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Stack Overflow is huge and varied. Wouldn't it be great if I could just subscribe to a newsletter with a list of my favorite tags? If I love dealing with , I think it would make sense for my version of the newsletter to focus more on Android questions.

Or, if I sign up for the Apple SE site newsletter, but don't own a Mac, it would be nice if I my newsletter would focus on the part of the site I do follow (i.e., iOS).

So I would like to suggest that the newsletters for each site (optionally) take into account the user's favorited and ignored tags for that site.

I know that you can receive emails about specific filters, but I don't think that's a good solution for users who already receive the newsletter. Most of the questions it highlights cover topics that I have no interest in. It would be much better if I could filter out all the noise and get down to my likely favorites.

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  • This is a similar question: meta.stackexchange.com/q/102606/160382
    – takrl
    Apr 2, 2012 at 14:04
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    I would love the newsletter to take into account my favorite and ignored tags. Currently I don't often find much to click on in the newsletters. FWIW Quora seems to do a fairly good job at tailoring their newsletters and I'm much more inclined to click on links in their newsletters.
    – Andy Ford
    Oct 9, 2012 at 19:26
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    FYI - I created a question explicitly about ignore tags: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/169705/…
    – Alex B
    Mar 1, 2013 at 17:52

3 Answers 3

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+1 I agree with this conceptually, but this will probably require a lot of fine-tuning, and it'll end up being a black magic solution which selects roughly X% content since you have X% recent activity in .

In other words, the newsletter should be able to provide you not just blanket favourite tag activity, but favourite actually-recently-used-by-you tag activity.. since there may be dozens of favourited tags and you may not like a giant wall of text where you have to scroll down to the section every time to see what you actually want.

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    Why can't we just use the actual favorite tags that you've set up on the site? Or, failing that, ignore all of the ignored tags? Why does it have to be a complex algorithm? Or, why can't we use the same algorithm for highlighting "favorite" questions based on inferred tags in orange, described here? I don't think this problem is technically difficult.
    – Cody Gray - on strike
    Feb 24, 2012 at 5:07
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    Because there's an extra metric at work here. It's part of the duplicate question you worked into this one: the users want interesting questions, not just all favourite tag questions. So you need to combine the metric of interestingness with how much the user actually cares about that tag.
    – user172164
    Feb 24, 2012 at 5:11
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    For example, I have objective-c favourited as well as ios etc, but I'm an iOS-only developer. If I was to subscribe to a newsletter with my favourite tags, I'd get a lot of OSX questions which I have no interest or expertise in, but I use objective-c in case an iOS question is only tagged as objective-c (an orange highlight is much less invasive than an email). I'm fine with getting one or two in the email, but not fine with placing both tags on equal ground in terms of favourites. So I think there's going to need to be shades of gray here, hence the X% I mention.
    – user172164
    Feb 24, 2012 at 5:13
  • I agree, I think there's a good idea hiding in there somewhere, but it will require some fine tuning.
    – Benjol
    Feb 24, 2012 at 6:52
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    darvids0n's point about not wanting all favorite tags to be covered equally makes sense, but I'd much rather have that than have every tag covered equally. As it is the newsletter rarely has something in it that pertains to me in any way.
    – jasongregori
    May 8, 2012 at 18:13
  • It mainly depends on how the newsletter works today : is there any algorithm that selects the questions, or is it 100% manual. Indeed, if there is an algorithm, it should not be too hard to make it generate different newletters according to tags. If it is manual, maybe several newletter could be created, for us not to read only about C and Java questions.
    – Augustin Riedinger
    Mar 13, 2013 at 9:45
  • @darvids0n I think it is more users want question related to their favorite tags rather than interesting question.. and even then - get the interesting questions only on favorite tags minus the ignored tags. I think SO will be able to use the newsletter better if more people use them, and I think that as it is today, no one wants to see question on subjects they don't care about
    – Nick Ginanto
    Apr 23, 2013 at 18:45
  • I'm sure many people would be happy if we do nothing this complex. I know I would.
    – Bernhard Barker
    Jun 19, 2014 at 8:41
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I guess it mainly depends on how the newsletter works today : is there any algorithm that selects the questions, or is it 100% manual.

Indeed, if there is an algorithm, it should not be too hard to make it generate different newletters according to tags.

If it is manual, maybe several newletter could be created, for us not to read only about C and Java questions, as it is the case now.

Eg.

  1. Software programming Newsletter (C, C++, Java etc.)
  2. Web Client Newsletter (HTML, CSS, and other web technologies)
  3. Web Server Newsletter (PHP, Django, RoR, Node.js etc.)
  4. Mobile Newsletter (iOS, Android)
  5. Algorithmic and Computationnal Newsletter

And everyone picks whichever he is interested into.

In fact, I am always amazed with the data mining potential there is in Stackoverflow.

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Hello Stack Exchange community!

After analysis of community opinions about the current Stack Exchange newsletter, we started to develop its personalized alternative called StackLetter.

StackLetter is a result of our university research project. It aims to provide you with an interesting newsletter which solves the drawbacks identified also in this meta question! If you want to read more about our project or register for your personalized newsletter, please, visit https://www.stackletter.com/.

Project is registered as a Stack Exchange application: StackLetter - A personalized newsletter for the Stack Exchange Network.

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