Pony: front page +fave links

July 4, 2006 4:11 PM

Any chance we can get a +fave link on the front page for each item, especially on the green? (I'm thinking Digg-style, AJAX based would be very pretty, though potentially too Web 2.0 for the likes of some Mefites...)
posted by disillusioned to Feature Requests at 4:11 PM (26 comments total)

And apologies if this has already been proposed/discussed/shot down/etc.

Sometimes, I see a great deal of links that interest me, but I don't have time to go through each of them at the time. A quick-fire favorites or subset of favorites (too complicated?) where I could "flag for later" would be fantastic, right from the front page.
posted by disillusioned at 4:12 PM on July 4, 2006

I wouldn't mind that, either.

Regardless of adding favourites to the front page, it'd be really nice to have a slicker means of marking favourites and flagging without all those unstyled pages flying about (ie working like the Metafilter Asynchronous Flagging Greasemonkey thingy).
posted by jack_mo at 4:23 PM on July 4, 2006 [1 favorite]

I think matt said he'd like to build in something like the asynchronous flagging but he couldn't get it to work across different browsers. Or something like that.
posted by puke & cry at 4:37 PM on July 4, 2006

The interface round here is starting to get a bit cluttered... and yet people keep asking for more. Do you want Mefi to end up looking like Slashdot?
posted by reklaw at 4:58 PM on July 4, 2006

I gotta say I'm leery of adding features that could skew whether posts are displayed on the front page or not, ala karma/voting schemes. I know this isn't that yet. But it could develop into it a few stages down the road.

Metafilter seems to have developed a natural balance that mostly works without all that & I don't want to see it pushed out of wack with unintended echo chamber effects or positive feedback loops in our social network. I'm not saying we shouldn't go there under any circumstances, just that we need to have our eyes open about what the ramifications of this kind of thing could be before turning them on. It's tricky stuff with things like information cascades possible, where people vote for what's already popular not because they like it but because other people before them said they liked it.

Adding Web 2.0 stuff can have negative consequences & we need to be careful, is all I'm saying.
posted by scalefree at 5:20 PM on July 4, 2006

i want mefi to find great links, post them, comment on them, add them to my favorites, send me a notification email, a text message summary, and read them to my voicemail. in 27 languages. by tomorrow. matt?
posted by quonsar at 5:23 PM on July 4, 2006 [1 favorite]

I think you should actually have to view the FPP to fave it. Leave the fave link inside, please.
posted by Eideteker at 5:52 PM on July 4, 2006

But it could develop into it a few stages down the road.

But I don't think that is ever going to happen, because from day one, matt has made it clear that Metafilter is about self-policing, not automated voting / moderation. That's why we have Metatalk, not "Vote to delete".

And I hate all that AJAX hype as much as the next guy who hasn't been a web developer since 2001, but I have to admit, clicking "+fave", being redirected to another page (in my case, in another window) telling me my favourite has been added, then being redirected back to the original thread feels kinda clumsy.
posted by Jimbob at 5:53 PM on July 4, 2006

I would love it if the flag button and fave buttons didn't take you away from the page, but I'm awful at javascript and don't have the first clue how to do an asynchronous GET or POST.

Anyone that's hip to it is welcome to write the code that will bypass the page redirect stuff for the latest browsers and I'll drop it into the site.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 6:14 PM on July 4, 2006

I've been learning mochikit for ajax stuff lately, and am impressed with it. Using it, you take care of favorites by with

<script type="text/javascript">
function mark_favorite(sitetype, link, parent, author) {
data = {sitetpe_id:sitetype, link_ID:link, parent_id:parent, author_id:author};
doSimpleXMLHttpRequest("/contribute/add_favorite.mefi", data);
}
</script>


in the head, and then replace the fav links with

<a onclick="mark_favorite(foo, bar, baz, quux)">+fave</a>

There's a one line javascript include for mochikit itself too, but browsers will cache it, so it shouldn't have any appreciable effect on bandwidth. And, IMHO, mochikit just rocks in general (its by far the best documented of the major ajax toolkits); using it will pay dividends later if you want to add more fancy javascript stuff.
posted by gsteff at 7:49 PM on July 4, 2006

Assuming that the /contribute/add_favorite.mefi link works from all the subdomains. You can't do xmlhttprequests to a different domain than that of the originating page.
posted by gsteff at 7:51 PM on July 4, 2006

But I don't think that is ever going to happen, because from day one, matt has made it clear that Metafilter is about self-policing, not automated voting / moderation. That's why we have Metatalk, not "Vote to delete".

Well I haven't been around since then so I hadn't heard that yet. Never mind then.
posted by scalefree at 8:53 PM on July 4, 2006

The text "You have added this as a favorite" or "You already added this as a favorite already" should be inserted by the javascript into the DOM on the line beneath the "posted...[!]".

