alphabetical list of MeFi usernames?

January 11, 2008 6:34 PM

Is there an alphabetical list of MeFi usernames anywhere? I have a vague recollection of a username I'm trying to recall and I know what letter it started with, but I'm stuck there. This wouldn't be hard to compile, it would just take a numerical increment and a simple web scraper. Just wondering if anyone's ever done it. Thanks!

Just to be clear, I don't need a giant list of links to MeFi user profiles. Obviously that page would be a spammer's honeypot. Just looking for a list of usernames.

posted by scarabic to Feature Requests at 6:34 PM (48 comments total)

To put it bluntly, there wasn't any such user. That feeling is your brain's way of coping with the fact that you've been reset and repurposed ten thousand times, and you can maybe almost, but not quite, remember a shred from perhaps three of those.

Drink until it goes away.
posted by "Tex" Connor and the Wily Roundup Boys at 6:45 PM on January 11, 2008

I take it the name didn't start with the letter "Q"...
posted by Tube at 6:54 PM on January 11, 2008

Bellvue?
posted by jonmc at 7:13 PM on January 11, 2008

Speaking of something like this, how do I get to the profile photo list?
posted by 517 at 7:30 PM on January 11, 2008

Ooh! Ooh! Is it me?
posted by [more inside] at 7:32 PM on January 11, 2008

Unless Bellvue allows access to Metafilter, no jonmc.

Well, not on a computer, man....

*turns on Manson Lamps*
posted by jonmc at 7:35 PM on January 11, 2008 [1 favorite]

I was also searching for a username earlier and missing the old user search, limited though it was.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 7:58 PM on January 11, 2008

There isn't a list anywhere, no. If you can be a little more specific, I could probably help you out; drop me an email or something if you like.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:03 PM on January 11, 2008

scarabic, check your mefi mail.
posted by vacapinta at 8:26 PM on January 11, 2008

"vronsky" was the coolest username ever!

"cortex" is the gayest username evar!

nuff said.
posted by post punk at 8:26 PM on January 11, 2008

I've got to investigate this Vacaloca character...

userid username
---------------------
...
13064 v
23843 V.
12986 v@d!m
29592 V4V
17112 v8440
24606 vac2003
11382 vaca
4565 Vacaloca
54757 vacannondale
10705 vacapinta
7268 vachead
61047 vachement
13067 vadim
8440 vador15
29842 vagabond
6432 vagary
2138 [e-mail]
13331 vahidhouse
16800 vahoo
...
posted by vacapinta at 8:31 PM on January 11, 2008

Was it Dr. Steve Elvis President America? 'Cause I have a good idea where you can find him...

Dr. Steve Elvis America President Steve Elvis of America Steve America Elvis Steve do you read me.
posted by "Tex" Connor and the Wily Roundup Boys at 8:31 PM on January 11, 2008

It's not offical, but you can usually find people in the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, which appeared as a later appendix to Johann Weyer's 1563 De praestigiis daemonum.
posted by Abiezer at 8:31 PM on January 11, 2008 [5 favorites]

If you can recall anything slightly unusual they might have posted, it would be easier to do a search for that + metafilter. Yahoo is better than Google, for some reason.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 8:37 PM on January 11, 2008

scarabic, just log in to file pile. I know there's a list there.
posted by localhuman at 8:40 PM on January 11, 2008

item, just log into file pile. I know there's an explanation there.
posted by localhuman at 9:17 PM on January 11, 2008 [1 favorite]

Har.

Maybe you should ask for help.
posted by "Tex" Connor and the Wily Roundup Boys at 9:30 PM on January 11, 2008

*waves to scarabic*

I'm right here, dude. Where the fuck have you been?

And after years of hearing about FP, I'm tired of not knowing what's in there.
posted by dobbs at 9:30 PM on January 11, 2008

It's me! It's me!
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:38 PM on January 11, 2008 [1 favorite]

"It's me, it's me" is an anagram of item's items.
posted by cgc373 at 9:42 PM on January 11, 2008

Speaking of something like this, how do I get to the profile photo list?

