Filtering the Question Display Page

Question

Is there a way to filter the Question List displayed; for example, I know absolutely nothing about ArcGIS and there are usually a bunch of questions related to ArcGIS that there is no point in me even seeing..

It would be nice to be able to say, Don't show me anything that is related to ArcGIS.

I am not sure if filtering by tags would work as there are a lot of tags to consider.

It sure would be nice to be able to identify tags with a Product, Service, etc, like grouping them and then choosing which groups one did, or did not want to see.

Answer 1

Do a search on anything. The search results page will have an "advanced" option in the upper right: link to it for more help. There is syntax to focus on questions, on answers, on answers exceeding a certain score, on particular tags, and so on.

When you need a more flexible search--involving exclusions of terms, compensation for misspellings, and so on--use Google's "site:gis.stackexchange.com" option. For instance, this silly example searches for all pages on our site without "ArcGIS".

You can cause threads tagged with arcgis to be grayed out or even hidden when presented to you: look under "ignored tags" in the "preferences" tab of your main user profile. I advise against hiding them, however, because a lot of questions of general interest get tagged with popular tags like arcgis or qgis: you would overlook too much.

Answer 2

Although I am aware of and occasionally use more sophisticated searches as described by @whuber in his first two techniques, I normally prefer to work with just his third technique of using Favorites and Ignored tags.

What I am looking for is quite a different set of questions to you, but by favoriting all of the arcgis-* tags and ignoring the arcobjects* tags, I find the more "non-developer" ArcGIS platform questions jump out as highlighted in yellow, the ignored "ArcObjects developer" ones are half-highlighted in dim yellow (unfortunately there are none in graphic below) while the rest flow through uncoloured. However, even within the uncoloured category, the non-ArcGIS but developer questions, which I am least likely to be able to help out with, are both uncoloured and dimmed.

This applies in both the Questions and Unanswered views I use the most.

I recommend experimenting with Favorites and Ignored tags because for a long time I only used Favorites and was ignoring the value of Ignored tag dimming.