There's "recent comments" up in the black bar at top, for most recent new comments from everyone, and from your profile page, you can get a list of your own posts and comments, to check back on those. Also, if you've enabled it, you'll get an email when you have new comments in your posts. There's also an RSS Comments feed link, bottom left.

We're just not doing favorites here, and that doesn't mean that we have anything against them. It's just a completely different site and usage. Our membership is tiny, so it's not like you need favorites to highlight interesting things in huge threads, and it's designed to be chatty, as in discussion, so just saying something to indicate you like something is far preferable to being the strong silent type, and we don't really want something that shows that X user had a milliontrillion favorites because it would be weird for us. Like you can sit around and relax and chat with your friends, and you don't always have to be "on" or supercool, or intimidated, because it's super-super casual.

I know we are very, very used to favorites from Mefi, so the instinct is there to want to favorite something, but in this setting it would be almost like getting up from your comfy chair in the living room where we're all sitting around bullshitting, and sticking a gilt star on someone's chest... if you see what I mean. It's perfectly fine to "lol" or grin, or giggle here, where it would be dumb at Mefi. This is really meant to be much more of a chatty gathering of people who mostly already know each other from another place, and more intimate. This is also why we don't show user numbers, because it should just sort of be friends hanging out, as much as possible.

Photo thing... that can't really happen since they are sized and cropped and bordered, blah, blah, and there's no way for that to happen on the fly. However, I will be changing photos a lot more often now, cuz seanyboy coded a nice admin interface that will make uploading a lot easier for me. I'm going to try to change them today, and then make it a weekly change, which was my original intent. (I understand, it gets boring seeing the same ones for a long time, but believe it or not, with the selecting and matching of complementary images, the photoshopping for size, cropping, etc., the uploading and changing the page code, it actually takes me several hours every time I change these - but will be a lot easier now. ♥ seanyboy!)

Thanks a lot for such a detailed and considerate reply, taz. Regarding the photos, I didn't mean that I get to chose them myself, on the fly, I meant more, "When will taz send me an email requesting instructions as to which photos to select for everybody to see?"

send me links to any photos you'd like to see included, and I'll have a look. I'm using photos from either photo friday threads, or the metachat eye group, since this means that members are purposely sharing these with us. (so, in other words, I don't plunder your flickr account for images to use here, because they may not be something you'd like showing up on the front page; if you've added to the group or shown them here in photo threads, then I know it's probably cool that people are seeing them).

Also, seanyboy has set up a Uservoice site for MetaChat, to discuss and vote for improvements and ideas for the site.

I love the recent comments function, by the by, because I seem to skip over all the interesting threads until people make interesting comments.

I hate it, though, because it sometimes drags me into really contentious threads and I can't resist an argument!

Thanks for all your work, mods and modesses! Since we don't have a site specific interface like talk, us members probably don't think as much about all the work you put into this site. It's appreciated. THANK YOU!

It drives me a little crazy that other sites on the internet don't support full-on mefi-style Recent Activity functionality, but I can speak from admin-side experience that it is a pretty complicated mess and pain in the ass to actually maintain. It's not something you implement when you've got twenty minutes sitting around, and whether it's worth building is a question in part of whether the volume of need crosses a fuzzy unstated threshold.

What taz says about the size of the userbase is kind of the key thing, there, I think. Metachat is a lot lower volume in general than mefi, and with RSS feeds and the Recent Comments feature here it's pretty manageable to keep track of things.

I too would love a 'recent activity" page, because I find it difficult to avoid being away for various periods and have to remember where I was up to to see what was added to a thread since I was last here. However, I can only imagine the complication of a page like that, so I imagine the return on investment would be pretty low.

It would be hard to do the recent activity thing. But it may be fun.

The changes that I make to metachat are either there because they're needed or I want to do them.

Return on investment is important to me, but so is my own enjoyment.

Well, the only way you'll know if it was fun is to do it ;-)

And it lets you knock off the most-voted job on the wish-list, too.

If Favorites are added I will stop participating. I hate them that much. I think they create bad mojo and people start fishing for them rather than just being themselves.

I would prefer someone type "Great comment, _____, thanks for saying something that makes a lot of sense. I appreciate you" over the favourites model.

I should have read Taz's comment first. What she said about favorites! :)

Another vote against favorites. Taz said it best.
Also, I find the recent comments link more than adequate for mecha.

I have seen enough communities destroyed or handicapped by comment-targeting functions to vote 'no' here on MeCha. Such an interface must be fine-tuned and micromanaged to avoid negative side effects. For one, it can intimidate new members, and in the last year, we have had some very interesting new members join and become active.