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I'm really, really not interested in , , or many other of the myriad topics that come through the question feed. I have specified my "favorite" tags (primarily iOS related); Why must I be shown all these other questions on topics that I find irrelevant? It is simply noise.

I saw that there is at least one question here on Meta from several years ago. It has many upvotes (over one hundred, I think). I saw that there was one answer stating that it had to do with server caching, but clearly that is incorrect, since I am able to filter from view the "ignored" tags so long as I specify each and every tag that I do not want to view. I have a hundred or more of these "ignored" tags. Must I continue with this busy work of clicking tags to ignore in order to reduce the noise?

Why is this? It is clearly not a technical issue; the entire feed can be downloaded as it is now, but filtered by my favorite tags, not by my ignored tags. Is it some "philosophy", like I should eat my beets and at least see questions pertaining to Visual Studio 2008 because it "broadens the mind"? Topic diversity? I'm kidding, but I just can't fathom why a basic UI feature such as filtering is not front and center. I understand that there are custom client-based scripts or apps of some sort, but isn't that a strange approach? Why do I need to defend against a user unfriendly UI?

I know this post might be received negatively, and that's fine. But I have just had multiple pages with almost half off-favorite-topic questions, and I am tired of jumping through the little hoop of clicking twice on that "favorite" star to ignore them.

I think this eat-your-beets "feature", if that is what it is, needs to be justified. Please point me to the explanation. And if this feature request is denied, can I at least get some rep points for each tag I ignore...a badge for most ignored tags...something.

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    In case you do not know, you can use wildcards in your ignored tags to cut down on them some (like [visual-studio*]). Just an FYI.
    – Josh Darnell
    Commented Jul 7, 2012 at 5:22
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    You could also just search within the tags that you want. For example, here's iphone or ios. Or am I missing something?
    – Mysticial
    Commented Jul 7, 2012 at 5:33
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    Actually, this looks like the same question: Tab for questions that are labeled with favorite tags. Correct? This answer appears to have a solution.
    – Josh Darnell
    Commented Jul 7, 2012 at 5:36
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    Personally, I like eating my beets -- i.e., I like seeing questions that don't have any of my favorite tags. This isn't to suggest that anyone else should have to eat their beets, just that it should be optional. Hmm, I wonder what happens if you add * to your ignored tags.... I just tried it, and it doesn't do anything, but maybe it could hide all non-favorite tags.
    – Keith Thompson
    Commented Jul 7, 2012 at 6:16
  • Thanks for the comments. Beets are great (though they stain my teeth). I would just like to have the choice as to when I eat them. I don't understand the comment about * wildcards, and I guess I could do the search within tags as suggested but I ask: why the need for these jiggery-pokery workarounds, when in fact I can filter but only so long as I do the busy work of specifying hundreds of "ignored" tags. It actually does seem punitive.
    – spring
    Commented Jul 7, 2012 at 6:36
  • @jadarnel27: I don't see a "Favorite Tags" filter on stackoverflow.com - that is the page I use to view questions. I think it is the main page of the SO site, yes?
    – spring
    Commented Jul 7, 2012 at 6:41
  • The answer I linked to clearly says stackexchange.com (which is the parent site for all the sites in the network, including Stack Overflow), not stackoverflow.com. Look in the screenshots for clarification on how to do it.
    – Josh Darnell
    Commented Jul 7, 2012 at 16:14
  • You missed my point. I don't use SE - I use SO. So your suggestion is not helpful or in any way a solution for the UI problem I described.
    – spring
    Commented Jul 7, 2012 at 16:23
  • Fair enough, I was just mentioning that as a possible solution. I know it's not exactly what you want, but it accomplishes the same thing (show all your newest, favorite questions via one filter). It's just not where you expect it to be.
    – Josh Darnell
    Commented Jul 7, 2012 at 16:28
  • @KeithThompson Sorry for the confusion about the * thing, I didn't explain that clearly at all. If you type "facebook*" into your ignored tags, it will ignore all tags that start with "facebook" (facebook, facebook-graph-api, facebook-fql, etc). It's just a workaround to hide groups of similarly named tags. See here.
    – Josh Darnell
    Commented Jul 7, 2012 at 16:35
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    @jadarnel27: I was suggesting that the behavior of wildcards could be modified so that ignoring * would ignore everything except your favorite tags. Or, to put it an other way, * applies to everything, and favorites override ignored tags.
    – Keith Thompson
    Commented Jul 7, 2012 at 18:28
  • @KeithThompson Oh, I see what you're getting at now. That would indeed be nice. For some reason, the answer from Jeff to this question is saying there's a technical limitation with that (must be at least 4 characters for wildcards to work).
    – Josh Darnell
    Commented Jul 8, 2012 at 1:08

1 Answer 1

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You showed me your list of ignore tags on my post: Filtering unanswered questions on Stack Overflow, it's time to show you mine :)

enter image description here

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    mine is bigger than yours ;-) \n I do hope someone addresses this 'feature'
    – spring
    Commented Jul 14, 2012 at 11:12

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