"It's not like there aren't five interesting people in here who couldn't start their own collective blog. Or even better, write something that will scrape the sites of five BB posters and create a metablog."

I'm not interesting enough for a whole blog, but if you need an alarmingly steady stream of post contributions in the topics of "animal hoarding" and Irish Travellers I'm your guy.

Online communities change over time. Go to archive. org and look at one of your favorite blogs, three years ago. I still think the best response to a blog that disappoints you is to get 4-5 like minded people and start your own. Not because the complaining is or isn't justified, but because it adds something to the ongoing conversation.

It's not like there aren't five interesting people in here who couldn't start their own collective blog. Or even better, write something that will scrape the sites of five BB posters and create a metablog.

"slowly wander away until Cory closes it down"

Why would Cory close it down? He's as much a guest here as Xeni. This is Mark's blog.

The short version:

It's like walking into a library, hearing absolute, blissful silence, and shouting, "WOW! THIS IS FANTASTIC! I CAN'T BELIEVE HOW GLORIOUSLY SILENT IT IS, YOU KNOW, WITHOUT THE CARS, AND THE YELLING, AND THE TELEVISIONS BLARING PORNOGRAPHY AND WOW THIS IS SO COOL I CAN ACTUALLY HEAR MYSELF THINK LIBRARIES ARE LEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET!" and wondering why people get annoyed...

Slightly longer, but still rude :-)

My point from the beginning was that filters, though personally useful, have this unintended side effect of promoting a culture of conspicuous outrage towards purity, with people "desperately" crusading against the Dark One's "best efforts" to ruin The Group.

I mean, maybe it's this cosmic balance thing; for every byte saved through the filters, one must be lost to overriding snobbery. I mean, look at your post, man. Jon Katz? Dead Horse? Two years since he posted last? Hello?

Chris, I'm sorry. I'm sure you're a nice guy, who has very nice and well thought out reasons to evangelize how his browsing is "so much more enjoyable" than the plebian Windows' users Xeni-tainted experience. I'm sure you sincerely believe that, if not for this grand new anti-Xeni filter, readers will genuinely "slowly wander away until Cory closes it down". And I'm glad you have the intestinal fortitude to stand up for your rights -- we need more people like that in this country!

The question is not whether any of this is good or bad. My point is simply that filters spawn promiscuous filtering, i.e. people can't shut up about it.

--Dan

Dan: You needed an example of what? Someone desperately trying to make bb more enjoyable for readers despite Xeni's best efforts? You say brag, I say inform. Proxomitron is a nice filter. It's not like I said this in some discussion with a topic other than filtering.

At the time Slashdot brought in author filtering I hadn't already had a filter running to get rid of Katz, so my response was simply "Great!" -- if I hadn't already been running Proxomitron with a Xeni filter my response here would have been similar. Instead I comment on how I've been finding bb since I installed the filter.

Proxomitron makes my browsing so much more enjoyable than most Windows users have it, I therefore wish to share the experience with others. This isn't some elitest thing, anyone can download and setup this free software. And I didn't even write the filter, another bb reader shared it.

What would you rather; Readers slowly wander away from bb until Cory closes it down -or- Readers have the option to customise bb into something they enjoy more and stay?

squiggy said it best: "blog editors have rights *and* readers have rights."

Reading what you want on B^B^ is as easy as walking down the street. You need technology to walk around stuff?

I would like BB not to change too much; but of course, I want it to stay 'cutting edge' and continue to bring up topics of interest to its authors, which is what I always was supposed to be of interest to the readers. (The alternative being, go do your own blog--I hear AOL's just released a whole blog tool set of some sort.)

I think one more author would be okay, but even now, I think entries fall off the radar a little too quickly. I like BB because of it's eclectic nature. I'm not interested in filtering it at all. As someone previously said, one's brain is sufficient for any filtering that needs to be done.

I think that whytheluckystiff /m15 has a good point -- add many more authors and bump up the content, make it about all kinds of things. Then the posters can troll or flame as they want, it'll sort itself out.

Oh, wait, that's Fark.

Filtering topics is dead easy. Sign up for the mailing list. Write a mail rule. If To: includes "boingboing-mailblog" and if Message Body includes "Disney" then delete.

I just wish there was a way to filter out topics rather than authors. To me, the response of "Fine, you don't like Xeni's SARS posts, then filter out Xeni," is just as ridiculous as all the baseless name-calling pointed at her to begin with. The point, to me, is that I'm getting sick of watching formerly interesting and eclectic blogs turn into blogs ABOUT blogging and reading SARS threads that run on for weeks. Of course, people seem to forget that it's not particularly difficult to skim topics and filter with your brain.

I suppose, looking at the functionality of BoingFilter, there's not really a way to do that as elegantly. Alas. I suppose that's sort of running into Usenet territory anyway.

Another option for BoingFilter is to grey out (or collapse) posts that don't meet your criteria. At any rate, I don't think BoingBoing posts enough content to make filtering worth it. We're talking an average of, what, 10-15 posts a day? It takes less than a minute to scan the titles on a given day and filter visually with a single eyelid.

