MetaFilter

I don't think it's the biggest deal ever, but I wouldn't mind it if users could enter their zip codes as an optional part of their profiles, so it could be displayed there. Like dame, there're some zipcodes that I can recognize offhand, and sometimes that's interesting, but there are no lat/long pairs that I recognize. Obviously, zip codes shouldn't be used for the location data, though, since they are US-only and imprecise (although maybe when a user is signing up, their US zip code could be… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 8:02 PM on December 28, 2005

Ok, can someone tell me how one compels Google Earth to provide lat/long in the decimal format needed by the preferences page? It's giving me a location in degrees, inches, and radians (or whatever those units are). Eg, 37°45'59.89"N.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 4:10 PM on December 23, 2005

It's an interesting question. Mininova is not, of course, hosting the IP-infringing material itself, as another prominent swedish pirate site likes to point out in its mocking letters to IP lawyers.

I guess the question is more about what #1's policy is than the legality, though. I doubt a serious legal case could be made that linking to a mininova page equates to an IP violation, but large IP-owning companies are notoriously litigous, so it seems like a good idea to… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 1:21 AM on December 21, 2005

Well, as long as we're all going to get a pony this christmas, I think my ideal system would be one where anyone could tag any post with whatever they wanted, and then I as a user could elect to ignore a given user's tags. Sort of a very rudimentary web of trust situation. I could see this chewing up a good amount of server CPU though.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 7:42 PM on November 20, 2005

...and now that I'm thinking about it, the above wouldn't solve the tag vandalism problem for non-registered users.

I suppose an alternative might be to have an "official" collection of author-listed tags and a whole different set of user-added tags, with the understanding that the user ones night be a more contentious set.

I don't personally see a lot of value in purely private tagging, and it seems a pity to let all that community-generated metadata go to waste.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 8:25 PM on November 20, 2005

The workaround for this is to move to California.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 6:57 PM on November 17, 2005

Well, speaking as somebody who mostly lurks, I would support this, at least as an experiment (read: pony) for a few weeks to see how it plays out.

I really think the problem is with the community, not the technical layout of the site, though. I'm genuinely interested in politics, and I would like to read good, infomed discussions about politics without having to wade through tedious callouts and feuds.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 6:53 PM on November 17, 2005

I've also had this problem for a while (running Mozilla 1.0 on Win XP). I recently re-bookmarked the site with the toolbar collapsed to get around it. It doesn't seem to involve textads, though I never investigated it that thoroughly. My font-size is set pretty large, though I don't usually have it higher than 100% on mefi.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 2:58 PM on September 13, 2002

The San Francisco meeting went well until someone mentioned Palestine and everything devolved into a hair-pulling fist fight. We've agreed to meet at a different time and place to discuss what happened.

Other than that it was a pretty good time. Good to meet y'all.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 12:09 AM on August 7, 2002

Well, I think Burning Man is still as cool as most cool things are, so I'll be out on the playa (chances are I'll be greeting some of you other burners on the way in) and I'd be happy to meet up with other Mefites. I'm organizationally impaired, though; if someone else wants to set up a place and time I'll show up there and then, but anything else is beyond my meager abilities.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 8:55 PM on July 28, 2002

As a matter of fact, I was just working on a shell script to notify me if the new user page changed when I noticed that it had changed. I think skallas' idea is a good one; in addition to being less US-centric it would give Matt a good idea about the demand for new accounts (as I think someone else mentioned). On the other hand, I'm loath to suggest anything that be more work for Matt.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 9:04 PM on July 26, 2002

Hmm, good point, Matt. I was going to suggest that people could pre-fill out their forms, and then X users could be activated per day, but that still wouldn't stop people from requesting bunches of different usernames. Email addresses are easy to manufacture, and if you go by IP you could cut out people behind proxies (and not stopping dialup/dynamic IP users anyways). I suppose you could set a cookie and stop those people who aren't very technically inclined.

Maybe… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 10:09 PM on July 26, 2002

Well, speaking for this new user only (thanks Matt!), I am perfectly capable of playing nice without such artificial measures. I think probably a lot of us who waited a long time to get in are hip to the self-policing idea (or we wouldn't want to get in so badly). The fact that MetaFilter is generally a civilized place where people don't do really dumb things most of the time is one of the reasons I'm glad to be here.

That said, if anyone wants to volunteer to be my… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 3:31 PM on July 26, 2002

Y'know, this is just the sort of thing I'd expect from you, rushmc. 23% of your posts are garbage like this. Maybe you should just go "rush"ing back to those bare ruin'd choirs you came from.

(Thanks! uh, was that bad enough?)
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 3:58 PM on July 26, 2002