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I have some questions saved in multiple sites ("Ask Ubuntu", "Unix & Linux", "Super User", etc.), in the "Saves" section. I've also created some Saves Lists, which are common for those sites (for instance, "Linux").

Is it possible to have Saves from multiple sites in one place? It is very inconvenient to search for a saved question, especially if you do not remember which site you saved it on.

I've found this obsolete question about Favorites, but it wasn't helpful for me. Also I've found no Saves / Favorites, following the advice in this post.

In my Stack Exchange profile I see some common features, but no common Saves. Maybe, it's accessible in some other way? And if not, will this feature be realized in future?

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    Nope, that's not possible and sadly it won't be possible in the future. The official announcement of Saves does include this: "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." which means this simply won't be done. (I've seen enough such cases over the years.) Commented Jan 25, 2023 at 15:05
  • @ShadowWizardChasingStars Thanks for the answer. It's really sad, 'cause generally Saves is amazing future. Commented Jan 25, 2023 at 15:17
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    True, but over time the network profile itself is dying and being thrown into the void, bit by bit. Removing this useful bit is just another nail in its coffin. Commented Jan 25, 2023 at 15:18
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    @ShadowWizardChasingStars which means this simply won't be done - I think that's a bit harsh. We talk about implementing a lot of things, but unfortunately there are only so many engineers and so many meta requests it's really an impossible task to reach any kind of success rate that will make meta folk happy.
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Commented Jan 25, 2023 at 21:17
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    @AaronBertrand Can we at least hope for common Saves? It would make them very easy to use... Commented Jan 25, 2023 at 22:51
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    @Boolean_Type I don't make those calls (or necessarily even have any insight into them), like any software company you can imagine we have to balance things that have various priorities for different reasons, like features that drive sales of our commercial offerings, features for here, bug fixes and stability efforts that keep this free web site running (and the additional free things we offer like SEDE and data dumps), security things like keeping servers patched (and automating that so it's not a full-time job), efforts on communications so we're transparent with you all here, etc. etc.
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Commented Jan 25, 2023 at 23:22
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    Basically, none of our engineers have the luxury of sitting around waiting for the next cool idea to come around to meta, and none of them have the ability to just free-wheel it and go retrofit things in a bubble (like putting saves at the network level). That doesn't mean it won't happen, it's just the reality that we can't possibly implement every single change just because someone thinks it's an amazing feature. Not every engineer can work on every area of the product, and we all have various projects and spinning plates on the go at any time.
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Commented Jan 25, 2023 at 23:24
  • @AaronBertrand I perfectly understand what you mean. I was just asking in case you had it in the nearest plans, and we just didn't know. But no means no. Commented Jan 26, 2023 at 0:35
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    Yeah, and I'm not trying to be abrasive, it's just there's a lot of work being done, all the time, and unfortunately not all of it is visible. And the general sentiment on meta is "but I just want this one thing, why can't someone just drop what they're doing and do it?" When 400 people are all asking for their one thing, well, that's why. :-)
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Commented Jan 26, 2023 at 0:41
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    @AaronBertrand 10+ years of watching endless bugs and requests sitting and just getting dust affects people, but yeah, it's harsh. There are dozens of actual bugs reported already for Saves (and new inbox), not a single one was handled, developers saying they can't spend time on it as they're busy with more important projects for Teams, without even knowing ETA. So.... very hard not to get pessimistic in such conditions. Commented Jan 26, 2023 at 7:04
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    @ShadowWizardChasingStars I don't think it's quite as bad as you make it out to be, especially if you go take a sample of the unsolved ones and see how many are "bugs" about shading or pluralization on hover...
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Commented Jan 26, 2023 at 14:05
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    @AaronBertrand sadly the data is misleading. No bug was fixed for long months. All those marked as completed are bugs that over the years got "fixed" due to other changes in the system. I consider bug fix to be a developer fixing the bug, and such thing did not happen for months. You can skim through the list of completed bugs sorted by activity and see for yourself. Worth to mention, I don't expect SE developers to throw everything and fix the thousands of bugs reported by users. But having a developer pick a bug once a week and fix it? I truly think it's a sane expectation. Commented Jan 26, 2023 at 14:09
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    @ShadowWizardChasingStars Remember too that we're talking about bugs on a free web site. Microsoft charges millions of dollars for SQL Server, do you think random developers are picking bugs off the stack and fixing one a week?
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Commented Jan 26, 2023 at 14:24
  • related: I can't search for my Saves in stackexchange.com
    – starball
    Commented Apr 26 at 22:03

2 Answers 2

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Right now, no, you cannot. They aren't exposed at the network level and aggregating them there is probably harder than you might expect.

In addition to the factors mentioned in the comment thread about how bugs and feature requests might be considered and prioritized among all the other work we do to keep this site running, one potential factor is, hopefully unsurprisingly, "how many users will this impact?"

Let's take a quick look. Saves aren't exposed to SEDE, so you're going to have to trust and not verify that the data that follows is accurate.

How many users on Stack Overflow have, say, at least 1 saved post? The tail is long so I stopped at >= 5:

1 save 2 saves 3 saves 4 saves 5+ saves
25,811 3,205 958 474 1,117

We're already at a very small number even at a single save, and this includes bookmarks that were converted to saves (so the user may not even be aware). 32K out of 4.04 million users who have been active since August 1st - that's about 0.78% of the active user base that are even using the feature at all, on the busiest site on our network.

Why do I care about how many saves they have in Stack Overflow? Because it's a guidepost for how many they may need to manage across the entire network (and hence how useful a global list might be, if there were some easy and efficient way to present one). I was expecting the first column to be higher, and only segregated because a larger number would be really hard to cross-reference across 350+ other network sites, and would take two weeks to collect. Which should give a hint about why this would be hard to implement if the feature were popular.

