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Since I can only answer a very few of the questions on SO, in niche topics, I filter most of the questions with 'ignored' tags set to invisible. As my list of ignored tags has grown, I've noticed the number of questions I can see on the questions page has been dropping.

It seems that the calculation for the number of questions to show per page is done before the ignored tags rule comes into effect and removes them. I'm now at the stage where I see less than 15 questions/page, even though I've selected the maximum available (50).

Is it feasible to provide either of the following?

  1. Add another button increasing the number of questions per page to, say 100 (so in my case, providing roughly 35 per page to look at). This is obviously avoiding the issue, since someone else will inevitably have even more ignored tags, but sounds relatively straightforward to implement, unless there are performance issues.
  2. Do the questions/page calculation after the ignored tags rule has removed them from view. This sounds like a lot more work but would permanently fix the problem.
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  • 3
    Found the duplicate, meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1251/…
    – Ian Elliott
    Commented Aug 7, 2009 at 18:58
  • you should be browsing by tag if this [an extreme affinity for certain tags] is the case, making this request kind of irrelevant. You know you can combine tags in the URL with AND (implicit) and OR (explicit), right?
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Aug 23, 2009 at 2:27
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    @Jeff Atwood: Yes, I do know about this. The problem is, I have 49 ignored tags. Everything else is by definition 'interesting' (or too infrequent to be worth ignoring)...
    – ire_and_curses
    Commented Aug 23, 2009 at 6:11
  • Someone had some similar concern. I was just thinking about asking this same question, but the search came to the rescue and I found this question. I would like to see a 100 option also.
    – Troggy
    Commented Sep 30, 2009 at 20:21
  • I wonder if this is still relevant when considering the fact that the question listing on SO homepage has recently been improved to push questions matching the interesting tags as much as possible to the top. I'd say, just get rid of all (at least, most) of those ignored tags. Currently, I have none more and it's perfect.
    – user138231
    Commented Dec 25, 2010 at 1:12
  • I need a button to show my own 100 questions per page too.
    – Display Name
    Commented Jul 7, 2011 at 12:57

6 Answers 6

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I would rather they change the pagination to not include ignored questions.

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  • This is a good idea, but one that we'd have to do a lot of performance testing around, as it would mean adding a join to full-text search results.
    – Jarrod Dixon
    Commented Aug 8, 2009 at 0:37
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I find this incredibly ironic. Here is a website dedicated to programmers, and the UI w.r.t. paging with filtered tags is really poor (sorry if I'm hurting any feelings here - overall the website is fantastic, but this one little annoyance is in your face every single time you're on the site).

When a large number of tags are filtered out, it results in a really long page with only a few questions at the top. The user experience is thus:

  1. Click "Questions"
  2. Watch the page flicker as it's first displaying, then hiding out many of the questions it retrieved.
  3. Peruse far fewer questions on this page than your preferences would suggest.
  4. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the long blank page just to get to the next page of questions, click next, rinse, lather repeat.

Furthermore, I understand the issue with server-side filtering of results. I think the overall site performance would likely take a major hit if questions had to be filtered for each specific users' tags server-side.

I'd like to offer some suggestions that I think would make a huge improvement of the user experience for this.

  1. How about only showing the results once filtering has been applied. No more flicker.
  2. However some of the results are hidden/shown, there shouldn't be space reserved for them. The page navigation should appear right after the questions to make it easy to go to the next page. (Solving 1 might solve this too)
  3. If there are less questions shown than desired, the page could just make an ajax call to the server to retrieve another set of results from the server. Add them to the bottom of the current page once they've been filtered out. Keep retrieving pages until enough questions are shown to meet the users expectations. I doubt having a few questions more than expected shown per page is as much of an issue as having far fewer.
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The simple solution to your problem is clicking next on the pagination near the footer. If you choose to focus on niche topics then be understanding that there might not be that many results and you may be forced to click ... 1 button ... to see more. If you had to click through 3 or 4 I may feel sympathetic, but more results are just a single click away.

Also tags are filtered on the client side for specific reasons. Mainly that it doesn't require intensive queries to generated the listings, and because of this the result can be cached. This wouldn't be possible if tags were actively filtered, which makes the cost unjustifiable.

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In the meantime, if you use Firefox, you can use RePaginator. Works on many sites, including (IIRC) SO.

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If you find you're browsing tags in niche topics, I recommend setting up a Tag Set and subscribing to it via email or RSS

https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/subscribe-to-tags-via-emai/

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This would be great for featured questions, so we can scroll through them checking for ones marked interesting, without having to stop and go to the next page so often.

See my question here.

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