Filtering FanFare?

January 28, 2025 2:17 AM

Is there a way to not see particular shows on FanFare? (an anti-MyFanFare as it were)

I read FanFare a lot but the show rewatch (and sometimes current watch) threads add a lot of noise to the signal. MyFanFare is great for shows I want to follow but I also want to see new movies and books as those are posted. Turning off descriptions helps a bit but still a lot of noise since I don't watch a lot of the shows being posted.

It'd be great if, in addition to MyFanFare, we could have a button to block a show. The show wouldn't appear in FanFare and there could be a BlockedFanFare page if you wanted to remove something from being blocked.

Thank you for listening to my BlockTalk.

posted by kokaku to Feature Requests at 2:17 AM (23 comments total)

Fanfare could stand to have a lot more filtering tools, so I support this! I'd love the ability to never see entire media genres - for me, podcasts, which I enjoy but don't want to discuss - so that there's way less to wade thru.
posted by donnagirl at 3:24 AM on January 28 [2 favorites]

I think this is a great suggestion.
posted by obfuscation at 5:18 AM on January 28

This was discussed almost six years ago. I was in favor then as well, with an option to mute authors of books. The problem there is that author is not a distinct field, and many posts don't even have the author's name in them.
posted by soelo at 8:07 AM on January 28 [1 favorite]

I'd like this too. I'm LOVING the renewed interest in FanFare - but that is also increasing the returns to rewatches of TV shows I was never into, so if I were able to filter just that off my own feed that would be glorious.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:56 AM on January 28 [1 favorite]

We can definitely add filtering. Since the priority is reproducing existing features, it would be in a post-launch Phase 2. We can also address some of the ideas from the earlier post.

For authors, we can add a field for authors. We could also look up the authors with some thinking like the Open Library Search API to add them to existing book posts.

Fanfare could stand to have a lot more filtering tools

Which tools specifically?
posted by kirkaracha (staff) at 12:40 PM on January 28

I love this idea.
posted by maryellenreads at 1:36 PM on January 28

Which tools specifically?

*Readies pen to take notes*
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 1:42 PM on January 28

Which tools: well, filtering a category or a specific franchise have already been mentioned.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:37 PM on January 28

I want to tag each post for myself (watched, want to watch, don't want, needs tag) with some kind of system so I could see posts in each of my categories. I realize this is big change and might need to see how many people would actually use it. Maybe just let people have their own invisible tags on posts and they can invent them, plus see posts they have not tagged.

Author required* on books - I would be willing to help clean this up on older posts. *Maybe with a checkbox option for "this book doesn't have an author"

I think Clubs needs overhaul or publicity. They are listed in Alpha order, so maybe an activity sort as default and other sort options. It is not apparent which if any are active.
posted by soelo at 5:07 PM on January 28

I would be willing to help clean this up on older posts.

I'm pretty sure I can loop through the books and get the authors with an API. Also, I'd like to have the form use the API to look up the author when a title is entered on the new book form.

Similarly, I'd like to use movie APIs to get IMDB links and poster images when a movie title is entered. (And hiding posters is on the to-do list.) Also, JustWatch has an API, so we might be able to programmatically determine where movies are streaming.

Which tools: well, filtering a category or a specific franchise have already been mentioned.

I was promised "a lot" and that's only two!
posted by kirkaracha (staff) at 6:03 PM on January 28

yeeeaaah this is definitely relevant right now. I appreciate/applaud your diplomacy in not making it seem targeted.
posted by supercres at 10:56 PM on January 28 [1 favorite]

I'm pretty sure I can loop through the books and get the authors with an API.
I am in favor of that, but is that API only using title name? My concern is about generic titles with multiple results, like "The Rook". A URL to buy the book is required as part of posting, so you might be able to use that to scrape the more common sources.

I was thinking there would be a few cases where lookup fails or needs to be validated. Users could sort through those to see if one author can be determined, and I would help out with that. It would be fun for me, I assure you.

I'd add the Year to the page that lists recent movie posts: https://fanfare.metafilter.com/movies
I would also add the year of the post as well as the year of the movie to the Club pages: https://fanfare.metafilter.com/club/Animation-Celebration because the last post there is from 2018
posted by soelo at 8:27 AM on January 29

I would also like to have some flexibility with filtering shows beyond just adding to My Fanfare. I don't know what you'd call it, but My Fanfare is 100% opt in show-by-show (and maybe also club-by-club) and I would appreciate a more curated experience than the full feed, that still allows discovery. Plus a lot more ideas below...

Filters that members could set to exclude posts from their default Fanfare home page - this would be in addition to My Fanfare which only displays what you've actively subscribed to:

• Tag
• Club
• Genre
• Author/Director/Showrunner
• Poster, as in, the member who posted the item
• New vs Rewatch vs Thing from a while ago that somebody just posted
• Medium (TV series, Movie, Podcast, Book, Event, etc)

In order to make this work, we'd probably need to have some cleanup on existing posts. We'd also need to have auto-suggestions for the freeform text fields like Author, Tag, and Genre, so we don't end up with multiple entries for the same person.

