Bookmarks have evolved into Saves

Question

Update Oct 6

Maintenance is complete: all bookmarks have been migrated to Saves across all network sites, including Stack Overflow. All saves, saved lists, private notes, and bookmarks are now available in Saves.

Update #2 Oct 5

Site is stable again.

Saves is enabled again for all users network wide. Your saves, saved lists, private notes, and migrated bookmarks should be available to you now. Bookmarks that were made during the outage period will be unavailable until we finish migrating tonight.

All bookmarks should migrate tonight. Until then, sites are either fully migrated or not migrated. The only exception is Stack Overflow which is still partially migrated with 360k of 14mil bookmarks migrated.

We have a maintenance window planned starting at 00:00 UTC. If all goes as expected, it should be done by 02:00 UTC.

Update Oct 5

Saves has been temporarily disabled network-wide due to some site performance problems. These problems didn't appear until partway through migrating existing bookmarks into saves. We've temporarily reverted to Bookmarks.

• All saves, private notes, saved lists, and migrated bookmarks are unavailable. They are still saved in the database and will be available again when we turn Saves back on.
• All unmigrated bookmarks are currently available while Saves is disabled and Bookmarks is turned on. When we turn Saves on again, we'll resume the migration.

The migration was partially applied and will resume once we've fixed the performance issues and turned Saves back on.

• Some network sites were completely migrated, and your bookmarks were successfully turned into saves in the "For later" list. These migrated saves are unavailable until Saves is turned back on.
• Some network sites were not yet migrated at all, and your bookmarks are untouched. These bookmarks are available as they were before the Saves launch.
• Stack Overflow was the only site partially migrated
  • Around 360k bookmarks were turned into saves
  • Around 14mil bookmarks are still bookmarks

We will post updates on this Meta post as well as on Stack Status.

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Update Oct 4

Saves is now officially live on Stack Overflow and across Stack Exchange sites! The migration process will take some time to process as there are millions of bookmarked questions to migrate over. If you’re not seeing any questions you previously bookmarked, that means they haven’t been processed yet.

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TL;DR: We're always working to make knowledge more accessible and easier to reuse, so we're excited to announce that we're making some feature updates to facilitate that. Later this quarter, Bookmarks are being renamed to Saves, as well as getting a suite of upgrades to make the feature more useful and robust.

To better understand how the community reuses knowledge, we've conducted a study on bookmarking habits, asked in the general survey how users interact with saved content, and looked through Meta posts to better understand how the Bookmarks feature is used and what needs we can serve better.

In the survey, 62% of respondents reported saving content for future use. One of the surprising uses we learned about was users creating an ad-hoc to-do list with their bookmarks. We also made use of Meta to look through community requests, including requests for better organization, being able to save answers, and even community-supported projects to add notes to your saved content. We felt we had enough feedback to seriously upgrade this experience and build out those desired paths with native support.

An overview of the new features you'll see with Saves:

• The ability to save answers
• The ability to create and manage custom lists to better organize saved content
• The ability to create private notes on saved posts
• The in:saves search operator (which only shows your own saved posts)

Here we get to show off the new dedicated tab on your profile page, which serves to increase visibility of the new knowledge reuse tools. On the left, you'll see the new "For later" section, which is where saved content defaults to. This was inspired by those users who used bookmarking as a way to create a to-do list for later site activities – but the sorting fun doesn't end there.

Not only can you create multiple saved lists, but now you can also leave specific private notes for each saved question or answer. Use this as you see fit – collect thoughts, remind yourself why you saved a post in the first place, or draft responses. These notes are private to you, as are all of your lists and saves.

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FAQs

What will happen to my existing bookmarks?

We will be migrating over your existing bookmarks into the default “For later” Saves list. Once we enable the Saves feature, the migration process will take some time to process as there are millions of bookmarked questions to migrate over. If you’re not seeing any questions you previously bookmarked, that means they haven’t been processed yet.

What sites will the Saves feature be available on?

The Saves feature will be available network-wide on Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange sites. However, Stack Overflow for Teams is not included in the initial rollout.

