MetaTalk

Strip mobile tags

Confess, Fletch — Thu, 24 May 2012 23:34:16 GMT

Can we strip the 'm' from links to Wikipedia? In a recent post there was a link to a Wikipedia page that went directly to the mobile site. If your on a mobile device you would automatically get the mobile version so there is no reason to force people on non-mobile devices to it.

I don't mean to call out this particular post, it's just an example.

Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of clubbing former actress Lindsay Lohan.

Nomyte — Thu, 24 May 2012 20:36:06 GMT

MeFi's Own™ nasreddin has won the Rossica Young Translators Award for his daring and inventive rendering of a passage from the new Viktor Pelevin novel. An excerpt of his entry starts on page 34 of this PDF.

Habeas factus

anigbrowl — Thu, 24 May 2012 20:03:56 GMT

This post ought not to have been deleted. The reason given: "This post was deleted for the following reason: Seems like an interesting and pretty fucked-up case, but most of the links here seem like they're kind of filler material and if the meat of the post is essentially "read this legal PDF" it might need to be presented a lot more in those terms, or with some good long-form journalism or analysis. Otherwise we've just got folks arguing about rape charges yet again. -- cortex"

What is wrong with 'read this legal pdf'? 90% of discussions about law at MetaFilter go round in circles because people either don't know how or can't be bothered to read the filings in the case. The legal filing has a table of contents and that includes a 'statement of facts.' This is not hard to understand even if you don't have any legal training. Deleting a contentious post because the author actually went to the trouble of providing primary sources is absurd, especially considering how many pointless arguments ensue in single-link-post threads because the single link contains an incomplete or biased treatment of the subject matter.

If it was up to me, we'd delete threads on legal cases that didn't include links to primary sources. I fail to see why punditry is more desirable than the actual facts presented to the court, and think that this is a terrible standard of moderation to use, regardless of how cranky rape threads can be. A guy spent six years in jail here for a crime he didn't commit, and that's not worth discussing because it might require people to do a little more reading than a typical blog post or tumblr page?

I am pretty offended by the rationale given for the deletion of this extremely worthwhile FPP, and call for its reinstatement unaltered.

Minor preview bug?

Pruitt-Igoe — Thu, 24 May 2012 18:08:54 GMT

Minor preview bug?

When I compose a comment in a thread with YouTube links (e.g. this), and hit preview, the preview page loads with broken images in place of the YouTube buttons.

Instead of an image of http://d217i264rvtnq0.cloudfront.net/images/mefi/youtube_yellow.png, they're an image of http://www.metafilter.com/images/icons/stockholm_mini/move_file.gif.

Just in case it's my browser's fault, I'm using the Firefox 12.0 package on Ubuntu 11.0 (x86_64).

+1 or Thumbs Up buttons

theobserver — Thu, 24 May 2012 17:45:24 GMT

I would like to request a feature to distinguish favorites (answers/posts I want to go back and read) vs "promotes" (ability to vote for a post/answer without adding a "nthing" comment).

I am sure this has been asked before, but I can't seem to find it in this section, whole of MetaTalk or in the FAQs - is there some way or on-going feature request for separating out the favorites vs "promoting" posts/answers? Some sort of +1/Like/Thumbs Up button?

There are some answers/posts that I want to keep track of and re-read later, but there are also posts that I want to "promote" without adding a "nthing" comment unnecessarily.

I would like to see only the posts I want to re-read show up in my favorites link.

Big Companies FTW

leotrotsky — Wed, 23 May 2012 19:02:56 GMT

Great Metafilter comment on moving up from a low-level position in a big company?

I recall someone praising the ability to apply internally to positions, networking, etc., all from a starter-level position at a big company. Ring any bells? It's not lending itself to easy queries.

MeFi's own...

Help, I can't stop talking! — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:22:11 GMT

Once again, an FPP has attracted its subject to comment on the proceedings. Deborah Feldman has dropped in to offer many clarifications and responses to questions in this thread about her interview on xoJane and the ensuing drama.

Just because it's commercial doesn't mean it's a bad idea

nickrussell — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:09:17 GMT

Klout interface for Metafilter?

Klout it what it is... a relatively blunt instrument for measuring social networking influence. They are adding heaps of networks to their portfolio, which seems to indicate quite a flexible API.

