Viewing popular favorites for posts tagged 'pony'

May 15, 2011 7:19 AM

Is there any way to view Popular Favorites for a given tag- for example, sorting posts tagged with 'books' in order from most to least favorited? If not, could there be?

I use the example of books because I've been looking for new reading material recently, and have been combing old Ask questions for ideas. But there are a whooooole lot of book questions along the lines of 'help me remember this specific book' or 'recommend a book about this incredibly obscure field.' It would be great if I could sort the book questions by most popular, in order to read the posts with the broadest appeal.

Similarly, I'm moving to NYC soon, and would love to be able to read posts tagged 'nyc' in the same manner.

Is there some way of doing this that I'm missing, or perhaps a script I could install? If not, consider this a pony request!

posted by showbiz_liz to Feature Requests at 7:19 AM (6 comments total)

There's no tag-filtered favorites search on the site at this point, no. You can get most of the way to your request here using Combustible Lighthouse Edison's Infodumpster, however, by searching a given subsite for posts that have a specific tag and at least one favorite.

- "pony"-tagged posts on Metatalk
- "nyc"-tagged questions on Ask

Caveats are that it's matching any tags that contain what you specified (so you'll get "books" but also "bookstore", "pony" but also "eponymous", etc; and it is not producing the results sorted by favorites count, though it should still be easy to skim for large favorite (or comment) count that way.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:27 AM on May 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

Actually, if you go to the main page of the Infodumpster (http://mefi.marksmith.org), you'll see in the "Posts" section a line which reads:

Which posts by ______ tagged with ______ have the most favorites? [?]

Just fill in the tag there and click the [?] button and you'll get a list of all posts with that tag, with the most-favorited ones at the top. You do have to do this once for each sub-site but otherwise I think it's exactly what you want.
posted by FishBike at 9:05 AM on May 15, 2011 [8 favorites]

Ha! That is a much better method. I am blind.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:15 AM on May 15, 2011

Also, here's a collection of book recommendation AskMes on the wiki, by book subject.
posted by desjardins at 7:13 AM on May 16, 2011

cortex and FishBike - since a lot of people link to Amazon listing when they mention a book, is it possible to see which books have been linked to the most?
posted by desjardins at 7:45 AM on May 16, 2011

Why yes, it is possible. See that thread for more context beyond what that comment covers as far as what I did there.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:49 AM on May 16, 2011