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I'm a big fan of the favorites feature. I usually mark questions with good answers of code snippets for later use.

Most of the time I can't find the favorite I'm looking for so quickly as desired. I know I marked the question in Stack Overflow, but it takes time to find it again, because of the following reasons:

  • lot of favorites
  • lot of answers for a question (last time I was looking for an answer in the question Hidden Features of C#)
  • the question title is not always what I'm looking for

To make favorites more useful I suggest the following features to be added:

  • Allow to mark an answer as favorite
  • Allow to tag questions with own tags (those tags are personal and can not be seen by others)
  • Search function over favorites
  • Allow to add a personal note to a question
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16
  • 12
    You can always just bookmark the answer - it has it's own "link" link.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Jan 22, 2011 at 11:49
  • 19
    @ChrisF that's true, but i would be more handy to have it right inside StackOverflow rather than managing bookmarks in the browser. a lot of favorites i mark at home and use it at work. and as my company blocks almost everything i can't even use bookmarking tools like del.ico.us and co.
    – gsharp
    Jan 22, 2011 at 11:56
  • I was going to add that, perhaps I should have.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Jan 22, 2011 at 11:56
  • 12
    Search function over favorites — see infavorites:mine at meta.stackoverflow.com/search
    – Arjan
    Jan 22, 2011 at 11:57
  • 1
    Allow to add personal note to a question — see Diigo at Any tool to help reviewing a website (snapshots, annotations, feedback)?
    – Arjan
    Jan 22, 2011 at 12:02
  • 2
    even a filter box for favorite titles would be a great advancement
    – user148312
    Mar 15, 2011 at 15:16
  • Related: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/83292/…, meta.stackexchange.com/questions/83286/…
    – Lance Roberts
    Aug 3, 2011 at 15:08
  • @gsharp, see my answer for a workaround to the problem... it will lag your favorites for up to a month, but it is better than nothing.
    – Mike Pennington
    Dec 13, 2011 at 12:28
  • @gsharp In addition to everything that everyone mentioned here, (which is awesome btw and should be implemented ASAP) I would also love to see the ability of adding my favorites into custom defined lists. For example, I can add two of my favorite STL questions to a custom list which I would name "Questions regarding STL". My suggestion is very similar to the 'Circles' feature in Google+ and 'Custom friend list' feature on Facebook.
    – user215771
    Mar 17, 2013 at 3:46
  • @ChosenTorture unfortunately my post is over 2 years old and nothing has do be done so far. I guess it's not in the priority list of the SE team.
    – gsharp
    Mar 20, 2013 at 15:49
  • I think that personal tags or notes would be the solution to another request as well. See meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2322/…
    – toxalot
    Mar 18, 2014 at 8:44
  • 1
    @ChrisF You can always just bookmark the answer. Yes, but favorites get highlighted when there is new activity, and regular bookmarks don't.
    – toxalot
    Mar 18, 2014 at 9:15
  • Sorry to necro this, @ChrisF, but I would really love to have more ways of organizing my currently 1263 favorite/bookmarked questions in Math.SE. At least by tags, so I can find them when looking for material for my courses :-)
    – Jyrki - SupportingStrikers
    Sep 3, 2020 at 18:52
  • 2
    Does this answer your question? Bookmarks have evolved into Saves
    – Sabito stands with Ukraine
    Oct 8, 2022 at 2:26
  • 3
    Does this answer your question? All (or some) of my bookmarks or saved posts seem to have disappeared! What happened? - Using Sonic's canonical.
    – Rob
    Oct 8, 2022 at 4:12

7 Answers 7

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29

Allow me to throw my hat in the ring with a mockup of this feature that I too would very much like to see implemented.

Consider using different colored stars1 for various user-defined categories ("tags").

Favoriting:

favoriting mockup

Viewing Favorites:

viewing favorites mockup

The biggest issue I see with this is the major overhaul it would require. To get around that, I would suggest a "default" category where all favorites land in implementations not yet supported (mobile, apps, API, etc.)

