What should happen with a question that has both ignored and interesting tags

Question

As I keep collecting tags to highlight interesting questions and questions I want to ignore more questions now appear where tags from both lists are present. It seems like currently the ignore tag has precedence. I wonder what people think if those tags could have weight/importance to them. Would that be too complicated?

Answer 1

I prefer 'ignore' having precedence over 'interesting'. I'd like to see every 'java' question, but I don't need to see the 'fun, offtopic, not-programming-related, java' questions.

Answer 2

I would like the ability, for at least certain interesting tags, for the "interesting" tags to take precedence over the "uninteresting" tags. For instance, I don't want to see java questions in general. However, I don't want to miss a wcf+c# question simply because the java tag was applied as well. This may be the case with a problem in consuming a Java web service with a WCF client, or vice versa.

Answer 3

Bill the Lizard said (in this page):

I prefer 'ignore' having precedence over 'interesting'. I'd like to see every 'java' question, but I don't need to see the 'fun, offtopic, not-programming-related, java' questions.

This is the opposite of my preference. I ignore python questions, but mark perl as interesting. When a question comes up that is tagged with both (e.g. someone asking for a solution in either language), I would prefer to see this question, rather than hiding it.

Perhaps this could be resolved by having another checkbox in the user preferences below the first: "...even if they also match one of my interesting tags."

Answer 4

On money.se, for example, we use tags to regionalise questions. I'm from the UK, and don't feel able to answer questions that are US or Canada -specific. I therefore choose to ignore [united-states] and [canada] tags, but this meant I couldn't see any question tagged with both [united-kingdom] and [canada], for example, about international transfers which I would be interested in seeing. I added [united-kingdom] to my preferred tags list, but because "ignore" takes precedance, I'm unable to see these questions still.

Perhaps the precedance could be set on a per-site basis, if no conclusion can be reached to satisfy all sites?

Answer 5

As this issue is applicable to the area51 beta sites also, it seems this question may need to be resurrected. Based on all of the answers here, we all agree that we have a preference. So, on the preferences tab, there should be a preference to drop down.

• Make Questions with both one of my Interested and one of my Uninterested Tags follow my [interested / uninterested] display option

Per an argument I listed on the cooking meta, say you LOVE real-time strategy games for PCs and have experience with a few dozen, but HATE Starcraft. A question comes up saying, "I love Starcraft, and really want to play more RTS Games, blah blah?"{[RTS][Starcraft][PC-games]}

Is it a success that your filtering of tags makes you unlikely to answer that question, when your expertise would have been ideal?

Answer 6

I think things may be improved by making a distinction between "entities" (php, java, mysql) and "concepts" (bestpractice, design, ui).

For the record, the system filters my results pretty well, but it would be interesting to see whether splitting the tags into groups as suggested above, and giving concepts priority (as they are typically entity independant), would provide even better results.

Answer 7

If you don't hide your Ignore tags the current system isn't perfect, but I think it strikes the balance between greying out and highlighting fairly well.

Looking at it positively, while the question is greyed out because it has at least one of my Ignore tags it's background is changed to show that it has at least one of my Interesting tags, and I might be able to answer the question after all.

Answer 8

I was about to ask this question, because I noticed a C# and Java question greyed out.

Here's an idea that hasn't been considered: have a "scale of importance" and apply the highlighting/greying based on the "score" of interesting/ignored tags in the question. The score on a question would be calculated as: (# interesting tags) - (# ignored tags), which would give a range of -5 to +5.

So in the case of a question having 1 interesting tag and 1 ignored tag, the score would be 0, and the colour of the question would be left as default. This makes sense because while it involves something we like, we're not sure about what the context will be, so don't let the system decide what to do with it automatically. If a question had 5 interesting tags, then we would really want to have a look at it, so highlight it to the max. The opposite goes for 5 ignored tags, where we probably aren't interested at all.

The situation where this would work the best is with questions that have 2 or 3 interesting tags and 1 ignored tag. There's a better chance of us being able to answer that one, so it would be a shame if it got ignored out of the list (based on the current algorithm).

Answer 9

I suggest Allow assigning a score to tags to determine “interestingness”

Answer 10

This Greasemonkey script prevents questions with Ignored tags from loosing opacity if the question also has a Favorite tag.

(function() {
    function GM_wait() {
        if (typeof unsafeWindow.jQuery == 'undefined') { 
            window.setTimeout(GM_wait,100); 
        } else { 
            $ = unsafeWindow.jQuery; letsJQuery(); 
        }
    }
    GM_wait();
    function letsJQuery() {
        $(function() {
            $("div.tagged-interesting").each(function() {
                $(this).css("opacity", "1.0");
            });
        });
    }
})();