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Why don't we have a Tab that shows only questions for our favorite tags, showing recent first? I keep having to scroll down the page to find the questions I'm interested in.

It'd be like the Unanswered Questions -> My Tags tab, but for all questions with my favorite tags.

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  • 48
    Great question / request. I find myself wanting this nearly every time I log in. The non-date display order of the "My Tags" tab makes it much less usable for me than it seems like it ought to be.
    – Jamo
    Commented Sep 21, 2009 at 21:18
  • 3
    David Dean: Same here. This question is so badly titled I couldn't find it and ended up posting a dupe.
    – Colin Barrett
    Commented Feb 20, 2010 at 5:43
  • @Fogle, the speed of implementation of feature-requests is non-deterministic. We just have to wait and see.
    – Lance Roberts
    Commented Mar 25, 2010 at 17:01
  • @Lance, you should create a few queries on SEDE that demonstrate these lists.
    – waffles
    Commented Jun 16, 2010 at 22:00
  • @waffles, I found a request out there to add interesting and ignored tags to the data-dump, please go up-vote, thanks. meta.stackexchange.com/questions/15229/…
    – Lance Roberts
    Commented Jun 21, 2010 at 19:38
  • @Lance Roberts Thank you. I had to delete and re-associate, as I had associated the accounts before gaining much rep on SO, but that did it.
    – George Marian
    Commented Jul 17, 2010 at 8:19
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    This is possible with a custom search - see answer to meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64651/…
    – sfinnie
    Commented Sep 17, 2010 at 11:38
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    Why is it declined?
    – MadTux
    Commented May 7, 2013 at 5:59
  • 1
    @MadTux and anyone who also wonder, here is Jeff reasoning for declining, deleted one year after posting it.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jan 13, 2014 at 22:24
  • I can't believe that such a basic feature is missing for many years. Custom search is not a solution, it's a workaround. Nobody wants to update the URL every time that he/she adds a new tag, it's redundant.
    – Deniz
    Commented Mar 5, 2019 at 9:51
  • 2
    It's probably worth mentioning that custom filters are now available, and it's quite easy to created a custom filter fo the favorite tags.
    – Martin
    Commented Sep 8, 2019 at 9:22

9 Answers 9

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+100

I like this idea. We can already choose, through preferences, to hide questions based on our ignore list and questions relating to our interesting tags are highlighted, so why not have the ability to only view the interesting tags as a whole?

However, I'm not sure that this should be a separate tab, could a search modifier or a link in the "Interesting Tags" section that is for all interesting tags work better? I don't know. That said, a tab would be intuitive given our existing interface.

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  • 3
    I've voted this up but I don't like the idea of a separate tab much. I would quite like the text "Interesting Tags" to call a URL that filters on the tags.
    – Steve Weet
    Commented Mar 19, 2010 at 10:50
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    Between those three suggestions, I like the tab the best – this is something I would like to be optimized for frequent and easy access when browsing.
    – Owen S.
    Commented May 28, 2010 at 3:59
  • I like the idea of having the "Interesting Tags" text link to such a view, as opposed to another tab. There are already enough tabs in the interface and this is natural location for such functionality. In fact, when I first started using stackoverflow, I clicked on that text expecting this exact functionality. (Personally, I would also like to see this for the "Ignore Tags" text, to see what one is missing by ignoring tags. Not that I have any ignored tags, as yet.)
    – George Marian
    Commented Jul 17, 2010 at 8:23
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    The search thing was implemented - see hims056's answer
    – Shog9
    Commented Nov 28, 2013 at 6:47
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    It's also now possible to do this by using the "Filters" feature on the Questions page, allowing you to filter to just questions with your watched tags (formerly known as "favorite tags" or "interesting tags").
    – V2Blast Staff
    Commented Jul 28, 2022 at 22:08
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+100

You can build a bookmarlet using 'or'. Here is an example which shows the questions tagged 'C' along with the questions tagged 'C++':

 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/'c'%20or%20'c++'

I'm using such custom links heavily, located in my SO bookmarks folder. I think there's no limit to the number of tags you can have. Here's the longest link I'm using:

 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/'c'%20or%20'c++'%20or%20'directx'%20or%20'visual-c++'%20or%20'java'%20or%20'struts2'%20or%20'hibernate'
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  • 1
    Great idea, I'm going to try it out.
    – Lance Roberts
    Commented Aug 17, 2010 at 15:57
  • That worked great, you're my new best friend.
    – Lance Roberts
    Commented Aug 17, 2010 at 16:00
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    +1 great answer, cool! They should add a feature in teh profile where you can set up to be this bookmark your home opening page on stackoverflow (oviously after you logged in).
    – Marco Demaio
    Commented Aug 23, 2010 at 10:50
  • Is there any way to enter this search in the search box? I can only get this to work, when editing the URL directly.
    – Daniel Hilgarth
    Commented Mar 15, 2011 at 8:03
  • This doesn't really work (or at least it doesn't anymore). Only a limited portion of the most recent questions seems to be shown.
    – ekhumoro
    Commented Mar 28, 2014 at 1:57
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    I think there's no limit to the number of tags you can have There actually is, there seems to be a limit on the URL length somewhere near 2478 characters where you start getting 400 Bad Request errors. I'm going to have to cut down my 200 favourites on Movies & TV.
    – MrLore
    Commented Jul 28, 2014 at 19:13
35

I'd love to be able to sort those unanswered questions by my tags and recent.

