Hello BoingFilter, goodbye SARS Art project!!

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...

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)

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?

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

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!

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.

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?

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

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.