I think quite a few of the contributors here spend a significant amount of their social networking time on metafilter, thus have there been any considerations for plugging into Klout? Everyone's contributing already, why not measure it?

Say what?

SLC Mom — Wed, 23 May 2012 04:41:40 GMT

Wait. Did he seriously go to the most expensive college in the country and tell the new grads to take the lower paying job? MeFi's own asavage gives an awesome commencement address at Sarah Lawrence College.

There is a long intro from the college pres. Adam starts at about 5:30. (closed)

I'm with Leah Remini on this one.

benito.strauss — Wed, 23 May 2012 04:23:10 GMT

Do I have the most inane first comment ever?

Amid the general bummer of the holdkris99 thread I got a little smile from this comment from sweetkid:

most people take a bit of time to adjust to a new website

That made me go into my posting history. This was my second AskMe comment, six years ago:

on an aside, IANAL means "I am not a lawyer"? heavens, I hope so.

ha.

I checked my posting history and found that I had introduced myself with:

I'm with Leah Remini on this one.

Does anyone else have a first comment that's more pointless than that?

AskMe Duplicity

DoubleLune — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:46:15 GMT

Hey, I just saw that AskMe... oh wait, it was a different cat problem...

Every so often I notice two posts that are very similar, right after the other. My example is books, but I seem to remember this happening with cats, sex, jobs, you name it.
I'm wondering, though I don't know how answerable this is, if it's usually someone seeing Post #1 and remembering a related question that turns into Post #2, or if it's just coincidental.

Where'd it go...

victory_laser — Tue, 22 May 2012 19:40:27 GMT

There was a FPP deleted about the blocking of parts of the NDAA and a link to a Guardian.uk article by Naomi Wolf. Why was it deleted?

It hasn't had much attention in the US press, and I probably wouldn't have heard about this ruling if not for the post. Is there already a thread running on this or something?

holdkris99's death was a hoax.

cortex — Tue, 22 May 2012 19:03:28 GMT

So, we were lied to. The good news is that holdkris99 is fine, rather than dead. He's also banned, his wife's (?) account is banned, and they're not welcome back to Metafilter, ever.

Needless to say this is an incredibly shitty situation. We're furious that the community was lied to like this, that we were lied to, and that something as difficult as suicide and a survivor's grief was used as the premise for a cheap prank on the folks on this site.

We were contacted by either Marc's wife or Marc pretending to be his wife -- we honestly don't know which -- informing us that he had killed himself the previous weekend and asking for help figuring out what to do as far as letting the community know. Jessamyn corresponded with "her", setting her up with an account and explaining posting stuff and so forth. And then the mrs holdkris99 account posted this death announcement thread.

As mods, we're stuck being the house cynics even on deeply sad or troubling stuff; we give folks the benefit of the doubt and assume all else being equal that things are on the level, because they almost always are, but we also double-check things, and look into stuff when users bring worries to us. And there were some quietly worrying things in this case -- no easily-findable obituary notices, no aggregations of condolences on social media pages -- but none of that's a smoking gun. When we found a direct reference from one of Marc's friends to having hung out with him at an event several days after his alleged suicide, that meant we had to ask, even if it was a weird misunderstanding with similar names.

Whoever was responsible for the emails to us and for the mrs holdkris99 account acknowledged tersely at that point that it was a "bad experiment or joke or whatever carried too far". We've banned the account, and an apparent sockpuppet (which, we discovered while looking into this, was used at one point as a prop in Ask Metafilter to ask a question setting up a long "here's my crazy life experience story" answer from holdkris99), and we've removed the death notice from the holdkris99 account and closed the bullshit Metatalk death announcement thread.

We're sorry as hell this happened; it's frustrating to find out someone has lied to the Mefi community like this, and it's galling that they chose to lie about something as wounding as suicide when we've actually lost folks like Bill "null terminated" Zeller, and to lie about the struggle to deal with the death of a spouse when folks like mrbill have genuinely lived through that experience here.

We don't really care about the specifics of Marc or his wife's motivations or what they have to say about any of this. They've thoroughly burnt their bridges, and while it's just amazingly lousy for him or them to have done this, their involvement with this basically ends with the truth being outed here and them being no longer welcome on Metafilter.

