February 25, 2004
Curious George: Running a *filter site
Just because filmfilter, geekfilter, sportsfilter, and everythingelsefilter aren't enough, I'm thinking of setting up my own *filter site. I have a few questions for anybody who runs such a site, and one question for users of those sites.
The two main software options seem to be Freefilter and Metaphilter. Is there any reason to pick one over the other, or should I flip a coin? Any other software options I should know about? Also: in theory, a *filter community is self-sustaining. In practice, how much shepharding is needed to keep such a thing on track? Finally, a question for users as well as site admins. I've noticed that some *filter sites seem to be consistently lively, while others are stagnant. Any thoughts on what distinguishes one from the other?
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I'll tell you what distinguishes them: Cheese, man. Cheese. If you give them cheese, they will come.
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Answering your second question first, the *filters where users can properly link, prosper. The others don't. As for software, tracicle has started a rewrite of mephifilter at sourceforge, in order to optimize and add new features. Check that out. Personally, I like what linkfilter has done, but that code is closed and private.
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i notice that my filter totally goes dead unless i'm around; if i post regularly so do the others. i should just delete mine since i have no interest in posting often, so my advice is only start one if you really want to play on it often.
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The reason I chose Metaphilter over freefilter is that the creator of Freefilter no longer provides support. Jack at mephi does offer advice on his site, although he's not the quickest at responding. There are always other metaphilter users to offer their help, however. Someone recommended Sportsfilter to me as a site to emulate/take ideas from, and it's a well-designed site that you can look at every aspect of (unlike Metafilter because you can't see it from a member's viewpoint). Metaphilter has its issues, but it's a good starting point and you can customise it to a good degree. If you know PHP, you can add features on a whim. Like gyan said, we've got a mephi hack going down and MonkeyFilter is the fastest-running Metaphilter site out there. If you join the sourceforge project you'll have access to the optimisation hacks. What sort of filter are you considering, anyway?
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I've considered doing a filter filter. So you could take just the good posts from linkfilter, sportsfilter, mofi, mefi, fark, /., biriv and the like. Then we could filter that. Then I could go swimming.
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So is it a metafilterfilter or a metametafilter? MeMoSlaSpoFaFilter. Sounds good.
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I'm thinking about setting up "Londonfilter." It seems like the *filter format is well adapted for a site about a city of this size--there's so many newspapers and magazines, it can be hard to sort out the interesting/useful stuff. At one point, I was a good enough programmer to write an entire text adventure game but my skills have gotten pretty rusty. I was able to get Movable Type up and running on my own website, but I'm not sure I'm capable of much more than that. How much mucking about with the innards of Metaphilter am I likely to have to do?
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jacobw, what's that link? I'd like to see this text adventure game of yours. Metaphilter requires little in the way of setup. You'll need MySQL or similar on your server. Create a database, run Metaphilter's configure.php file and go for it from there. Then do whatever the heck you can to prettify it, because it's pretty darn ugly under the stylesheets.
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For some reason, everytime I try to post a link here, all my lovely HTML is stripped out, and no href appears. I'll try one more time: my game can be found here. If that doesn't work, go to http://wurb.com/if/game/186
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It should work fine, as long as you always put the "http://" at the beginning. But yeah, I just looked at the source and there's only [a] and [/a]. Weird.
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That link problem happens sometimes. I usually find that correcting the HTML, and checking again on preview before posting works.