Now, let's see how many of those users have at least one save on at least one other site in the network:

enter image description here

Well, 0.21% is not a lot. This is by no means a suggestion that the team has considered this evidence, or would decide based on this evidence, or whether or not this is even on anyone's radar (never mind backlog). But it's damning if you consider that most software companies should prioritize time and effort on features that are used by, well, more than half a percent of its user base.

Again, this isn't an official response. I ran off and captured these metrics independently and have only shared them here, merely to suggest that feature usage should probably be taken into account when deciding where to spend valuable and scarce engineering resources. Also I spent about two hours collecting these metrics and crafting this answer, to which many people on meta would say, "Aaron could have skipped answering the question and just implemented the feature!" Unfortunately software is like a lot of industries, where you can't just swap warm bodies out and expect them to be capable of the same tasks, with similar quality, in a similar timeframe, and without disastrous results - when a pilot is needed for a flight, and they're sick, you can't just take an air traffic controller or gate agent, shove them in the cockpit, and wish them luck.

More breakdown for the stat-hungry (I found the last column interesting because it shows that the people who like saves really like saves a lot.)

Breakdown of saves network-wide

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  • Thanks for the detailed answer, although your thought was clear to me even in the comment thread, without detailed statistics. As for Saves, I'm sure the number of users who use them will grow over time, so I'm not losing hope for this functionality to appear. Commented Jan 26, 2023 at 22:55
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    @Boolean_Type Yep, just wanted to put some concrete numbers behind it, to avoid being called hand-wavy. :-)
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Commented Jan 26, 2023 at 22:56
  • I wonder how we can (unobtrusively) increase those usage numbers 😁
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented Jan 27, 2023 at 0:01
  • @AaronBertrand the numbers may not be hand-wavy but they do seem to be a bit arbitrary, if you take for example as definition of active user people that have posted at least once per week on average since August then I think the percentages would be different. Maybe that is a bad definition but calling a user "active" if they signed up on August 1, posted one question and never returned is also a bit of a stretch. Moreover, with the current numbers you could claim that more than 25% of Saves users have saves on multiple sites, which could justify building extra functionality.
    – Marijn
    Commented Jan 29, 2023 at 17:26
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    @Marijn You may think it is easy to derive such stats or that I have all the time in the world to formulate those queries and wait around for them to run against 350+ databases, but sure, even if I didn't have other work to do, we could slice and dice usage data in any way we want to suit our respective arguments. I don't quite agree that 25% is a number you could use to justify building extra functionality, though, because you have already forgotten that the 25% you quote is 25% of 0.78% of the user base.
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Commented Jan 29, 2023 at 21:18
  • @AaronBertrand by that argument (only 0.78% of the user base) you should discontinue Saves altogether because it is not used enough. I do see your general point that SE needs to prioritize which features are worked on and that usage numbers play a role in this, and I (genuinely) appreciate that you took the time to explain this and work out the statistics, however for me the statistics do not really strenghten your argument much because of the particular definitions, assumptions and conditions used that are imo not ideal.
    – Marijn
    Commented Jan 29, 2023 at 21:48
  • But maybe this would be a good opportunity to reinstate the Data Science Time posts that used to be written by Julia Silge (like meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/386178/…) and ask the Community Team to take on this analysis :)
    – Marijn
    Commented Jan 29, 2023 at 21:56
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    @Marijn Just to clarify, I picked 6 months not to deem those people as "active" in that sense (like they post every week), but rather to eliminate folks from the overall number who hadn't done anything on the site since before saves were introduced (which was ~September). I don't know that further reducing that number to the people who post weekly will lead to a massive difference in the stat, even if it were easy to calculate. As for the feature itself being unpopular (and not the feature request asked for here), well, most features don't gain 99% popularity overnight, especially here.
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Commented Jan 29, 2023 at 21:58
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    @Marijn And in fact you could argue the other way, too. Let's say 95% of active users, by your definition, if we already knew who those users were, have created saves (and even across multiple sites). How many use them regularly? How many of them use the ones outside of SO regularly? Like you critiqued my definition of "active," merely having a save doesn't suggest anything about its usefulness or usage frequency. Anyway let me reiterate that I am not officially representing any of this as objection to the request, just an example of the kind of information that could be used, ideal or not.
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Commented Jan 29, 2023 at 22:26
  • @AaronBertrand I won't speak for everyone, but I use Saves quite often, because that's what I add them for. If I just liked the question, I upvote it, and that's it, but Saves for me are like bookmarks in a desktop reference book. But I will not object: someone may save simply because they can. Commented Feb 16, 2023 at 23:18
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    @Dominique this feature is not implemented (yet) because of lack of popularity -> no, that's not what I said, and I went out of my way multiple times to make it clear that I was only offering the possibility that this is the kind of information that might be used in making a decision. Or, at least, that would be part of the consideration were I a PM. But I'm not.
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Commented Sep 12, 2023 at 11:41
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    There's a little bit of chicken-and-egg here. I might save questions on multiple sites if it were easier to find them. But as it is, I mainly use saves on the site that I spend 90% of my time on (SO).
    – Barmar
    Commented Oct 3, 2023 at 20:27
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At the time of this writing? Nope. Not yet.

There will be if/once https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/382720/997587 () is fixed (by using the in:saves operator in the http://stackexchange.com/ search bar).

You'll also probably care about this answer post: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/384115/997587 (for showing which list something is saved in in the in:saves search results).

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  • Thank you for the answer! So, nothing to do with this yet... Commented May 14, 2023 at 17:24

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