Watched Tags
To watch a tag, do one of the following:
- In the popover that appears when you hover over the tag, click on the "Watch tag" button.
- On the main page's right sidebar, in the Watched Tags section, click on "Watch a tag" (if you have no watched tags yet), or click on "Edit" next to the section heading (if you have at least one watched tag already).
- Go to the Settings tab of your user profile, then click on the Tag watching & ignoring link.
Note that you can use wildcards in the latter two.
This has the following effects:
- Questions with these tags become highlighted on the front page.
- Questions with new activity are shown on stackexchange.com/filters.
- In the review queues, questions from these tags are shown to you before other questions.
- The search operator
intags:mine
limits search to questions with those tags and answers to such questions. If your "Watched Tags" list is empty, the search operator does nothing.
- On Stack Overflow, this affects how questions are displayed on the home page (Recent questions) and the various questions pages.
(Watched tags were formerly known as interesting tags and favorite tags. They may also be known as followed tags.)
Ignored Tags
To ignore a tag, do one of the following:
- In the popover that appears when you hover over the tag, click on the "Ignore tag" button.
- On the main page's sidebar, in the Ignored Tags section, click on Add an ignored tag (if you have no ignored tags yet), or click on Edit next to the section heading (if you have at least one ignored tag already).
- Go to the Settings tab of your user profile, then click on the Tag watching & ignoring link.
Note that you can use wildcards in the latter two.
This has the following effects:
- By default, questions with these tags are shown faded/grayed-out; they are still visible, but less prominent. It is possible to hide them completely; for more details, see: How do I hide posts matching my ignored tags?
- On Stack Overflow, this affects how questions are displayed on the home page (Recent questions) and the various questions pages.
Subscribing to a tag
You can no longer choose to receive emails about new activity within a tag. However, you can subscribe via RSS by hovering over the tag, then clicking the orange RSS feed icon in the top-right of the popover that appears.
See also