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  1.  
    If I go to the Questions tab I have an option to see 15, 30, or 50 questions. I've set up filters so that I'm not shown any questions from outside of a fairly specific set of tags. What I'd like is to be able to see the most recently active 50 questions (or more) from that set of tags. What I see instead seems to be the subset given by my tags of the 50 recently active questions in total. Right now that's 16 questions. Yesterday it was 18. So it seems the software first picks the 50 top questions and then trims the list by removing those questions on my list of "ignored tags." It seems the number of questions I see is declining, which I suppose means MathOverflow is getting more popular in fields which I don't follow. The problem is that I don't check that often, and if other fields are very active then I don't get to see the new(ish) questions from my field without having to click through several pages of questions.

    I'm wondering if there is a setting I can change to fix this, or if it's one of the few pieces of the software which we have control over. I imagine it wouldn't be hard to have an option to show 100 or 200 questions, and then maybe I'd be getting 50 or more of the questions I like to show up at once. The other solution I can think of (which might be hard to implement from scratch, but which maybe there is a setting for) is to have the software first trim the list of questions down to those on my good list of tags and then display the top 50 of those. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks!
    • CommentAuthorWillieWong
    • CommentTimeNov 28th 2012 edited
     

    Best that I can remember, the "feature" to completely hide from view the list of "ignored tags" is accomplished with some sort of Javascript/CSS magic after the database was queried. It is a sort of a hack that our moderators put in on top of the standard-issue software from MO. To do what you want we will need to modify the database logic, which we cannot at the moment.

    That said, what you should do is bookmark a link using the MO search function. For example, if I just want to see questions tagged [ap.analysis-of-pdes] and [fa.functional-analysis], I can enter the url

    http://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/ap.analysis-of-pdes or fa.functional-analysis
    

    (note that the two tags are separated by the word or surrounded by spaces; you can equivalently use the HTML escaped %20or%20 instead.) The above url brings up this link which shows for me the thirty active questions having at least one of those two tags.

    And if you want to instead search of [ap] and not [mp.mathematical-physics], use the minus sign operator like this:

    http://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/ap.analysis-of-pdes -mp.mathematical-physics
    

    (put a space between the tags, and the minus sign - in front of the undesired tags). So you will just have to craft (once and for all, I hope) your own custom search string.

    Note unfortunately that a search string cannot consist of just ignored tags. You will have to specify also tags you want to see. See this discussion on Meta.SO.

  2.  
    Hi Willie,

    Thanks for your reply. I'll try that.

    Best,
    David