The Ability to Hide Questions

Question

I was wondering how hard it would be to enable a 'hiding' option that let me hide certain questions that I don't want to see. That way if it was a very active question that I have no interest in, I could simply click hide and not see it anymore.

The only foreseeable reason why this couldn't be implemented completely with a Greasemonkey script is that it would be nice to get replacement posts. As of right now, even the hide tag feature simply hides the questions after they were loaded. If I hid a lot of tags, I would end up getting very few questions on the home page.

This is, of course, due to caching.

Answer 1

I have written a simple GreaseMonkey script which will do this for you. Just replace the ids with the ids you wish to hide, and it will remove these questions from the questions page. This is my first GM script, so if you find bugs in it, please let me know. I will try to make it a bit more user friendly, but this does work (on my comp anyway).

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Hide questions
// @namespace      http://stackoverflow.com/
// @include        http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions
// ==/UserScript==
//

//************************************
//* Replace the numbers in brackets  *
//* with the ids of the questions    *
//* That you wish to hide            *
//************************************
var hiddenQs = new Array( 7609, 7598 );

var questionDivs = "//div[@class='question-summary']";    
//define a search function for arrays
Array.prototype.findIndex = function(value){
var ctr = "";
for (var i=0; i < this.length; i++) {
if (this[i] == value) {
return i;
}
}
return -1;
};

function getQuestions () {
    return document.evaluate( questionDivs, document, null, XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null);
}

var questions = getQuestions( );
var curQuestion, qID;


for (var i=0; i < questions.snapshotLength; i++) {
    curQuestion = questions.snapshotItem( i );
    qID = curQuestion.id.split('-')[2];
    if (hiddenQs.findIndex( qID ) != -1) {
        curQuestion.parentNode.removeChild( curQuestion );
    }
}

Answer 2

It just hit me when I first noticed that I was constantly browsing through the same question over and over on the main page. My mind had dismissed them, but the UI did not let me.

Of course I can browse further elsewhere, but I feel I should be able to hide questions with a button right on the main page if I'm not interested (anymore), and possibly end up with a higher percentage of interesting questions on my main page.

Also, I wish there was a search for "open, unread, not hidden, not ignored tags questions", to show me those slightly older questions I haven't tackled yet. I mean there are 23000 questions, and I constantly see the same 25-30 over and over because people are commenting and answering on these.

Answer 3

I'd love to have this feature!

Let me highlight that this feature is close related to the "star" feature. They can even be used for data mining to decide how to initiate new stackoverflow branches by topics favoured and hidden by clusters of people.

My alternative formulation (closed as a duplicate) was:

---

I like the "star" function because it enables me to revisit questions I hope to read new answers for.

I would like to have a complementary functionality, maybe "black glasses" (as for blinding): I would like to mark some unanswered questions as ones I do not want to revisit. I regularly read through unanswered questions to see if I can answer any. There are questions that I can't answer and also I'm not interested in the answer, but staying unanswered for longer periods of time.

I would find it helpful if in listings it would be immediately visible which questions I marked with black glasses so as to save the time of re-reading and re-realising that they are questions I don't want to see any more.

Answer 4

I just thought of posting the same idea. I have started working through the list of question on StackOverflow with no answers, and some of them I would never be able to answer, however keeping track of which you've seen and which you haven't is becoming tricky, especially across multiple machines.

Something similiar has been implemented for the moderator dashboard, where items we have already read are dimmed, although for the question list, completely hiding it will definitly make life easier when going through the unanswered list.

This could be linked to the current option for hiding ignored tags.

Answer 5

Yet another greasemonkey script with an UI to select questions to hide manually. Selected questions are stored locally :(

Answer 6

This would be a nice to have. And would also require a way to un-hide a question. Good suggestion though.