1 Rainbow stars make me think of unicorns, so this can't be a bad idea, can it?

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4
  • I don't see same capability in unix.stackexchange.com, did you write an extenstion for firefox? how i use above capability?
    – PersianGulf
    Sep 16, 2014 at 1:42
  • 2
    @MohsenPahlevanzadeh I sure wish! This is just a photoshop mockup though. Some day, one can hope, they'll implement something like this
    – mhlester
    Sep 16, 2014 at 2:24
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    +1 - I've used this idea and default options in my userscript - hope you don't mind :)
    – ᔕᖺᘎᕊ
    Mar 13, 2015 at 20:50
  • This feature is exactly what I would like: meta.stackexchange.com/q/324372/336030
    – CarLaTeX
    Feb 23, 2019 at 12:26
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+125

I frequently use favorites for multiple purposes as well, and everything gets jumbled together.

I really like the personal tags idea.

  1. The tags would aid in searching through you favorites.
  2. It allows personal notes about a question
  3. It would allow users like myself to categorize favorites into things like 'Check back for edit/reply to my comment', 'Look at implementing in the future', etc.
  4. It could be a work around for tagging an answer as a favorite.

I recommend implementing at least this addition.

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17

Having a full-text (both question and answer) search box at the top of your favorites page is quite useful... the search should be local to your own favorites. Perhaps this would be easier to implement than a local-tags feature, which (I predict) would require modification to the db schema. If devs don't want to modify the favorites page, perhaps we could denote a full-text search of our own favorites by typing favorites: in the SO search bar.

I don't know why infavorites: was deleted from the new search capabilities introduced in January, but this functionality leaves a big gap when you have hundreds or thousands of favorites and you only want to find answers relevant to

FWIW, I am hacking around the problem right now with:

EDIT NOTE

infavorites:mine works again, but it only searches the title of the favorite.

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1
  • 1
    This is great to be able to search through existing tags, title, and content. However, it covers only one of the requests. And it would be great if there was some kind of shortcut to this feature from the favorites tab.
    – toxalot
    Mar 18, 2014 at 8:58
7

The favorite feature is useful and a token of any good Q&A site and you definitely point out some good improvements for it. I really like the concept of a personal note, because often times I will favorite a question when working on a specific project, because I know I'll want to reference it later. The personal note would allow me to write down exactly what I thought its significance was at the time.

I think the feature of having favorite answers would be the most significant change though. Most of my favorites are in fact favorite answers, and quite frankly I could care less about some of the questions. I think that the favorite answers and questions could be listed separately, but the user might be able to place questions in categories together with answers, much like you were suggesting with the personal tags.

I think these suggestions would really benefit that So community. Just my thoughts.

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6

I really like the favorites feature too. But it's hard to manage when they are large.

Personal notes is a good idea, especially if it allows personal notes about a question.

Because for me

  • track this question and its new answer
  • store code
  • just like

I suggest the feature can use more tags (signs) substitute for star.

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6

I've made a userscript to do some of the suggestions you mention, which are:

  • add personal notes to favourites
  • add tags (or 'categories') to favourites

Here's a gif:

enter image description here

Get it at StackApps.

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4

[edit] I finally found out about the "infavorites:" tag in "search". The following could be a UI improvement, but the functionnality already exists. [/edit]

My 2 cents :

I totally back the "add user based data (tags, private notes) to favorite questions".

Here are two other suggestions, which IMHO would note require as much back-end development :

  • add a tag filter : gather the list of tags represented in the favorite questions, present them as clickable buttons on the right hand side, much like "favorite tags" filter for questions ;
  • add a keyword filter : have an input on top of list, typing words in it will look for this word either in tags, or question's title.

Provided there is a way to get all the favorite questions info (title + tags) in one query, this could be implemented writing client side code only.

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