wanna see dem peektures

October 18, 2007 8:18 PM

What happened to the Flickr pics on profile pages? and the photostream? Also my Flickr link under the "social apps" section of my profile has been disappeared.

What about the photostream? Also my Flickr link under the "social apps" section of my profile has been disappeared. I tried refreshing cookies, logging out and in.

I am sad, because I really like to check out the recent MeFite pics.

posted by exlotuseater to Bugs at 8:18 PM (33 comments total)

mine is still there.
posted by quonsar at 8:23 PM on October 18, 2007

mine too, did something change with your login or profile somehow?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:25 PM on October 18, 2007

recent photos from all
posted by quonsar at 8:25 PM on October 18, 2007

q, when you look at my profile, it's not there, though, correct?

I went in a couple of times and tried to "re-add" my flickr acct, to no avail, and the "recent pics" that used to be on the bottom are no longer there.
posted by exlotuseater at 8:31 PM on October 18, 2007

yeah, no sign of it on your profile page. strange.
posted by quonsar at 8:34 PM on October 18, 2007

Perhaps you have too much poetry.

It drives out pictures, you know. There are two disciplines that just hate each other, don't you know.
posted by yhbc at 8:38 PM on October 18, 2007

i made u a feet chir, but then i eated it
posted by Eideteker at 8:40 PM on October 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

are you sure you're adding wiht your proper flickr name as per the faq?

Flickr
Your Flickr photostream URL does not necessarily contain your Flickr username, and your Yahoo! login is not necessarily your Flickr username. To find your Flickr username, sign into Flickr and take a look at the line at the top of the page that says, "Signed in as...". Whatever appears there as a link is your official Flickr username.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:41 PM on October 18, 2007

jessamyn, it's the same name, character-for-character. My yahoo! id is different. The Flickr username is the one I have plugged into the Social apps, and it's just not happening.

I dunno.
posted by exlotuseater at 8:57 PM on October 18, 2007

quonsar - I would kiss you, if you didn't live on the other side of the largest ocean on earth - that recent Mefites photos page is better than FISH or indeed PANTS.
posted by Samuel Farrow at 9:02 PM on October 18, 2007

hey exlotuseater, we find flickr IDs via the API. You can even try out the search by username here. Plug in your username and see if you get a positive response back. I tried your MeFi username, and got "user not found" in the response at the bottom of the page.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:16 PM on October 18, 2007

I blame Yahoo. 'cause I've been hammering on Matt hard enough already this week.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:26 PM on October 18, 2007

My flickr nickname reverted sometime a few days or more back, from the proper "Jesus H. Shatner" to "cortex", and I have no idea why; I fixed it and things are back to normal.

Given the slipperiness of the flickr naming scheme and the weird What Happened reversion I experienced, it's possible you got hit by the same thing and then were mistaken in trying to put the actual proper flickr ID back in.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:28 PM on October 18, 2007

Could the length of your profile page have anything to do with the disappeared flickr images?
posted by edgeways at 10:22 PM on October 18, 2007

Mine had mysteriously changed too, a couple of days ago (from 'tellurianmonkey' to 'tellurian'). I looked at other profiles and they had pictures, so I figured it was just me. I guess not!
posted by tellurian at 10:24 PM on October 18, 2007

yep, there's definitely something janky going on with Flickr usernames right now. I found exlotuseater's username via some Flickr trickery: exlotuseater. So I don't know why it's not being returned via their API. Frustrating. Hopefully they'll sort this out soon.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:35 PM on October 18, 2007

Any idea how mefi-side Flickr names got changed? Was there a migration of the flickr data from the original standalone field to the generic also-on fields?
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:36 PM on October 18, 2007

No mefi-side Flickr names were changed. These are some sort of changes on Flickr's end.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:36 PM on October 18, 2007

oh wait, you're saying "Jesus H. Shatner" turned to "cortex" in your Metafilter profile? That's not good.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:42 PM on October 18, 2007

Yeah. Neat, huh? I notice the Flickr field shows up in the social list now, and I can't remember if it was like that before, which is what's got me speculatin' about it. Don't know if you or Matt changed that over under the hood or anything, and whether it was possible that some names got changed/consolidated/munged in the alleged process, basically.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:47 PM on October 18, 2007

Yes, there was a process of moving Flickr over to the Social Apps world. I'll do some investigating to see what happened. (We have all pre-move Flickr names stored, so there can be a great Flickr name restoration if need be.)

I think we have two issues here. 1.) Possible Flickr move name munging. 2.) Flickr API not returning an ID for some usernames, eg. exlotuseater.
posted by pb (staff) at 11:21 PM on October 18, 2007

ok, after looking through the database it appears that some flickrnames were set to MeFi usernames during the move. I've restored them to their pre-move flickrness.

I don't want to get into too much behind-the-scenes sausage-making, but basically we store everyone's Flickr NSID after looking it up via the Flickr API, and those weren't touched during the move. We also store the username that y'all give us to find that NSID, and some of those were temporarily set to [mefi username] instead of [flickr username]. This has been fixed, sorry about the confusion.

This issue is completely separate from exlotuseater's non-appearing Flickr photos from what I can tell. I'll have to do more investigating into that one, but this one looks like a bug on Flickr's end to me.
posted by pb (staff) at 11:44 PM on October 18, 2007

Mmmm, sausage.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:52 PM on October 18, 2007

pb, is your name short for pnambic? Sometimes it feels that way.
posted by wemayfreeze at 1:48 AM on October 19, 2007

Oh my god, I had no idea that that's how you make metafilters.
posted by blacklite at 3:28 AM on October 19, 2007 [2 favorites]

I haven't linked my flickr account to mefi, but on facebook, all my pictures suddenly vanished the other day. I think it's them.
posted by CunningLinguist at 6:21 AM on October 19, 2007

I work for Flickr, and I think I can explain some of the problems described above: it's not a bug, its a feature :)

If you are logged on to Flickr and go here you will see a checkbox for "Hide my profile from searches". That used to only affect searches on the site, and not the API method that mefi uses to grab Flickr user ids, but that was a bug. We fixed that bug, so the API method will no longer find people who have chosen to hide their profile from searches, like exlotuseater.

One possible workaround: allow mefi users to enter their nsids if they don't want to uncheck the "Hide my profile from searches" checkbox.
posted by ericost at 7:17 AM on October 19, 2007

In a complete tangent, I just rediscovered that flickr pictures from all page too and got thoroughly addicted. What caught my eye was that there sure are a ton of pictures of food. I wonder if this is a mefite thing or a general population thing - why so many pictures of food?
posted by mygothlaundry at 7:33 AM on October 19, 2007

Many thanks for the insider info, ericost! That explains it. Unfortunately, having someone find their Flickr NSID is even harder than having them find their correct Flickr username.

Perhaps adding some information about Flickr's "Hide my profile from searches?" setting to the Metafilter FAQ will be enough to help with this particular situation in the future.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:01 AM on October 19, 2007

I'll add a note to the faq, ericost's explanation should be decent enough for most people.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:07 AM on October 19, 2007

recent photos from baal
posted by Eideteker at 11:43 AM on October 19, 2007

thanks very much-- I'm going to take a nap and fix it later.
posted by exlotuseater at 4:04 PM on October 19, 2007

Aaannnnddd . . . fixed! Thanks pb and ericost for the help. Thanks to everyone else, too!
posted by exlotuseater at 8:05 PM on October 19, 2007