It would be great to have a Fanfare Search page with all of the above filters, plus regular keywords so you can go looking for stuff. Search should also include date range so you can look for 1940s movies or 1980s TV shows if you want.

Other curation options to make the default Fanfare home page more usable - these would be user-configurable options that would apply to everything displayed for you when logged in:

• Display only latest episode for all shows, with the episode's description; include a link to the Show page too
• Display the show page link and description instead of any episode links; bump the link up and include the new episode number ("Season 2 Episode 3" for example) every time there's a new episode posted

And please: Display the year the movie or book was released on the home page. If you can do year(s) for TV shows and podcasts too that would be great. Events should store their year just like movies/books do, so the year can be searched easily.
posted by expialidocious at 8:57 AM on January 29

I don't know if this is really a problem requiring resources and time. Over the past week or so, there have been two rewatch shows with multiple episodes being posted on the same day. I think maybe limiting the number of episodes that are posted on a single day would help remedy this problem. Or at worse, adopting a multi-episode post practice, one post, but it covers multiple episodes.

For reference, here's a daily breakdown of the recent posting trends:

January 28 - 3 episodes of one rewatch show A, 2 episodes of rewatch show B

January 27 - 5 episodes of rewatch show A, 2 episodes of rewatch show B

January 26 - 2 episodes of rewatch show A, 1 episode of rewatch show B

January 25 - 3 episodes of rewatch show A

January 24 - 3 episodes of rewatch show A

January 23 - 1 episode of rewatch show A (this day had a few other rewatch shows, one episode each, neither show B).

Going back further and but for one example, the rewatch shows are just one episode per show, and some of those are once a week posts. I think based off the last five days or so, it's easy to fill overwhelmed by a space that typically doesn't have so many entries per day, or at least, not of the same show. To a large extent, it might save some time to focus more on user practices than dabbling in the code.
posted by Atreides at 10:43 AM on January 29

I think maybe limiting the number of episodes that are posted on a single day would help remedy this problem.

I would gently suggest that creating barriers to posting is the last thing that Mefi needs.
posted by zamboni at 7:43 AM on January 30 [2 favorites]

I was not aware restricting the number of episodes that could be posted on Fanfare in a single day from tv shows no longer on the air was the height of censorship.
posted by Atreides at 8:28 AM on January 30

(Isn't there already a one post a day in AskMe restriction?)
posted by Atreides at 8:40 AM on January 30

Mod note: There used to be a one day posting limit in AskMe, but there no longer is any limit.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 10:06 AM on January 30 [1 favorite]

We are simply making a list of improvements we would like to see in FanFare and it shouldn't devolve into sniping like this. Improving FanFare in general is something that comes up often. kirk already said: "Since the priority is reproducing existing features, it would be in a post-launch Phase 2." so this is not taking away dev time from launching the new site.
Is there a clear plan of how new features will be proposed, filtered (yes or no), prioritized, and implemented in this new version? I don't think one has been announced. I know there will be rounds of testing, but that is all prelaunch. I hope there is a post launch plan, and that just making the plan it isn't something that gets bogged down in arguments.
posted by soelo at 10:56 AM on January 30

[There used to be a one day posting limit in AskMe, but there no longer is any limit. ]

Thank you for the update!

Now pardon me while I go milk a cow to make some ice cream because I'm that far behind on things. I don't have salt, but I'll just use gravel like normal.

And my apologies if my comment came across as sniping, my feelings could have been written in a more constructive manner. As a pretty regular user of Fanfare I am one hundred percent for any changes that will encourage broader engagement with other users of the site.
posted by Atreides at 11:14 AM on January 30

I sure could do without all the horror stuff.

No shade to DOT, whose posts are excellent -- I just don't want horror movies causing intrusive thoughts. And I expect there are readers who would similarly be glad to do without other things.

But this requires having metadata like "genre" that isn't currently collected, right? Maybe if it was possible to search for, say, the ID string from IMDB or TVDB, that metadata could prefetched and presented to the poster for validation when the post is previewed?
posted by wenestvedt at 6:42 AM on January 31

Maybe requiring at least one user entered genre for movies and books?
posted by soelo at 7:47 AM on January 31 [1 favorite]

Filtering by genre/author/director/year for each media category, so I could, on a whim, see what historical fiction novels ppl were discussing, or check out sci-fi tv series with active watch groups, or see what 90s movies have posts.

Filter out, permanently for my account, media types (no books) or genres within types (no sports documentaries) or whatever you'd call series rewatches.

Basically, I assume there's a database on the back end. Add necessary metadata to old posts, require it for new posts, and then let users use the database in database-y ways. The list of possible filters has no limit!
posted by donnagirl at 2:21 PM on February 1 [1 favorite]