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Sometimes I feel it takes a lot of effort to find questions I am interested in reading. I would love to be able to stumble solely on stack overflow. I would hit a button and it would bring me to a question that has been up voted by people that have up voted other questions that I have also up voted. I would also like to be able to configure the button slightly, allowing me to only go to questions with certain tags or ones that have no up voted answers. I know people will say you can already do searches and ignore tags but that often seems like a lot of work. Being able to come to stack overflow, hit stumble, and be learning or answering questions would really improve my experience.

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Stack Overflow already has this, only better. When I go here it takes me to a whole page of unanswered questions that are interesting to me, instead of just one question at a time. I can click the "next" button at the bottom to be taken to a page with all new questions. ;)

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  • Must be broken for me somehow. Most of the questions that it lists for me when I try it have answers; only questions with accepted answers seem to be excluded… May 3, 2010 at 22:23
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    @Donal: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18870/…
    – Jon Seigel
    May 3, 2010 at 22:38
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  • I obviously know that this functionality exists. There are many things that this lacks. The problem that SO addresses so well is that many times people don't know the words for what they are searching, they use long sentences to describe what they are talking about. Being brought to a single question fully submerges you in a question you might not have been brought to by the snippet alone. I know as programmers we are taught that the most efficient way is best. This mindset often worsens the user experience.
    – Lumpy
    May 4, 2010 at 14:17
  • Also this solution does nothing for people that come to stack overflow to learn. Being brought to an answered question that was up voted by someone with interests similar to your own would be a great tool which your answer does not address. I wish I had the rep to down vote this answer as I believe it should have been a comment instead of an answer and because it got an up vote this question will no longer be considered unanswered.
    – Lumpy
    May 4, 2010 at 14:27
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    @Lumpy: You can already do everything you're asking for on SO, with the one exception of a "Stumble" button that takes you to one question. Instead you can go to entire pages of them! You can already easily find upvoted questions. You can already easily find questions with certain (interesting) tags. You can already easily find unanswered questions. The focus of the site is to help people easily find answers to their questions. I think that stumbling around randomly would be counter to that goal. May 4, 2010 at 14:38
  • @Jeff: OK, that makes sense. May 6, 2010 at 13:11
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This would be great functionality, especially since it cannot be done through the API (voting records are not exposed per user).

However, very similar functionality can be obtained simply by trolling your tags pages. Start with the questions that share tags which you have ranked on your user page (ie, tags with questions you've participated in).

This could also be automated by an enterprising stack app creator.

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    Automation of this is my current project (and will be to a greater extent when my exams finish).
    – HAL 9000
    Jun 16, 2010 at 23:07
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I disagree with Bill that the current unanswered page serves this goal, since it doesn't filter out questions that you are likely interested in.

Perhaps someone can make a StumbleUpon StackApp for this. But I don't know if they would have access to your upvotes (given & received), so they could recommend questions you are likely to find interesting.

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  • When I go to the Unanswered page there are three tabs on the top right; my tags, newest, and votes. The "my tags" tab shows unanswered questions from my interesting tags. Maybe you're on the wrong tab, or you don't have any tags marked as Interesting? (Despite that, an app using the api is still a good idea. You'd have to enter your interesting tags again since you can't log in through the api yet, but that's a pretty small hurdle to get over.) Jun 16, 2010 at 20:28
  • @Bill: I know about sorting it for tags, but obviously StumbleUpon uses somewhat more sophisticated algorithms to propose things than just tags. Yet I'm no expert on the topic, so I refrain from suggesting any specific implementations. But it would be awesome to have questions suggested to you that you are likely to want to answer.
    – Ivo Flipse
    Jun 16, 2010 at 20:41

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