Can I save a post to multiple lists?

Currently, we are only allowing a post to be saved to a single list.

Will my saved posts and lists be public?

Nope! When we launch, all of the saved posts, custom lists, and private notes you create will be private moving forward. The existing Bookmarks tab on your network profile page will also be rebranded to Saves and made private.

Are you adding any new badges?

Absolutely! With the ability to save answers now, we will be adding two new badges for you to earn: Favorite Answer (Silver Badge) and Stellar Answer (Gold Badge), awarded when answers are saved by 25 and 100 users, respectively. The badge list will be updated to reflect these new additions.

What happens to the existing badges I’ve earned with the previous bookmarks feature?

We will be carrying over the existing badge progress associated with the Favorite Question and Stellar Question badges.

Can moderators see my saved posts and private notes?

Moderators will not be able to see or interact with your saved posts and private notes.

What happens if a post I saved has been deleted?

We will be preserving the existing behavior: If you have the access to moderator tools privilege, you will be able to see deleted posts in your saved lists. If you haven't earned this privilege yet, you will only be able to view deleted posts that you have authored.

What changes will be made to search?

We are removing the ability for users to search other users’ saved posts. The current search operators inbookmarks:mine and inbookmarks:<userid> will no longer yield any results. Users can now search their own saved posts using the in:saves search operator. The Help Center page on searching will be updated to reflect this change.

What happens to my saved posts if I have multiple accounts that need to be merged together?

If you have saved posts in both accounts, your saved lists and posts will be merged together when the accounts are merged.

What changes will be made to the user profile and network profile pages?

On your user profile page, the Bookmarks section under Activity > Summary will be hidden now that we have a prominent menu item and Saves will be private. Additionally, the Bookmarks tab on the network profile pages will also be hidden as we re-evaluate how this will work with answers being supported now. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and will provide future updates on this.

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We're really excited to address so many requests as part of this upcoming upgrade. Let us know what you think of the new features!

Answer 1

feature-request

Bountied answers look cluttered because of the Saves button.

Can you please increase the spacing between Saves button and bounty awarded label?

Answer 2

bugstatus-declined

It is possible to save a post to two "Saves lists" in at least one way, as described below.

In your question, you state:

Can I save a post to multiple lists?

Currently, we are only allowing a post to be saved to a single list.

However, the following demonstrates otherwise:

1. select "Triage" from the REVIEW QUEUES drop down menu on the top bar on (Stack Overflow)
2. click "History"
3. click on an action in the Action column (Looks OK, Flag, etc.) of a post which has not already be added to any Saves list
4. click on the "Saves" icon (which turns orange for me on SO)
5. return to your profile page and click on the "Saves" tab button
6. click on "All saves" and "Added" and the post will be listed twice in the "For later" list
7. to move to a different list, click on the three dots menu for one of the duplicated posts and click on "Move to"
8. select a different list (say, "Triage") and click "Done"

9. the post will appear to be listed in the "Triage" list twice

10. However, click on the "All saves" button and the page will refresh and now the post will be in two lists.

I have not exhaustively investigated this further, but it appears that "Unsaving" a duplicated post removes both entries from both lists.

This bug may or may not be connected to another bug reported here — please note that the first four steps are identical.

This was tested on the first four review queues of Stack Overflow.

Only the Triage Review Queue demonstrated this behavior.

Answer 3

bugstatus-review

The "Move to" dropdown includes the list where the post currently resides

This happens when browsing saved posts under "All saves":

...and even when browsing posts in that particular list:

Answer 4

bugstatus-completed

Moving a post to a new list does not remove it from the current list until the page is refreshed

When browsing posts saved to a certain list and then clicking "Move to" to move it to another existing list, the post element gets immediately removed from the DOM. This is the expected behavior.

However, if the post is moved to a new list (i.e., "Move to" > "Create new list"), the post gets moved in the backend but remains displayed in the current list until the page is refreshed.