Here is why:

145,161 questions with no upvoted answers in your tags

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28

There is a default tag filter on https://stackexchange.com/ but you must be logged in:

  1. Click on Filtered Questions

  2. Click on "Favourite tags

Then look for the default "Favorite Tags" filter.

enter image description here

You can browse it in your browser, or have it emailed to you, or get the RSS feed at the bottom of the page (also present in the headers, too, if your browser auto-detects).

favorite tags RSS feed

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  • 4
    You have to leave the SE site you're on to do this? +1 for the tip, but man, that's counterintuitive. Also, if you have any favourite tags on stackoverflow and other SE sites the volume of SO questions will obliterate any and all others on smaller sites. Would be great if you could do this within an SE site, linked to from the Favourite Tags heading
    – user56reinstatemonica8
    Commented Apr 19, 2017 at 16:17
18

Not exact what you want but this will help you to search for questions tagged with your favorite tags.

You can use intags:mine is:q in the search field which will list all questions tagged with your favorite tags. You can also sort it with active, votes, newest and relevance.

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14

A while ago I went through all of the top tags and added everyone that didn't interest me to my ignore list.

I now have ~160 ignored tags.

This feels so wrong and hackish I wish there was a better solution.

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1
  • Been there, well not quite 160 tags, but I pruned the list quite a bit because I realised that lots of interesting-for-me questions do happen to have tags that mostly don't interest me.
    – Charles Stewart
    Commented Aug 26, 2010 at 12:54
9

As I can see, now it can be done by going to stackexchange main page (do not worry, you will see stackoverflow's questions at the end), on the right (Tag sets), click on "Interesting Tags" (or any other category you would like to), and you will get a list of those questions!

You will be able to sort the question with interesting tags by activity, newest and no answers. Best of all: you can get an rss feed at the bottom of the page of the given order of questions. Plus you can subscribe to get e-mail notifications about the news in the given tags at the "Email Updates" form with desired time interval (15 mins, 3 hours or daily).

I hope this helped.

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2
  • I don't see what you're seeing, but maybe you have to be logged in. I'm unable to log in to the main Stack Exchange site because of some stupid OpenID bug. However the main page on SO, now that it's been change takes into account my Interesting Tags so I hang my hat there now.
    – Lance Roberts
    Commented Jan 12, 2011 at 0:08
  • Yes, I am logged in.
    – daroczig
    Commented Jan 12, 2011 at 0:21
2

This has kind-of been implemented with the Candidate Release.

But for now, there's no GUI option to set it up.

Steps:

enter image description here

It's not exactly as expected, but it is, in effect, what the original question was asking for: a quick way to view questions with favourite tags from the homepage.

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3
  • Finally got to this. It seems like they've changed again with the rc. But I haven't been active lately. Where do I get to the "all tags" dropdown.
    – Lance Roberts
    Commented Oct 30, 2015 at 20:02
  • @LanceRoberts lol I was just looking into this when you upvoted - because I noticed they removed it again. But the feature is still there! Go to stackoverflow.com/unanswered?tab=mytags, and save the tab that it opens as something like 'favourite tags' :)
    – ᔕᖺᘎᕊ
    Commented Oct 30, 2015 at 20:04
  • @LanceRoberts see my edit :)
    – ᔕᖺᘎᕊ
    Commented Oct 30, 2015 at 20:08
-4

That can and will create a narrow focus based on tags. And basing focus on tags is something that I don't think is smart.

If you want to see all questions for your tag, fine you can do that.

But even though I have a nice little tag setup for myself. I still find questions not in my tags that I can answer. Which I would have never found if this was implemented. Which is bad for everyone, since you all know my answers are awesome! :P

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  • 1
    I find questions like that all the time also, not only to answer but to learn from, so I probably wouldn't do it all the time. Plus my niche is small and waiting for new tags can take some time.
    – Lance Roberts
    Commented Sep 22, 2009 at 6:08
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    i'd actually say it would broaden the focus - at the moment you can have everything (introducing a lot of noise) or easily get a list within one or two tags... but I have about 20 tags, and would like an easy access to the questions in any of those 20.
    – HorusKol
    Commented Jan 18, 2010 at 22:38
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    For someone who is specialized (I'm pretty much only comfortable answering questions about Cocoa), the rest of SO is basically noise. I would love to be able to hide that.
    – Colin Barrett
    Commented Feb 20, 2010 at 5:41
  • As long as there is a preference to hide anything that's in the ignore list, there's a reason for this feature to exist.
    – Jeff Yates
    Commented Mar 2, 2010 at 14:25
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    Yes, it will create a narrower focus, which is exactly what I want. Please trust me to use it judiciously; I'll still browse without filtering for interesting tags since I know they're not an exhaustive list of my interests.
    – Owen S.
    Commented May 28, 2010 at 3:55
  • We already could have a too narrow focus on tags by browsing tags only. This request would just help by giving us an additional view to find older unanswered questions we might be able to answer.
    – Georg Fritzsche
    Commented Sep 14, 2010 at 22:56

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