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I discussed this in The Comms Room but will throw it here for discussion.

My proposal is something similar to what eBay does with their "allow bids only if rep higher than X and not international", etc.

I'm not a programmer in the least or I'd attempt to figure this out myself or at least speak the lingo that would help.

Due to the issues with the influx lately of horrible questions pouring over from SO or from new users and the issues found here: Why the major FAQ/help change?

What I'd like:

  • A way to filter the SF site to only see questions from users with a rep higher than x
  • A way to filter out questions with tags that are of no interest or I have no expertise in
  • A way to filter out questions if the user asking is unregistered
  • A way to filter out questions if the user has a rep less than 200 on SF but higher than 200 on SO
  • A way to combine, mix/match filters, and/or, etc.

Yeah, so there you go...maybe it's already been done but all I see is this: https://stackapps.com/questions/1325/can-i-filter-users-by-reputation-or-up-vote-count-using-the-api and that doesn't quite help me.

Good idea? Horrible idea? Shut up Cleaner?

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  • I don't think this can easily be done in a user script; it would hit the API very hard and as a result run very slowly. Then it would get rate limited and fail...
    – Michael Hampton Mod
    Commented Aug 3, 2013 at 15:58
  • 3
    Having some way of filtering the river of shit like this might make SF somewhere I would like to continue to contribute.
    – user9517
    Commented Aug 3, 2013 at 20:53

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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I'm pretty sure this has come up on meta.SO and not gotten anywhere... I think the official position is that other than tag filtering, everyone sees every question.

e.g. Filter questions by user reputation

and Independent filtering & sorting on questions

Ah, here's a Q that seems official (with Status Declined on it) Can we filter questions by reputation

2

Ignoring tags is easy. Just add tags to the 'ignored tags' in the right hand column.

tag filter

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  • 2
    Ignoring tags really doesn't do it for me. I want to answer question in tags but I would like some way for me to customise the view based on (for me) the rep someone has elsewhere. (for me) There is a high correlation between having more rep on SO than SF and an entirely crappy question.
    – user9517
    Commented Aug 4, 2013 at 21:23
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We can sort of do some of these with existing tools:

  • A way to filter the SF site to only see questions from users with a rep higher than x
  • A way to filter out questions if the user asking is unregistered
  • A way to filter out questions if the user has a rep less than 200 on SF but higher than 200 on SO

These are unlikely to ever appear as an official tool.
The basic concept of Stack Exchange sites is that crap gets seen by a large number of people, declared to be crap, and closed. If we allowed filtering by rep there would be a pile of crap from 1-rep accounts that nobody ever sees (except the 1-rep account holders who don't have the filter privilege).

Basically this would make things look nicer for most of the site regulars in the 10k and 20k+ range, but the quality problem would get worse for everyone else (and our "% Answered" statistic would go completely to shit because nobody would be trawling through the muck to answer the genuinely good questions).

What we can do is filter by question score -- Check out the slightly improved Search documentation for details.
You can create and bookmark search queries to use as your Server Fault homepage. Of course this relies on someone actually reviewing the questions in an unfiltered view and upvoting the good ones / downvoting the lousy ones (again we're back to "The site works better when smart people help get rid of the crap).

(That last part was bolded by Ward because - once again - the solution is MOAR Voting!)

A way to filter out questions with tags that are of no interest or I have no expertise in

We have Ignored Tags for this. I suggest using the default "faded out" rather than the optional "completely hidden" mode, because you never know when you'll find something useful on a post tagged .

A way to combine, mix/match filters, and/or, etc.

The two tools we do have (Search and Ignored Tags) stack, so this is basically "combined by default".

I know none of these are really optimal solutions, but they're at least a starting place.
If additional search operators would be useful we can definitely propose them to the Stack Exchange team.

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  • Further to my edit... It's awesome to see that other people have been downvoting the (many) crappy close:yes score:0 answers:0 questions I mentioned in a previous meta.SF question. And once they're at -1, the auto-delete is nuking them. Yay!
    – Ward - Trying Codidact Mod
    Commented Aug 16, 2013 at 4:27
  • This doesn't really work. For example I want to see good questions in linux but it is also a river of shit so ignoring it gets me nowhere ...
    – user9517
    Commented Aug 16, 2013 at 6:37
  • @Iain [linux] score:4 is about the closest approximation to "good questions in linux" -- I agree it's suboptimal though: your frontpage is still a disaster, and you only see linux questions in that view. something that lets us filter favorite tags by score (maybe [*Favorites] score:N?) would be a nice feature addition.
    – voretaq7 Mod
    Commented Aug 16, 2013 at 15:22
  • If we allowed filtering by rep there would be a pile of crap from 1-rep accounts that nobody ever sees: this is rather easy to handle by requiring users to complete a certain number of reviews to earn this privilege.
    – the-wabbit
    Commented Aug 16, 2013 at 17:20
  • @syneticon-dj In practice that's not how it seems to work out -- All SE sites develop a core of "active regulars" who would be over the threshold (and presumably filtering), and a sea of changing "occasional" and "newbie" users -- Those in the sea are usually not active reviewers (less invested in the site), and those who can filter have no incentive to review because they don't see the crap.
    – voretaq7 Mod
    Commented Aug 16, 2013 at 17:46
  • 1
    Just in case you hadn't noticed, I'm not having a great time playing SF at the moment. I'm still the third highest voter this year, this simply won't work. There are fewer than 300 people who have v-t-c privilege and less then 25% of them exercise it with any regularity. There is far too much 'work' being required of too few people.
    – user9517
    Commented Aug 16, 2013 at 18:28
  • 1
    @voretaq7 it looks very much like if filtering is not being provided, it will be created as a browser add-on or a StackApp. It already is rather easy to craft a query allowing filtering on just anything using data.SE, it seems just like the matter of time before anybody gets annoyed enough to implement it for the live data.
    – the-wabbit
    Commented Aug 17, 2013 at 6:48

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