A whale of a Meta!

January 15, 2018 7:05 AM

Halloween Jack posed a question in response to aniola's wonderful post about whales and literature.

“So, can any of you boffins on the blue tell me if there's a longer post than this one?”

I thought it'd be nice to have a place to discuss that subject and share some of the longer posts that have managed to hit MetaFilter.
posted by Fizz to MetaFilter-Related at 7:05 AM (25 comments total)

There's lots.
posted by aniola at 7:33 AM on January 15, 2018 [2 favorites]

My two favorites are The annotated filmography of Charlie Chaplin and Sing! (The Electric Company, 1970s version).
posted by Melismata at 8:36 AM on January 15, 2018

Dear lord...the list of tags in that Chaplin post.
posted by Fizz at 8:39 AM on January 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

JHarris is my hero.
posted by valkane at 8:39 AM on January 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

There’s gotta be an honorable mention for the Breaking Bad finale thread with a literal periodic table of links.
posted by Itaxpica at 11:25 AM on January 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

Aniola links to the infodumpster. It's a great resource for these kinds of questions.

I did this back in 2012. I've been considering doing one for 2017, but it requires serious time to put one together and I'm afraid I wouldn't be done before March.
posted by zarq at 12:11 PM on January 15, 2018

Considering the longest work of English literature is a Super Smash Brothers fanfiction I can't be surprised that the longest Metafilter post is about My Little Pony.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:27 PM on January 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

> the longest work of English literature is a Super Smash Brothers fanfiction

what
posted by ardgedee at 1:07 PM on January 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

> the longest work of English literature is a Super Smash Brothers fanfiction

Here you go ardgedee.
posted by Fizz at 1:09 PM on January 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

As a followup to my old huge Doom post from 2013 I was thinking of making a similar post for the 20th anniversary of Half-Life this year, but the Doom post took so much time and effort to research that I decided against it.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:53 PM on January 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

What post has the most external links?

What's the longest post to which you've replied "Wow, this is a lot. I'm going to have to take some time going through this." and then actually devoted that time?
posted by cichlid ceilidh at 3:35 PM on January 15, 2018

I'm a big fan of the Katamari Damacy 10th anniversary post.
posted by J.K. Seazer at 4:50 PM on January 15, 2018

cichlid ceilidh: The Electric Company post mentioned above.
posted by Melismata at 8:02 PM on January 15, 2018

My post on the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures would have been longer, but my computer kept crashing while trying to input the post, which lead to the post being split into the OP + two comments, because even when I thought everything was in there, the post was truncated (and the first follow up comment was also truncated).

It became an obsession of mine for around a month, trying to provide online links for around 180 lectures. I don't suggest anyone do that sort of thing.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:49 PM on January 15, 2018

I'm more of a shitort post guy, so I would like to know the opposite. Shortest post? Shortest post with most comments?
posted by Literaryhero at 11:41 PM on January 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

Apparently the info dump doesn't allow sorting by shortness, which is fine as it allows my curiosity to build. However (and this is probably the least important thing I have ever said, so please don't take it too seriously), I feel like this kind of correlates length of post to value which isn't something that I agree with.
posted by Literaryhero at 11:50 PM on January 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

My favorite long post: Nick Cave, the Black Crow King, is fifty today
posted by cjorgensen at 12:08 PM on January 16, 2018 [1 favorite]

Also a post with no link, but the "meat" of that post is actually in the first comment. That's a pretty interesting find, though.
posted by Literaryhero at 12:11 AM on January 17, 2018

I'm a big fan of the Katamari Damacy 10th anniversary post.

That one started out quite small but just kept getting bigger and bigger by absorbing other posts.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 8:56 AM on January 26, 2018

Shortest non-test one i've found (again, summing title and body) is this one.

This one is shorter with 2 Characters title, 2 characters URL description and 13 Chars in the URL so 17 overall, which is equal to post 2541, but is less if you don't count the title. (2541 has 0 title length).

It has 68 comments.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 9:10 AM on January 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

If we're not including URL length, just text in the box then probably this is shortest.
1 Character title, 1 Character body. 50 Comments.

A few people have tried to make obituary posts which are just single dot, but they've all been deleted ,though this one has just a semi-colon as the link. It looks like all other single character link posts have been deleted.

A few other notes whilst I'm in the data:
Longest Title is 316 characters (here)
Longest URLs in a post 433 characters (here) and the first few comments are about how long the URLs are.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 9:26 AM on January 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

Just this guy, y'know you are doing great work there.
posted by Literaryhero at 3:25 AM on January 28, 2018

And I thought there was a limit on title length?
posted by Literaryhero at 3:26 AM on January 28, 2018

There seems to be a limit to url description of 200 characters.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 5:39 AM on January 28, 2018

The title length limit came in more recent years, in tandem with some other changes notably including the introduction of the Modern theme.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:03 AM on January 28, 2018