You're my favorite.

April 11, 2013 7:31 AM

If favorites are bookmarks, and I'm not saying that they are, it would be nice to be able to search them by username.

However, when I access my Favorites via My Profile and use the search box provided to search for comments by someone clever, in this case jessamyn, all the returns are simply comments mentioning our esteemed librarian overlord. Perhaps there is already a way to do this that I'm missing? A quick scan of the FAQ (ctrl-F "search") was not helpful.

Basically this is relevant because I can't remember how to spell Elsevier, but I know that jessamyn said they were fuckers.

posted by maryr to Feature Requests at 7:31 AM (33 comments total)

Hmm, I was hoping you could do this by searching for "by jessamyn" or something similar but that not only doesn't work it produces no results which is sort of unexpected. Maybe pb can speak to what exactly that query is doing and we can figure out if this is a doable thing.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:38 AM on April 11, 2013

Mefi Infodumpster

Edit: or maybe I misunderstand what you're asking for, in which case, never mind. :-)
posted by Decani at 7:38 AM on April 11, 2013

Yes, currently the search only looks at the text of the comment. The "by jessamyn" isn't part of the text—we're treating it like metadata. That's the difference between our local search and Google. Google indexes entire pages—which includes the bylines. So they can point you at a particular page that contains "by jessamyn", but not at an individual comment that does. Once you get to the page with "by jessamyn" you'll still have to search the entire page to find the bit you're looking for.

So our local search is a bit more precise in that we can point you to specific comments that contain specific text. We include the permalink to that comment so you can go directly to it.

One of the drawbacks of that precision in this case is that we aren't casting our net as wide. So it misses some of the surrounding pieces of metadata.
posted by pb (staff) at 7:48 AM on April 11, 2013

This is a pony I would enjoy.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 8:22 AM on April 11, 2013

Decani, the infodumpster is helpful and this is a good reminder for me to bookmark it, but I was kind of hoping that searching the "by jessamyn" metadata could be included in the local search. It seems like part of the convenience of Favorites to me. Honestly, I generally use Favorites more like upvotes than bookmarks, but that doesn't mean I don't want to refer back to them. Sometimes I don't remember the exact wording but I remember who said it - as in this case. (Actually, I couldn't remember jessamyn's exact wording and I searched for "fuck" and "fucking" before giving up and figuring out how to spell Elsevier via Google.)
posted by maryr at 8:31 AM on April 11, 2013

If you have a rough time frame of when you or anyone else favorited it, I would click on the user page in question and speed through the favorited by others there until you get in the temporal neighborhood and then slow down and sift.
posted by y2karl at 8:44 AM on April 11, 2013

This would be a useful addition to the existing 'Posts'/'Comments' tabs and 'Showing Favorites From' filter. A "By user" pulldown would be unwieldy, but I can imagine a textfield with auto-complete suggestions limited to the list of users whose comments you've favorited.
posted by usonian at 9:00 AM on April 11, 2013

I'd love a pony like this. It would be easier than searching infodumpster.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 9:14 AM on April 11, 2013

In the meantime, allow me to BLOW your MIND!

Google:

site:metafilter.com "by jessamyn" AROUND(0) "fuckers"

Explanation: this will return metafilter.com pages where the word "fuckers" appears near "by jessamyn".

The only downside to this is that you become aware of how often certain mods use the word "fuckers."
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:27 AM on April 11, 2013 [38 favorites]

This would be great, as it would allow somebody to search their own favorites by user. Also, even better for those of us who are desperately trying to not use the Google search engine anymore (it's annoyingly hard, and now becoming more of a "can I succeed at doing this?" thing, but still...every little bit of assistance helps).
posted by iamkimiam at 9:30 AM on April 11, 2013

I would like this pony as well. I use my favorites as bookmarks and I am finding it increasingly difficult to find old comments in any way without clicking into each one individually and opening a new screen with the whole thread. I usually just remember a general theme of a comment or the user but if I can't come up with an exact word in the comment (I usually can't) then my search queries return nothing. What I'm doing now is copy pasting each comment I've favorited into a word document so I can skim them fairly quickly, but that's a roundabout way that's taking a while.