Answer 5

Will we be able to see our deleted list? I can see that deletion can be undone if I am quick enough, but if I change my mind about the deletion later, can I still undelete it?

Unrelated but, editing deleted list results in error 500. It's not a very good UX and I hope you will adjust it.

Answer 6

support status-completed

The quarter has ended (July to September) and I cannot see Saves in my profile yet.

So, when are bookmarks evolving into Saves?

Answer 7

bug

I created a save list called exception as shown in the screenshot:

But if I try saving a post to it directly from the question the exception list isn't available:

Answer 8

support

When I use in:saves does it search only in the saved post - or in the other associated questions and answers.

For example:

• If I saved an answer, and I combine in:saves with a tag - which is on the corresponding question, will the answer be among the results? (Well, this one was easy to test and the answer is Yes. Moreover, this is behavior consistent with the way search works with answer in general - the tags on questions are taken into account. So I'd say that this is the expected behavior.)
• If I saved an answer and I use a in:saves together with a keyword which is contained in the question (but not in the answer), will the answer be among the results?
• If I saved a question and I use a keyword which is in one of the answer - will the question be among the results?

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I am asking this as support rather than feature-request. I basically just want to find how it actually works - and I am not really sure which of the possibilities would be better.

I am pretty sure that I could find out this by myself by trying a few experiments - but some other users might wonder about the same thing, so it might be good to have some kind of "official" answer.

If this would be better as a separate question, let me know - I can delete this and repost.

Answer 9

support

When we un-Save a post, this is shown:

Question removed from saves.

or

Answer removed from saves.

Should it be "saves" or "Saves" (with a capital 's')?

Answer 10

feature-request

After selection of a list in the Move to dialogue, the focus should be changed to the Done button. Otherwise, for every save, an extra click or Tab is required which makes the process additionally tedious if you're organizing a large number of saves.

Answer 11

bugstatus-bydesign

Why is Saves pop up shown to users who are not logged in?

Screenshot from Incognito mode:

Answer 12

feature-request

Allow filters by tag(s)

I would say this is a good-to-have feature.

Once the number of saved posts (questions/answers) exceeds a certain number, we would have to go through each page and search by tag on the page. If we had an option to filter by tag(s), it would enable easy filtering.

Answer 13

How do I see all my "saves" across SE without going to each site one-by-one? I don't know if I saved this-and-that post in English or Writing, or if I saved in on SU or SO. That was the main appeal of bookmarks. They were aggregated in a common place.

As far as I can tell, you did not make bookmarks "more useful and robust." You castrated them and are pretending it was an upgrade.

If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Answer 14

support

I just noticed the saved mark is blue on MSE. Shouldn't it also be yellow?

Answer 15

I noticed some redundancy in the "Saves" 'new list creation' command, there's two buttons on the same page that open the create 'New list' popup:

1. Perhaps it would be better if the blue "+" on the left was replaced with a number, showing the total number of lists.

   Another alternative would be to show your top ten lists, possibly with MRU under that, there's plenty of whitespace on the left to accommodate this.

2. The "New list" popup doesn't look like it searches and displays your existing lists, so you can either avoid similar naming or copy and modify existing names to avoid some typing.

The "Feedback" offered in this answer is no so much a feature-request, it's to comment that the "Saves" webpage isn't at all fully baked (as has already been acknowledged), and that unlike raw cookie dough, raw cake isn't very good - your inviting a bunch of bug reports or feature requests that a better baker could avoid.

I thought we'd moved towards more thorough testing, hopefully this will be the case now.

Answer 16

In terms of why the feature was renamed from Bookmarks to Saves — It was done in part because "save" is a bit more explicit than "bookmark" in terms of what the feature does. Bookmark is a great term for ebooks and browsers. When it comes to content consumption we wanted to make a clear distinction from what you would see with a browser's bookmark feature. "Bookmark a question" has a double meaning; do we mean bookmark the tab or the question itself?

I think that Shadow sums it up really nicely in his comment that at first glance, "saves" may seem too vague, but that these updates are actually something much bigger than some minor tweaks to bookmarks.