Yeah, I was looking for this a couple weeks ago but I couldn't find it anywhere. I tried searching metatalk but couldn't come up with anything. I'd appreciate it if I could be pointed to wherever it's linked at cuz I couldn't find that either.
posted by puke & cry at 9:48 PM on January 11, 2008

The profile photo page is here: Profile Photos of MeFites.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:53 PM on January 11, 2008 [4 favorites]

Thanks, pb. I thought maybe it'd be linked on each profile page under the picture, or maybe somewhere else on here that I missed. Then I thought maybe digging around in http://www.metafilter.com/images/profile/ would lead to something. I dunno if you want to put that somewhere noticeable or if it's already there and I just missed it.
posted by puke & cry at 10:03 PM on January 11, 2008

File Pile is, as I learned at the last Toronto meetup, a secret code that proves your nerditude. Like gang signs, or Mason handshakes.
posted by SassHat at 10:17 PM on January 11, 2008

For the people who don't already know: http://metafilter.com/username/vaguely_recalled_username
posted by philomathoholic at 10:52 PM on January 11, 2008

puke & cry, no problem, I thought there was something about it in the wiki but I don't see it now. Yeah, we need to find a good place to link it. Maybe a FAQ entry that includes the group Flickr, Twitter, and Last.fm pages.
posted by pb (staff) at 11:11 PM on January 11, 2008

Everyone is thinking of me all the time, so by logical deduction, it must be me.

And by "everyone" I mean "me."

And by "me" I mean "no one."

Won't somebody please send me a MeMail?

I promise I'll stop using the small tag.

No I don't.
posted by slogger at 11:16 PM on January 11, 2008

The profile photo page is here: Profile Photos of MeFites.
posted by pb at 9:53 PM on January 11

I followed that link and arrived at two questions:
1. Would it be a lot of trouble to put the pictures in alphabetical order?
2. Is that growabrain's foot or someone else's?
posted by Cranberry at 12:02 AM on January 12, 2008

1. Would it be a lot of trouble to put the pictures in alphabetical order?

The pictures are done in order of most recent update. So if you look at it occasionally you can see the newer photos at the top. I actually kind of like it that way.
posted by shelleycat at 1:13 AM on January 12, 2008

I've always wanted to see a large social graph of metafilter.
Barring that, here's something which is kind of interesting: the top 50 users, ordered by how many inbound contacts they have, that is how many people link to them, for whatever reason.

linked_by user_id username
-------------------------------------
309 292 jessamyn
268 1 mathowie
255 14752 languagehat
223 14275 amberglow
207 17564 Anonymous Ask MetaFilter
193 7418 cortex
179 58 jonmc
171 986 quonsar
150 15971 madamjujujive
141 17721 ThePinkSuperhero
139 23392 asavage
114 2238 stavrosthewonderchicken
112 17548 ikkyu2
110 14421 taz
106 17454 Ethereal Bligh
102 3502 DaShiv
97 17391 robocop is bleeding
97 3930 matteo
96 923 grumblebee
95 1228 nickyskye
91 14401 CunningLinguist
88 14200 interrobang
88 23407 It's Raining Florence Henderson
86 10705 vacapinta
86 17549 melissa may
86 20640 miss lynnster
85 11820 y2karl
84 11856 scarabic
84 7683 ColdChef
81 19344 Miko
79 206 wendell
79 16640 occhiblu
78 14474 Stynxno
77 19466 OmieWise
75 16239 scody
71 10947 MiguelCardoso
68 814 riffola
67 21820 orthogonality
63 23558 klangklangston
63 4027 brownpau
62 15532 Pretty_Generic
62 20821 Eideteker
62 31765 Astro Zombie
61 13786 iconomy
59 43565 stevewoz
57 14155 timeistight
57 14271 jonson
56 16386 plep
56 20539 matildaben
posted by vacapinta at 5:42 AM on January 12, 2008 [2 favorites]

The numbers are a bit off because this data was pulled end of November, by the way.
posted by vacapinta at 5:46 AM on January 12, 2008

btw is the recent photos from all/Flickr thing broken? I'm getting a connection timeout there.
posted by pjern at 6:14 AM on January 12, 2008

I've always wanted to see a large social graph of metafilter.

