Announcing filters

We've seen many requests over time for some way to customize what you see on the list of questions in a category – finding unanswered questions, hiding closed or low-scoring questions, or building more personalized views. You can use search for one-off queries, but until now you couldn't set a sticky rule that the site would remember for you. We put filters on our roadmap a while back and Moshi and Taeir took up the challenge. We're happy to announce that filters are now live.

You can think of a filter as a named, permanent search. In fact, filters are based on search. There are some built-in filters that you can choose, and you can also create new ones for yourself.

You'll find the filter control at the top of a category list:

If you're currently using a filter you'll see its name there instead of "None". Expand the widget to get to the controls:

From here you can choose a filter from the drop-down menu, or you can build your own: specify score ranges, number of answers (for questions), status (closed or open), and tags to include and exclude. Type a name into the text field and hit the Save button, and your new filter is now added to the list in the menu. Apply applies the filter to the category, and Clear resets the category view to the default (no filters). To make the filter permanent (until you change or clear it), check "Is default for this category?" – otherwise, it's a one-time filter until you refresh the page.

We don't yet have a way to copy filters to other categories or share them with other users. If you never want to see status-completed items on community Meta categories, you'll need to define it on each community. Our mantra for this feature all along has been "start simple, then expand". We were going to start with only predefined filters and add customization in a later round of changes, but our volunteer developers are awesome over-achievers.

I want to highlight the teamwork that went into this feature. Early on I sketched out some ideas of how filters could work – the easy part! – and community members told me what I got wrong suggested improvements. Moshi refined my scribbles into an interface that would work on phones and desktops without adding complexity, and got to work. With help from Sau226, Moshi pushed drafts to our development server so people on our Discord server could try it out and look for bugs. There was a lot of iterative development and ongoing code review, and then Moshi had an attack of life and had to pause work on the feature. Taeir picked it up, addressed the remaining review comments and some new ones, made some other improvements, and shepherded it through to completion. ArtOfCode approved, merged, and deployed it. Thank you to everyone who was part of this group effort!

Please report bugs or request improvements on Meta as usual. We even have a future placeholder on our roadmap for filters improvements we haven't thought of yet. Meanwhile, there's lots of other stuff we want to make better, too.

posted over 1 year ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Monica Cellio‭ staff

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