I'm of the opposite approach, I'm interested in being flooded with more content. More authors, more content on BoingBoing. Seven or more other authors to continue diversification of the content. Capable authors out there with adjacent angles on the popular themes of trash-collecting, Japanese publicity stunts, QTVR, SARS, sci-fi and copyright law. Maybe one new author that did his own experiments in trying to reanimate dead spiders and glue dragonflies together. Or a WiFi-crazed lumberjack that could go on a quest to chop down telephone poles and put a photoblog in his axe.

Nobody's being forced to read BoingBoing. Nobody's being forced to use the BoingFilter. Stop the whining.

"Alright, perhaps I was a bit contentious in my original post. I still think an unabridged BoingBoing is best, principally for its ability to expose you to the unexpected."

100% behind that sentiment. Not to be pedagogical about it but yeah, I think we learn just as much or more from those we may not like or agree with.

"Also, I guess it has the editor's approval, and if it forever eliminates the tiresome ".... is ruining BoingBoing" type comments then it's totally worth it"

I feel bad that I didn't go to Cory with it first, and I actually intended to but was waiting for next big flood (when people bitch the most) to bother him about it. It was just a nerd tool a couple of people were using and we wanted to polish it up a bit before we said anthing publico, but I guess he just had to check his logs to see what was up and color me happy he ain't pissed!

Alright, perhaps I was a bit contentious in my original post. I still think an unabridged BoingBoing is best, principally for its ability to expose you to the unexpected. However I'm willing to grant that maybe the filter isn't necessarily the most evil technology since the invention of anthrax.

Also, I guess it has the editor's approval, and if it forever eliminates the tiresome ".... is ruining BoingBoing" type comments then it's totally worth it.

Boingfilter was intended to make reading BB easier, not to shut out or killfile anyone. In fact, in the first version, JimmyDub had the filter simply wipe out that person’s posts – as if they’d never existed and I talked him into going the extra step of having it at least show the headline. Now I’m even considering adding a pulldown to the form that it would instead merely truncate the posts to X number of words with a minimum of 10, just to get the point across that we are not interested in a kill function and all the implications that are already popping up here.

With so many small screen web browser devices out now (including my satanic Danger phone) sometimes it’s just not worth the large download and millions of page-down clicks a verbose, large image packed “A-Z project” can impose on the 240x160 set - so with this tool we can still enjoy our BB fix on the go. You still don’t miss out on anything in case the filtered poster snaps out of their binge and veers back into things more your speed, so everybody wins, yay.

Edited by author 07-14-2003 10:26 AM
xradiographer -- your comment that "anything that keeps me from learning something i don't know" is skewed. it would only fit if the boingfilter was applied *for* the reader, rather than *by* the reader.

the beauty in this solution is that readers over time can develop their own sense of which writers interest them, and then filter the blog accordingly. no one's filtering the blog for them. whether a reader skims over the posts they don't like or uses a filter to collapse them, it's is the same action: reader's choice.

Anything that keeps me from learning something I don't know is a Good Thing!

Edited by author 07-14-2003 09:56 AM
oh, come on, anil and jnelsonw. blog editors have rights *and* readers have rights. your arguments are flawed.

the right to free speech doesn't come with a clause that forces people to listen, much less agree or be interested in what is said.

from my point of view, boingfilter is great functionality for a group-edited blog. this solution helps readers customize content to their tastes and interests, and gives editors freedom to post what they like. how can that be wrong?

Hmmmm, that's interesting but it's really only curing the symptoms, isn't it? It enrages me that people without the filter are still reading stuff here that I don't like.

A far more elegant solution would be if we could insert filters directly into the author's brain such that they would shut down anytime they considered writing something that didn't interest me.

Then BoingBoing would go back to the good old days, when they only posted about Leave It To Beaver and how to Dance the Jitterbug.

Wow, how did that get out! We made it as an experiment during a certain folk-art epidemic but then when it died down we kept it quiet. Oh well, its cool to see that it was discovered with NO promotion ;)

Enjoy folx, we have infinite bandwidth. If anyone has any ideas on how to make it better, let us know!

Thank you, Chris. I needed an example.

Killfiles -- filtering by author -- are fine and wonderful, but they have this horribly annoying side effect of making people brag about their newly filtered lifestyle, like it's some kind of badge of honor or status symbol. "I'm too cool for Xeni!" he says. "I can't wait until she sees this message, and is unable to respond!!!"

So, if we could have a small message come up when adding a contributer, "Nobody's interested in your f*cking Boingfilter, so shut up about it" -- or even better, automatic removal of the filter if its existence is disclosed -- I'd be a very happy camper.

And sorry, Chris -- nothing personal, but the Proxomitron namedrop sold it :-)

--Dan

I'm a huge fan of BoingBoing and would like to filter out all of the authors so that the site can be perfect and exactly like what I want. Will this help with that?

Hey Cory, while you're doing neat stuff to improve the functionality, any chance you could try setting up a free Atomz.com search engine to take the place of the Google one that can't index the archives because they're too big? Or maybe switch the archives to weekly so Google can handle them? Or both, Atomz is more reliable than Google for in-site searching because it'll get all the pages whenever you tell it to instead of being at the whim of Googlebot. (Don't get me wrong, I love Google, but they only index the first 100k or so of each archive page which makes it hard to look for old posts)

Since I've been using Proxomitron to filter out Xeni for quite a while now I must say this *is* the way to do it.

It'd be cool if it would optionally filter out that right hand bar too...

Hello BoingFilter, goodbye SARS Art project!!