tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (Request: ignoring specific questions?)

Harry Gindi comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1957)

2010-01-18T11:08:37-08:00

Is there any way to change the color for interesting tags? That yellow looks really bad with the rest of the color scheme. Maybe you could change the text color instead of the background color? Say, make interesting questions have blue text rather than a yellow background?

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1955)

2010-01-18T10:43:54-08:00

Okay, questions with both ignored and interested tags should now be displayed even if you've set the preference to hide questions with ignored tags, but they'll still appear slightly opaque.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1954)

2010-01-18T10:32:22-08:00

@CSiegel: It will be grayed out and highlighted. I think if you're set the user pref to hide ignored tags, then it won't appear, but I should be able to change that in css.

CSiegel comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1953)

2010-01-18T10:17:49-08:00

@Anton: What happens with that if one of your favorite tags is also on a question that is in an ignored tag? Say, if I ignored [co.combinatorics] but favorite [ag.algebraic-geometry], then someone asks a Schubert calculus question (which is tagged both) I want to be able to see it.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1949)

2010-01-18T09:40:51-08:00

Harry's deleted suggestion was to retag the question with something like [anton-ignored] and add that tag to my ignored list. I agree with everybody that it would be unacceptable to actually do that, so let's not do it. The [tag-removed] tag is primarily a handy way for a moderator to remove an unwanted tag (e.g. [newbie]) from the system by merging the undesirable tag into [tag-removed], but you can also use it when you want to remove an inappropriate tag from a question, but there aren't any other tags that fit.

I've voted up Qiaochu's request. Another idea that I was discussing with somebody (Scott?) a while ago is a user preference to ignore any question that you've voted down. I feel like private tags would be feature creep.

@fedja: I'm not sure if this is what you want, but you can check the "hide ignored tags" box in your user preferences page to make it so that questions with ignored tags don't appear at all (rather than just being grayed out).

Harry Gindi comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1944)

2010-01-18T08:53:56-08:00

Whence came the suggestion of private or at least local tagging.

Andrew Stacey comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1943)

2010-01-18T08:47:13-08:00

I think I now have enough information to recreate Harry's deleted suggestion ...

Hmm, interesting idea. It sort of has the ring of the "Journal of Stuff I Like" (some post on "God Plays Dice" a year or so ago). I could decide that if Greg Kuperberg thinks a question isn't worth looking at then I'm not going to look at it either, ditto a few others that use the site. I can see some potential for that idea.

Except that, of course, it wouldn't work because the system isn't designed to be used that way and there are too many changes that would need to be made to ensure the system wasn't abused.

fedja comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1941)

2010-01-18T07:10:49-08:00

How about an option to collapse the ignored tags completely?

Harry Gindi comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1936)

2010-01-18T05:53:29-08:00

The mitigating factor here was that the question had -2 votes and was as Gr\'etar said, "admittedly bad".

Pete L. Clark comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1935)

2010-01-18T05:39:43-08:00

I agree with Gretar that Harry's behavior is distressingly close to what we agreed was a completely inappropriate course of action. The combinatorics tag was reasonable (adding a probability tag would be very reasonable; changing the tag from combinatorics to probability would be defensible).

It's not for me to police the site or make policy decisions. We need to hear from the moderators whether this sort of behavior is considered appropriate.

Harry Gindi comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1934)

2010-01-18T04:58:14-08:00

No, I retagged it because it's going to be closed and the tag was wrong in the first place. If anything, it was probability, not combinatorics, and now it's tag-removed. No harm, no foul. The worst I did was switch out an incorrect tag for a now correct tag. I mean, I removed the tag, so it's tag-removed, right?

Grétar Amazeen comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1933)

2010-01-18T04:26:44-08:00

Well I disagree with Pete that Harry should have deleted the post, I think that is a bit much. I however think you Harry have come quite close to doing what you suggested, and I'm not sure what to think about it. In this example you retagged it as "tag-removed" and in the comments you say

I retagged this because I have tag-removed blocked, and this question's going to be closed soon anyway.

I think you may have somewhat crossed a line there since you're retagging (an admittedly bad) question, just to serve your own purpose.

Harry Gindi comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1876)

2010-01-16T11:27:42-08:00

Alright, I deleted it, but anyway, a request we might add on meta.SE is the ability to add private tags.

For those of you who missed it: I didn't do anything wrong, but I came up with an exploit that would allow a person to block certain questions, but this exploit seemed too dangerous, so I deleted any mention of it.

Pete L. Clark comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1872)

2010-01-16T10:40:10-08:00

@Harry: this is a completely inappropriate suggestion. If by any chance a dozen people followed it, it could cripple the whole site. I think it would be best for you to delete your post entirely.

Grétar Amazeen comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1870)

2010-01-16T09:32:44-08:00

I agree with Marino, that's way to dirty.

Mariano comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1869)

2010-01-16T06:52:24-08:00

Harry, that is certainly not a viable option

Scott Morrison comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1850)

2010-01-15T13:21:50-08:00

@Sonia,

No one is updating the sticky post because no one has got around to it. Feel free to add links to mathoverflow specific feature requests you've seen elsewhere.
If you post a feature request on meta.SE (not meta.SO -- that's the Stackoverflow equivalent of this site), and post it in our sticky thread, I'll happily vote it up even if I don't particularly agree with the need for the request! (That applies to all mathoverflow residents, of course.)

Andrew Stacey comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1820)

2010-01-14T12:14:39-08:00

Just as on MO, you can build up reputation by asking sensible questions that others then vote for. "Sensible questions" can be bug reports or feature requests, amongst other things. Also, if you don't have enough rep to leave a comment then you can always leave an answer (just say "Since I don't have enough rep to comment, ...") and if it's something worth saying, someone'll probably vote for it. Do that a couple of times and you'll have enough rep to vote for feature requests and the like, which is probably all most of us want to do on meta.SE.

Harry Gindi comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1819)

2010-01-14T10:59:08-08:00

meta.SO and meta.SE are different. I don't know if that helps you though.

Sonia Balagopalan comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1817)

2010-01-14T09:20:21-08:00

Orthogonal:
1. Why is no one updating the sticky post on feature requests?
2. How do I build up enough rep to vote on meta.SO, as I have nothing to contribute to the questions there?

Qiaochu Yuan comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1810)

2010-01-14T05:51:01-08:00

I've posted the question on meta.SE: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3710/is-there-a-way-to-ignore-specific-questions

Andrew Stacey comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1807)

2010-01-14T00:31:40-08:00

This sort of thing sounds like it needs to be in the code (Anton will know better but I guess he's a bit busy with the AMS/MAA meeting at the moment) so you should see if someone's requested this feature over on meta.SE. If so, vote for it. If not, request it yourself.

Harry Gindi comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1805)

2010-01-13T23:10:01-08:00

Fourthed

Pete L. Clark comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1796)

2010-01-13T15:11:00-08:00

Thirded.

Noah Snyder comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1781)

2010-01-13T10:38:10-08:00

I agree, this would be great.

Qiaochu Yuan comments on "Request: ignoring specific questions?" (1770)

2010-01-13T06:50:15-08:00

There are certain questions I know I'm never going to read, but it's not necessarily because of the way they're tagged. What would be wonderful is a way to ignore questions on a question-to-question basis, similar to the "Archive" button in Gmail. Ideally this would take the form of a button on the left or right of every question, and there would be a separate tab where it would be possible to browse all questions, including ignored ones.