There needs to be some feedback.
posted by blasdelf at 9:27 PM on July 4, 2006

Good, someone else jumped on that already. (I have the same type of script ready, but not using a nifty toolkit. The XMLHttpRequest object is really ridiculously simple.)

Meanwhile, I don't want this to become Digg. I was citing Digg for its asynchronous properties, NOT for "burying" or "deleting" posts. That's not at all what I want, as the two different philosophies serve entirely different purposes.

I just want something that I can use to quickly go down the page and mark as "ooh, this is interesting, I'll return to it when I have more time, and for futher reference."

Though it's nice to see that the +fave button will be AJAXified soon enough.
posted by disillusioned at 10:13 PM on July 4, 2006

Yeah, that was meant to be an example of how simple it can be. I'm sure many of us could provide whatever tweaks were desired.
posted by gsteff at 10:42 PM on July 4, 2006

i want mefi to find great links, post them, comment on them, add them to my favorites, send me a notification email, a text message summary, and read them to my voicemail. in 27 languages. by tomorrow. matt?

Google maps 37Signals with Flickr iPod.
posted by loquacious at 2:04 AM on July 5, 2006

Eideteker writes 'I think you should actually have to view the FPP to fave it. Leave the fave link inside, please.'

If you interpret "fave" as "I like this", then yes. However, I think disillusioned is using the "fave" feature in the "I'm interested in this and would like to bookmark it for later" sense, which is how I - and a lot of others - use it. In which case, there's no need to open up the post to bookmark it.
posted by blag at 3:53 AM on July 5, 2006

I think you should actually have to view the FPP to fave it. Leave the fave link inside, please.

I don't get this - why can't you tell whether you like/want to bookmark the post from the front page? Unless there's a [more inside], clicking through to the thread before favouriting is just a pointless extra click.
posted by jack_mo at 4:28 AM on July 5, 2006

Yeah, I'm with blag on this. I use the +fave to track stuff that I know I want to read, but don't have time for right now. Having access to that from the front page would be great.
posted by MrZero at 5:07 AM on July 5, 2006

I had a long, diplomatic and conciliatory reply written, but a cleverly-timed hit of my mouse's back button took care of that (and Firefox usually saves vs. those). So fuck it.

Long story short, I didn't know favorite = bookmark, since I use Bookmark (it's Ctrl-D on most browsers) to mean bookmark (or just open a new tab; SessionSaved if I have to close my browser) and feel +fave is a clunky way to do that (have to go to a particular page on a particular site to maintain the list?). To each their own. Front page clutter bad, agree with reklaw. Sorry if tone not pleasing, original was very nice and I-see-your-point-y, promise.

Need sleep, the end.
posted by Eideteker at 5:44 AM on July 5, 2006

Oh, and, jack_mo, OP said "esp. green" and most of AskMe posts have [mi]. Felt that was important enough to add, to show my point of view & help you "get this."

blah blah blah still feel one should view thread and discussion before faving, but then something about each their own... this is getting to be as long as the original deleted reply, and is getting me no closer to sleep.
posted by Eideteker at 5:47 AM on July 5, 2006

Favorites are trying to serve a dual purpose right now. The visible "x users saved as favorite" makes some people tend to use it as a way to give visible feedback for good posts and comments while other people use it as a personal bookmarking system. If it were me - it isn't, of course - I'd show a count of "fantastic" flags as a visible positive feedback mechanism, and leave the "favorites" more personal and private.
posted by Wolfdog at 5:54 AM on July 5, 2006

There was talk of adding "+save" next to "+fave" and having two separate results pages (one public, one private) which would solve the problem completely. Don't think Matt liked the idea, though.
posted by blag at 6:41 AM on July 5, 2006

There was talk of adding "+save" next to "+fave" and having two separate results pages (one public, one private) which would solve the problem completely.

...and introduce the huge problem of what in the heck the difference is between the two identical functions. Sorry, I know you keep mentioning it, but I'll never do it because it makes no sense to me.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 6:46 AM on July 5, 2006

OK, thanks for the reply.

I still think that there's a lot of difference between "I like this, others should see it" and "I want to come back to this later" but, meh. Up to you.
posted by blag at 6:53 AM on July 5, 2006

still feel one should view thread and discussion before faving

Oh, I see what you mean now - I'm an 'it's all about the links' type who rarely reads Ask MetaFilter, so it didn't occur to me that folk would see favouritising as applying to whole threads, comments and all, just posts (though I've probably favouritised a fair few MetaTalk threads on the basis of the, uh, discussion, come to think of it).
posted by jack_mo at 7:46 AM on July 5, 2006