Things I favorited by my contacts?

October 24, 2016 11:20 AM

Is there an easy way to see, for each of my contacts or for an individual user who is a contact, things that _I_ have favorited? This would be a quick way for me to remind myself why I have marked that user as a contact.

If I find someone's comments particularly compelling, I'll sometimes both favorite their comment and make that user a contact. Later, I want to remember specifically why I made that person a contact and/or be reminded of the precise aspect of their brilliance that spoke to me.

So, if my contacts included Bob and tressamyn, could I somehow generate a list/lists like:

Your favorites by Bob:

UX Design exercise for job candidates

Do you have, or have you encountered a design exercise for a UX job application that you thought was effective?
posted to Ask MetaFilter at 7:10 PM on October 18, 2016

Your favorites by tressamyn:

MeFi post: all i've got is a photograph

I liked Daniel Radcliffe's strategy of wearing the same clothes every day so that paparazzi pictures of him plummeted in value.

I have the same conflicted thoughts as...

Would also work: A solution that involved creating a complete list of short versions of all my favorited comments and posts (written by other people) and then searching the text would be OK, but I don't know how to make a single long list without having to go page-by-page, which would take too long.

Thing I already tried: Searching my favorites for a user name doesn't seem to work (unless the comment contains the user name in the text).


Thanks! I've wondered about this for a couple of years. I realize the answer might be some kind of browser-side script, or that it's not possible, but I figured I'd ask.

posted by amtho to MetaFilter-Related at 11:20 AM (5 comments total)

Y'know, I don't think there is any good built-in tool for this on the site. It's the sort of thing that might some day creep into the favorites view for profile pages along with the existing search, but for now there's not really a way to do it. (And you're correct, the search bar for favorites looks only at comment content, not any of the byline metadata. So in the vast majority of cases search for someone's comment by tossing their username in would go nowhere useful.)

That said, the data does exist in the Infodump, so someone feeling enterprising could certainly in principle do that sort of calculation of comments by user x favorited by user y as a third-party tool for at least generating a list of links to comments to review. It's the sort of thing that would be a decent addition to what Combustible Edison Lighthouse already supports on the unofficial Infodumpster tool, though I'm not volunteering work for him on that front and haven't done any calculations to figure out how much of a bear a worst-case scenario search along those lines might be.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:24 AM on October 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

If there's a way to list all my favorited comments and posts on a single page (instead of distributed across 61 screens full as they currently are) that would work and also be cool. It would be a little awkward, but would solve the problem.

I could do text search within the long page for the users I'm interested in.
posted by amtho at 11:35 AM on October 24, 2016

Yeah, no single-page view like that currently exists. In principle we could create one; in practice it could be a real scaling nightmare for anyone who has a loooot of favorites. There's some pretty good "don't melt the server" reasons we do most of this dynamic serving of search results stuff with only like 20 or 50 results at a time, paginated.

One DIY that is available, though I don't think it'd answer your specific need here as far as searchability by user: if you go to your Preferences and scroll down to the bottom of the page, there's a few links including "Export Your Favorites", which will generate a big html file with all the posts and comments you've favorited as link, with the post title as the link text for posts and the first little bit of the comment text for comment link text. No bylines or anything, so searching by username wouldn't be any better there, unfortunately. But since we're on the subject, I figure I can remind folks that exists.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:42 AM on October 24, 2016

I definitely use the infodumpster for stuff like this! That way when someone's coming to a meetup I can see what stuff of theirs I've favorited or what stuff of mine they've favorited so I'm less anxious and it doesn't feel so much like I'm talking to a stranger when I meet them.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 11:52 AM on October 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

tressamyn vest

(sorry not sorry)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:23 AM on October 25, 2016