I know a lot of you are going to be as frustrated and upset by the deception as we are, but I've always valued the fact that the Metafilter community has been decent about not taking stuff offsite or reacting nastily even when other folks act badly, and it's important to all of us on the mod team that that's the case here, too. If folks want to talk about what happened, this thread is the place to do it, and we'd prefer it stay here and that people check their anger or upset about this enough to take the high road and keep things reasonably cool in here and drama-free elsewhere on the internet.

"Well, I expressed them!"

amanda — Tue, 22 May 2012 15:40:06 GMT

Hat tip to MonsierBon, I think this might be the most disgusting Ask.Mefi ever. Is it?

Though, to be fair, what drew me in was the "double penis" descriptor as I initially thought he had a cat with two penises. Sadly, no.

And, really: hat tip. That cat has a most caring owner.

IPonyV6

khedron — Mon, 21 May 2012 22:59:30 GMT

Is Metafilter participating in World IPv6 Day? Can we get IPv6 connectivity?

My new ISP supports IPv6 and I've been browsing v6 only on a netbook for giggles. The Google empire and Facebook is accessible, but very little else besides certain tech sites.

The blockquote tag is awesome! Let me show you how to use it.

royalsong — Mon, 21 May 2012 19:57:04 GMT

Quoting more then a sentence or two from a user or article? Let me introduce you to the blockquote tag to use in place of italics.

I'm not going to ask that the community as a whole do this. I'm well aware I can't make all Mefites everywhere follow this suggestion. Instead I just wanted to enlighten those that aren't aware that Metafilter supports the blockquote tag.

What is the Blockquote tag used for?

The BLOCKQUOTE tag designates quoted text - generally long quotations where a paragraph break is appropriate.

So, it's perfect for those times when you're quoting an article to answer a question on AskMe. It's also great for when you're replying to a long comment another Mefite and want to quote them in your reply.

But what about Italics?

I totally understand where you're coming from. I mean, they are the gold standard way of quoting here at Metafilter. Change is hard to implement sometimes. After all, tried and true methods are what we always lean back on. Would it help if I tried to define why italics exist for websites?

Italics are one way to draw attention to text, but it makes text harder to read.

As a matter of fact, if you highlight a word and press the I button under the textbox, you will see those words get wrapped in "em" tags. Em stands for emphasis.

Have you ever been confronted with paragraphs and paragraphs of italicized text? I don't know about you, but it makes me not want to read it. Imagine if you had poor eyesight or a reading disability.

How do I use the blockquote tag?

Simple! Follow my example below:

<blockquote>
The text you are quoting goes here.
</blockquote>

That's it! I know it's a couple of letters to type out, but now quoted words will stand out without being difficult to read.

Thanks for listening to this service announcement. Brought to you by someone who wears glasses and finds as she gets older that she really wants to read what you quote but struggles with the italics.

Cab talk

curious nu — Mon, 21 May 2012 17:38:20 GMT

Dmitry Samarov joined up and dropped by this post about his work.

World wide web

fight or flight — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:35:51 GMT

Single (or multiple) region-locked link posts: yay or nay?

Previously.
Previouslier.

We're never going to get Hulu et al to stop blocking non-US visitors, so perhaps we could talk about putting in an informal rule (as in the case of "SLYT") or asking users to make sure they have at least one working global link in region-locked posts. I understand there was discussion of putting in a warning note before Hulu-only posts go live -- does this still seem reasonable?

Personally, I'd like to see a clarification as to whether an all-Hulu link post is acceptable for Metafilter and if so, why? Does that mean I can make a post with just BBC iPlayer content if I want to? Because I totally want to. David Attenborough is the shit.

Showtime

Artw — Sun, 20 May 2012 05:35:54 GMT

So, apparently the term "showrunner" is new to Metafilter and Metafilter is offended by that. Shall we discuss it over here?

Even better than an advice column binge: how to search for most favorited/commented AskMes in a particular category

ocherdraco — Sat, 19 May 2012 22:58:10 GMT

Is there a way to look at popular AskMe questions in a particular category, either in the recent past or over time? The infodumpster almost does this, but not quite.

I have a hankering for reading through some interesting human relations questions, so I'm trying to find a way to look at the most favorited ones or most commented ones over a particular time period or overall. Is there an existing way to do this?