Even if we could export the whole comment (with the posted by), that would be helpful. Right now we can only export the line that shows in the favorites and not the whole comment.
posted by triggerfinger at 9:43 AM on April 11, 2013

Shouldn't this be titled "your my favourite"?
posted by KokuRyu at 9:53 AM on April 11, 2013

No. There is a script for you if you feel that it should.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:01 AM on April 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

Butt elephant.
posted by Melismata at 10:15 AM on April 11, 2013

tellmenolies, Google used to claim that there was some meaning to the argument used in AROUND( ), but I didn't find it to be reliable. Does "0" have some special meaning, or has Google given up the pretense?
posted by benito.strauss at 10:16 AM on April 11, 2013

I couldn't tell if KokoRyu was correcting the spelling of 'favorite' or incorrectly adjusting the usage of 'you're.'
posted by shakespeherian at 10:51 AM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Btw jessamyn, that is an AWESOME name for a script.
posted by Melismata at 10:51 AM on April 11, 2013

Why not both?
posted by maryr at 11:11 AM on April 11, 2013

Be careful. Searching Metafilter for "fuckers" and "jessamyn" may bring up that photo she took of a guy fucking a chicken.
posted by various at 11:19 AM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

KokuRyu: "Shouldn't this be titled "your my favourite"?"

I honestly cannot tell if you're just fucking with us.
posted by Blasdelb at 11:20 AM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Explanation: this will return metafilter.com pages where the word "fuckers" appears near "by jessamyn".

It won't work nearly as well once we all start using "By jessamyn!" as an epithet.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:21 AM on April 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

By jessamyn's hammer, by the suns of Warvan, you shall be avenged!
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:29 AM on April 11, 2013 [7 favorites]

You are standing by Jessamyn west of a white house with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.
posted by ook at 12:26 PM on April 11, 2013 [10 favorites]

Baby Jessamyn H. Christ, that is so wack!
*cries*
posted by y2karl at 12:26 PM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Oh, that was in response to It's Raining Torvald Henderson, by the way.
posted by y2karl at 12:28 PM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

tellmenolies, Google used to claim that there was some meaning to the argument used in AROUND( ), but I didn't find it to be reliable. Does "0" have some special meaning, or has Google given up the pretense?

No idea. I saw the same claim made but I was reading blogs.

I sure can't see a difference when I fiddle with it.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:16 PM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Can I just note here that this thread is riotously funny if you use (and forget that you use) the greasemonkey script that replaces "jessamyn" with "Mom"?

Basically this is relevant because I can't remember how to spell Elsevier, but I know that Mom said they were fuckers.
...
Explanation: this will return metafilter.com pages where the word "fuckers" appears near "by Mom".
...
It won't work nearly as well once we all start using "By Mom!" as an epithet.
...
By Mom's hammer, by the suns of Warvan, you shall be avenged!

posted by Hadroed at 1:43 PM on April 11, 2013 [7 favorites]

Can I just note here that this thread is riotously funny if you use (and forget that you use) the greasemonkey script that replaces "jessamyn" with "Mom"?
Even more so if you use it as I used to - replacing 'jessamyn' with jessamyn's mum' and in conjunction with the MefiQuote script.
posted by dg at 3:00 PM on April 11, 2013

Because you end up with things like this:
... replacing 'jessamyn's mum' with jessamyn's mum's mum' and in conjunction with the MefiQuote script.
posted by dg at 3:03 PM on April 11, 2013

As someone with a bajillion favorites (I use them about every possible way one can--as nods of agreement, as hand squeezes, as bookmarks, whatever) I've wanted this pony for a long time. For whatever reason I can usually recall that some comment or info I want was posted by a certain user, and that I saved it by favoriting, but that's it--and yeah, not very helpful for fast retrieval purposes. If there's a way to hack Google search to do this for me, that's work too...
posted by ifjuly at 6:45 PM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Never forget that in Canada, there is a "you" in "favourite!"
posted by salishsea at 11:44 PM on April 11, 2013

The only downside to this is that you become aware of how often certain mods use the word "fuckers."

This is not a bug, it's a feature.
posted by corb at 4:58 AM on April 12, 2013

It's not as helpful as searching through your favorites, but you can search Jessamyn's activity for comments. (Though I can see why you'd rather have a shorter list to search through.)
posted by Margalo Epps at 9:51 AM on April 12, 2013