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I'd like to be able to specify an interesting or ignored tag via a wildcard. May tags which cover similar topics have common roots. For example

windows
windows7
windows-vista
windows-xp
windows-errors
windows-xp-sp3

would all match the wildcard windows*. Someone who finds one of these tags "interesting" would probably find all of them to be "interesting" (or vice versa, if they want to ignore all the windows related stuff, they would need to ignore all of these tags).

I realize that technically everything tagged windows-xp should also be tagged windows, but that's not the case. (https://superuser.com/questions/tagged/windows-xp)

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  • 3
    +1 because I was just wondering if I could do ''duplicate'' on my ignore list...awesome!!!
    – IAbstract
    Feb 6 '10 at 19:48
11

You can already do this.

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  • I feel like a tool for not knowing this! Just optimized my interesting tags.
    – scunliffe
    Jul 20 '09 at 14:03
  • Note the issues that malach links to in his answer though.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Jul 20 '09 at 14:14
  • omg I was just going to ask for the same feature!
    – forget it
    May 12 '10 at 14:59
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We now replace the client wildcard (*) with the server wildcard (~) on tags.

However, be careful, because the server has rules that the client does not. Most notably, any wildcard searches MUST be a minimum of 4 characters in length (not including the wildcard chars themselves), or they are ignored.

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  • 8
    No love for php*?
    – Randell
    Sep 18 '09 at 17:25
  • 1
    s/love/hate/ Or ios*?
    – donfede
    Nov 6 '12 at 4:20
  • Is the limitation of a minimum of 4 characters in length still there? I think I can favorite php*.
    – Himanshu Jansari
    Feb 24 '14 at 12:26
  • @hims056 it is unclear whether the 4 characters is (still) correct. There used to be a message that said so, but the behavior said (and says) otherwise.
    – NH.
    Mar 12 '18 at 19:45
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There have been quite a few questions concerning this. You can use * as a wildcard as seen here in the blog. It has its limitations, as it only marks or hides the questions in the list and does not allow you to click on the tag and get a combined list of all tags matching thee wildcard, as discussed here and here and here.

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  • The closest is to replace '*' with '~', but that is still an experimental feature.
    – Brad Gilbert
    Jul 20 '09 at 16:00
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As ChrisF says, you can already do this: "Interesting and Ignored Tags Now Support Wildcards"

Simply specify one or more asterisks to match any number of characters, either in the middle, the beginning, or the end of a tag. So all these should work as you might expect:

*.net*
jquery*
*c++
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