How to count comments

December 9, 2006 1:12 PM

I think that deleted comments which have been favorited should continue to appear on the "posts from ___ saved as favorites" page of the user who wrote them. For example, you can look at my profile and see that my stuff has been favorited 108 times, but you can't find all 108 items, because some of them no longer exist.

If they don't, then they should at least not count toward the number of favorited comments listed on that user's page. However, the first solution is better. The fact that someone marked something as a favorite shows that it had value to someone, even though it was deleted, so it ought to be preserved.
posted by bingo to Feature Requests at 1:12 PM (28 comments total)

108 favorites doesn't mean 108 comments. It could be 54 comments you wrote, all favorited 2 times each. Make sense?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:19 PM on December 9, 2006

Wait, is that... like.... .02 favorites, or .02 comments?
posted by Baby_Balrog at 1:25 PM on December 9, 2006 [1 favorite]

mathowie: I counted the number of times that my comments and posts were favorited on my profile. It doesn't add up to 108.
posted by bingo at 1:40 PM on December 9, 2006

...and I also know that a recently deleted comment of mine was favorited at least twice.
posted by bingo at 1:41 PM on December 9, 2006

And I thought I was having a boring Saturday.
posted by Optamystic at 1:45 PM on December 9, 2006

I don't feel like counting, but did you try the next page?
posted by moonshine at 1:50 PM on December 9, 2006

Of course.
posted by bingo at 1:55 PM on December 9, 2006

...it was deleted, so it ought to be preserved.

Cognitive dissonance.
posted by shoesfullofdust at 2:14 PM on December 9, 2006

I got 106 favorites. You had some lame joke about the lack of a more inside on your comment, which I deleted when I fixed the post.

Sorry that is not saved for the ages in illuminated text with the two favorites on it.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:31 PM on December 9, 2006

It's already the the best of both worlds: your sweet crap count rises while your crappiest crap gets flushed.
posted by and hosted from Uranus at 5:54 PM on December 9, 2006

Sorry that is not saved for the ages in illuminated text with the two favorites on it.

I suspect that you are not really sorry about that. Neither, of course, should you be.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:31 PM on December 9, 2006

Maybe we could have our favorites periodically bronzed and then put on display in a favorites museum? The gift shop could sell cafepress versions of our comments on t-shirts and micepadi.
posted by blue_beetle at 7:38 PM on December 9, 2006

Illuminated text would be a cool feature.
posted by y2karl at 7:40 PM on December 9, 2006

Matt could probably make a mint turning out official "I have N favorited comments on Metafilter" T-shirts.
posted by tkolar at 9:07 PM on December 9, 2006

You had some lame joke about the lack of a more inside on your comment, which I deleted when I fixed the post.

And that lame joke had been favorited twice?
posted by bingo at 10:58 PM on December 9, 2006

And that lame joke had been favorited twice?

Oddly enough it turns out that "...or somebody thought it was funny" has not been added to the guidelines for what makes an appropriate comment.

Much to my regret, really.
posted by tkolar at 11:13 PM on December 9, 2006

Anyway, even if that's what happened...that just brings us back to the way this thread started. I don't think deleted comments should disappear from favorites.
posted by bingo at 11:17 PM on December 9, 2006

People who follow up in their own AskMe questions get credited with 'answers'. I think that is a more egregious misrepresentation than what you are taking issue with.

Just sayin'.
posted by geekyguy at 3:36 AM on December 10, 2006

Let's be reasonable here, bingo. If a comment was deleted, it was probably either completely off-topic, extremely rude, or otherwise worthy of deletion. People who favorite these kinds of comments do the entire system a disservice by highlighting the "crap of MetaFilter". And this type of thing happens all the time; it just so happens that your particular comment was so egregious that it got deleted.

