Sort favorites by author?

August 4, 2012 5:10 PM

Is there a way to sort my favorites by author, or to get a tabulation of quantity by author?

I recently noticed how many times I seem to favorite the same few authors and was wondering if there's a way to see those trends easily.

posted by etc. to Feature Requests at 5:10 PM (13 comments total)

etc.: I recently noticed how many times I seem to favorite the same few authors and was wondering if there's a way to see those trends easily.

AskMe questions/answers, MeTa posts/comments, MeFi posts/comments for you. Only the favourites you've given for posts on the blue have any repeat receivers, and even there, the most you've given anyone is five in the 10+ years you've been here. Basically what I'm saying is that you're stingy.
posted by gman at 5:30 PM on August 4, 2012 [6 favorites]

Short answer, there isn't a way to do it on the site directly and we don't intend to add that functionality. However, someone wrote a script to do that - probably based on the infodump - and if my search-fu is up to the task I'll find the thread where that happened. Otherwise, someone will no doubt beat me to it.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 5:30 PM on August 4, 2012

...and gman beat me to it. Nice.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 5:31 PM on August 4, 2012

A while ago I asked how to search the posts I have favorited, to see how many there are by a given author. That post shows how to use the Infodumpster to do it. I don't know about how to extract trends over time if that's something you're interested in.
posted by LobsterMitten at 5:31 PM on August 4, 2012

Here you go.
posted by empath at 5:31 PM on August 4, 2012

Thanks. And I prefer to think of myself as frugal.
posted by etc. at 5:58 PM on August 4, 2012

I did not know the dumpster was so user friendly. Thanks again.
posted by etc. at 6:12 PM on August 4, 2012

I always forget how much fun it is to play with infodumpster.
posted by batmonkey at 6:29 PM on August 4, 2012

I didn't know infodumpster was so easy to use, either. I was picturing some enormous spreadsheet requiring code to use it, or something.
posted by Miko at 7:45 PM on August 4, 2012

Nope, the dumpster is great. Note that it's a custom search front end that uses date from the Infodump itself, which is indeed a collection of enormous tab-separated data files.

The nice thing about the raw Infodump is you can do anything you like with it; the downside is you have to actually do whatever you want. It's provided directly by the site.

The Infodumpster is a great prefab tool for playing with the data a bit without having to muck around with scripting or spreadsheets or whatever. It's written and maintained by Combustible Edison Lighthouse, who is awesome, and just imports new Infodump data on a regular basis as we regenerate it.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:34 AM on August 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

Whose comments were most favorited by muddgirl in MetaTalk?

Favorites User
27 jessamyn
18 cortex

Damn, am I a kiss-ass or what?
posted by muddgirl at 8:53 AM on August 5, 2012 [2 favorites]

I would love to see 'contributions made to favourites received' stats for our two recent additions to the mod staff, both prior to becoming moderators and after becoming moderators. Anyone?
posted by gman at 9:14 AM on August 5, 2012

That'd be pretty interesting - I've actually commented on my impressions before, but never bothered to run the numbers. April 10 was when I was officially introduced, so it's probably a more or less useful date to start from.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 9:46 AM on August 5, 2012 [1 favorite]