I could easily do a screen scrape of the user pages and create a graph (using favorites as edges) in NetworkX, and then publish the graph in a few different formats for anybody who wanted to analyse it. I don't know if this kind of one-time screen scrape of the whole site is frowned upon, though.
posted by signal at 8:13 AM on January 12, 2008

signal, sounds great, I'd love to see that graph. I can't speak for mathowie, but I think a one-time screen scrape of user pages would be ok as long as you're not grabbing pages in parallel. And you might sleep for one second between requests. That shouldn't put too much extra pressure on the server. You also might want to make sure the data you're gathering is publicly available by keeping your script logged out. Contact info is public, but some of the other info on profile pages isn't.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:05 AM on January 12, 2008

About a year ago, I scraped all of the usernames, and then printed them all on a single 17x11 piece of paper in a 4-point font. I brought the paper to a meetup, intending to get a photo with it, so I could say I shouted out everyone. We forgot to do shoutouts.
posted by Plutor at 9:07 AM on January 12, 2008

Thank you Vacapinta! Next we meet your pints are on me.
posted by scarabic at 9:35 AM on January 12, 2008

signal, let me know what you want to do and I can probably save you a scrape and just hook you up with clean data.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:00 AM on January 12, 2008

(I've played with the idea a bit before, so I've probably got 90% of a direct db-grab working, is the thing.)
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:02 AM on January 12, 2008

Thanks, pb.
posted by 517 at 10:42 AM on January 12, 2008

I've always wanted to see a large social graph of metafilter.

Back in March monju_bosatsu created an interactive map of his contacts and his contacts' contacts. It's frickin' rad.
posted by carsonb at 11:12 AM on January 12, 2008 [1 favorite]

Doesnt the Metafilter User.kml file have an alphabetical list of usernames?
posted by grateful at 2:06 PM on January 12, 2008

cortex: I'm thinking a graph where every user is a node and every 'favorite' is a directed edge from the favoriter to the favoritee. So maybe a list of all the favorites listing -er and -ee by username, comma- or tab- delimited would do the trick.
Something like:

signal cortex
signal mathowie
pb cortex

meaning that 'signal' has favorited cortex and mathowie, and pb has favorited cortex.

I could slurp this into NetworkX, and output a huge mother of a graph, using a spring layout, for instance , or do some centrality analysis, etc.
I could export the graph in a variety of formats, as an adjacency matrix for instance, in case anybody else wanted to play with it.
And other, better ideas are welcome, of course. I'm not an expert on graphs, I just used them in my master's thesis, and especially like networkx.
posted by signal at 5:20 PM on January 12, 2008

cortex: of course, whatever format you have is fine.
posted by signal at 5:25 PM on January 12, 2008

It would be nice to have a web API or system for doing these kinds of queries for people doing 'mashups' of publicly available data.
posted by delmoi at 5:55 PM on January 12, 2008

hey signal, i'd be interested in taking a look at such data. I might have a neat use for it-
posted by localhuman at 6:27 PM on January 12, 2008

signal: that's totally doable. I could even provide a fave count, if you want to do any intensity mapping.

I don't know networkx, but I'm curious how monstrous your hardware is. We're talking about a big, really-really-multiply-connected graph; I ended up playing with pretty limited subsets just to avoid hour-long renders when I was futzing around. (On the other hand, I was very much just futzing around, first time out with the graph software, so god knows I was probably doing some silly stuff.)

I'll see about producing a couple of canonical lists, so you (and whoever else) can get up to some fun with it.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:44 PM on January 12, 2008

cortex: networkx seems fairly robust and scalable. For my thesis my dataset had 10.000 nodes with an average degree of 5.000, so there where a lot of connections. Analyzing betweenness-, closeness- & degree-centrality plus clustering for all nodes took about 1.5 hours.

localhuman: of course. Mi data es su data.

It might be interesting to have some more data associated with users: date of sign up, number of posts, tags used, etc. Basically whatever is public. The user #s might be better than the username to identify users, too, since this won't have any whitespace or odd characters that might make it hard to use them as keys.
Another graph could have tags as nodes and users who use more than one tag as edges.

Basically, a dump of all the publicly viewable data would be very nifty.
posted by signal at 7:04 PM on January 12, 2008

Ooh, yes. More graphs please. I'm a man of simple pleasures, and I often find myself clapping and poking my monitor with a greasy index finger whenever I see my name listed in some sort of metric.

I could be described as burbling with excitement at the very prospect. (Where 'burbling' may be code for 'drooling').
posted by quin at 8:01 AM on January 14, 2008