Matt did the community a favor by deleting it; why elevate the comment to such an extent as to give it a special home on your profile page? Unless this entire MeTa is driven by sheer ego of having your words written down twice on this site. In which case, you probably have bigger problems than trying to bring dead favorites from out of the grave.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 6:32 AM on December 10, 2006

SeizeTheDay: Deletions are not always appropriate, and l think that allowing them to stay in some form when they're favorited provides a little balance. We're talking about a pretty high bar here...in order to read the deleted comments, someone would have had to mark them favorites to begin with, and then you would have to be so interested in the user's contributions that you'd have gone to their profile page and clicked on the number of favorited comments. Allowing people who are that curious to see anything at all marked favorite for that user is not going to hurt the integrity of the site. In fact, the way, I see it, it will in a small way contribute to the sense of a self-regulated community. It's the self-regulating aspect that I like most about metafilter to begin with, and I'd like to see it preserved to some degree.

Also, mathowie did say when favorites were first introduced that deleted ones were going to stay available (I asked about it).

However, let's say you're right. Why would those deleted comments be counted among the number of favorites listed on the profile page of the user in question? My profile page basically says 'bingo has had his comments and posts marked favorite 109 times, but I'm only going to let you see 107 of them, nyah nyah.' That is, at the very least, a bug.

And mathowie: I know that a recent comment I made on askme was favorited at least twice before it was deleted. So why do those two favorites not get counted toward my total, but these other two, which you removed when you fixed my post (?), don't? Do you see that there is a problem here of some sort, even if you disagree with everything else I'm saying?
posted by bingo at 7:13 AM on December 10, 2006

I don't think deleted comments should disappear from favorites.

And I don't think you should be going on and on about a stupid egotistical idea that nobody else agrees with. But neither of us runs the universe, eh?
posted by languagehat at 7:41 AM on December 10, 2006

languagehat: mathowie has created a forum for users to express their opinions about the way the site works, and I'm using it. That's a far cry from trying to run the universe.
posted by bingo at 7:48 AM on December 10, 2006

And I don't think you should be going on and on about a stupid egotistical idea that nobody else agrees with.

I agree with bingo. Favourited comments that get deleted should either remain available (my preference) or their "favouriteness" should disappear with them.

What's the point of having a favourite on something you can't return too? If you insist on tearing pages out of the book I'm reading why leave my bookmarks at he gaps?
posted by timeistight at 8:13 AM on December 10, 2006

you fight for that comment, bingo. you deserve every one of those favorites, and you don't let no-one tell you otherwise! remember, it's a man's honor we're talking about here and not just some tossed-off comment on the street. this is worth fighting for. go, man!
posted by carsonb at 8:30 AM on December 10, 2006

...it was deleted, so it ought to be preserved.

Cognitive dissonance.

That isn't what cognitive dissonance means.
posted by ludwig_van at 10:38 AM on December 10, 2006

Why would those deleted comments be counted among the number of favorites listed on the profile page of the user in question? My profile page basically says 'bingo has had his comments and posts marked favorite 109 times, but I'm only going to let you see 107 of them, nyah nyah.' That is, at the very least, a bug.

On this, we agree. It's a bug that should be fixed. The method of fixing it, however, is what we disagree on.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 10:59 AM on December 10, 2006

That isn't what cognitive dissonance means.

I've already written it down and placed it in a drawer so it won't affect my world view if you should care to delete my comment. It's quite understandable how it could be misconstrued in such a way. Indeed, I'd be quite surprised if you were alone in this.

Note to self: Must. Reduce. Tension.
posted by shoesfullofdust at 1:16 PM on December 10, 2006

I agree with bingo that deleted comments should still be visible if they've been favorited. For example, when people have made really vile comments, I've favorited them so I'd have a reminder of that user's vileness to take into future consideration. That's info I'd like to have access to even if said vileness gets those comments deleted.

So far I have just had to keep my own dossier on y'all instead. That includes you, ThePinkSuperhero!!
posted by hermitosis at 6:45 AM on December 11, 2006