my last question?

How about it? We don't know, we'd assess the situation as it arose as we do with all sorts of totally new situations here. I don't think any of us is going to go on record saying "Nah, I think you're just going to be screwed" or, alternately "heh, that would never happen."

I think it's unlikely enough, and we are not Bank of America, that having weekend scenario planning retreats "Okay cortex... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:26 PM on February 10, 2009

We've got a middle-ground thing at this point with the askme sock-detection, what cjorgensen is describing, that's a little more softball I think than the initial test concept you ran into, Phire.

If an account goes to post a new question and it's been less than a week since an associated (e.g. by matching Paypal info) account posted a question, the page displays a "you're not skirting the limit with multiple accounts, right?" type informational warning, but... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 1:02 PM on February 10, 2009

My concern is what will happen to this data if you sell the site in 10 years?

I have a very hard time seeing the site sold (who would be buying, why would they be buying it, and why would we want to sell it to them?) but I have a harder time yet seeing this stuff not nuked from orbit were that ever even on the table.

We don't have an eyes-just-on-the-money Bob From Accounting on the team angling for a sell-out, that's for... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:39 PM on February 9, 2009

Yeah, I've had both a Terms of Service and a Privacy Policy drafted by lawyers in the past, but they were both just boilerplate things you'd see on Yahoo or Google, and the last lawyer I talked with didn't understand the internet enough to be able to tweak it to my liking, so I never slapped it on the site.

I would like to get a ToS and PP going. Here's the rough draft of what both those looked like in the past, summed up in outline form:

Terms... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 7:56 AM on February 9, 2009

bru, check for NoScript (or something similar) preventing the execution of mefi's javascript stuff. Some of it is hosted on google, if you're doing per-domain whitelisting and only including mefi.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:06 PM on February 3, 2009

I did an ebay auction long ago for user number 8. It got up to $135 I think, but this was when signups were mostly closed.

Someone did it again a couple years later (and got about $50), and I realized if people want an account that badly, I might as well kill the mefi account resale market by undercutting them with a simple one-time $5 signup.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 11:52 AM on January 23, 2009

Attempt at compromise-and-contain solution to inevitable clusterfuck results in failure to please all of the people all of the time.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:23 AM on January 20, 2009

Yeah, we went back and forth on this one a bunch yesterday. Approving it was getting down to coinflip territory, but I had some time to watch the thread yesterday and so went ahead. Only a couple of stupid/lulzy answers that needed deleting in the first couple hours, hoped it would keep going that way overnight.

If it's fake or not is not something we privilege as the decisive factor in weird anony submissions. We give stuff the sniff test and will in some cases do... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:41 AM on January 18, 2009

I would like to hear from a mod why lulz-ifying an unequivocally doomed thread is "knob"ish.

Because, first of all, doomed thread or not it's against the guidelines to go lulz-ifying in AskMe. Check the FAQ; the bit about "...unless the askme is totally bonkers in which case, fuck it, GO NUTS!!!" was not omitted by accident.

And because, secondly, people are sometimes wrong about whether or not a thread is... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:07 PM on August 13, 2008

The more a thread seems likely to be deleted, the more likely people are to flip out and get noisy in it. Like roll truck roll suggests, it's not all that uncommon for it to happen. It's a tradition of barnstorming that came over to AskMe from the blue, where it had been happening for years before the green even existed.

And while it's not practically speaking that big of a deal in cases like the one he linked about—e.g. balls-out who-the-fuck-do-you-think-you-are... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:23 AM on January 17, 2009

We're currently using the Modbot Thing Sidebarrer 3220xi, but previously it was a home-rolled system running on a Tandy in Matt's basement.

Really, we just keep an eye out for stuff that people are flagging as fantastic or favoriting the hell out of or emailing us about, or that one of us happens to come across independently and thinks is pretty keen. It's pretty much a given that different people will appreciate different entries more.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:31 AM on January 16, 2009