Filtering by tags

[vilakins]

In case you don't know, LJ has this great new feature: filtering your reading list by people's tags (if of course they use them).

You can modify settings for anyone (who uses tags) on your Edit Friends page. Another way of doing it is hovering over a friend's userhead and choosing Edit Tags. You can choose to include or exclude tags (but not, it seems, both).

So useful if you don't want to read posts about say sports or politics or particular fandoms. Now you'll be able to filter out my daily art posts come August if you're not interested.

Comments

[elmey.livejournal.com]

All you have to do now is find friends who are consistent in how they use their tags :D

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Some people don't use them at all, and I could do with not seeing their posts about politics and violent crime etc.

[muscadinegirl.livejournal.com]

I have some tags but I never use them.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

It took me a while to get round to using them a couple of years ago. They're useful for finding old posts. I really need to go through my scrapbook and tag photos so I can find them by various categories.

[muscadinegirl.livejournal.com]

Problem is that search engines pick up tags and I'd rather not have my posts indexed.

[theyarnproject.livejournal.com]

Cool. Good to know.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I've found it very useful already.

[sheenaghpugh]

That's interesting - now shall I use it positively, to find lit stuff I might have missed, or negatively and avoid [immediately thinks of long list starting with Dr Who and what people had for dinner]:)

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Do they tag for meals? :-)

I think exclusion is best because new tags may be of interest. It's also likely to be a very much smaller set.

[samantha-vimes.livejournal.com]

I, of course, want to see your art.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I know there are those who find August posts annoying. I'll remind them at the start.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

A brief test suggests that, if the creator of an article tags it with more than one tag, you will only not see the article if you have set all those tags to "exclude". (But another possible explanation is that the exclusion doesn't work restrospectively. I.e. you can still see an article with an exclude tag if it predates your having set up the exclude.)

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I found it works fine on posts where I've only filtered out one tag. I'll keep checking though.

[Edit] Someone complained about exactly that on the LJ news post and it turned out they had the include rather than exclude button selected. Maybe you did that in error? If not, you should put a bug report in.

[Another edit] Oh and it only works on your friends list, not on the journal itself. I used that to test it: comparing a person's posts on my flist with their journal. :-)

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

Sounds useful, yes... there are folk on my flist I do like for the most part, but they tend to write a LOT about politics in their country, which I have to scroll past unless I take them off my default...

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes. Though tags are only useful if people actually use them.

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

That sounds very useful - thank you! I have one person on my friends list who is very intelligent and generally interesting, but every now and then he posts, umm, explicit content, which he usually remembers to put under a cut but he has been known to slip up once or twice. Filtering it out altogether would be good. :-)

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Provided he tags it! Many people don't bother but I find it useful for looking up old posts.

[maegquare.livejournal.com]

It sounds useful and good to know. I haven't always used tags consistently, so I may have to pay more attention to that from now on. I usually remember to use them if I'm yammering on about knitting, for example, so non-knitting friends can skip it. ^.~

It would also help if more people and groups used tags consistently, so I could catch up faster when I've been away for awhile, by skipping certain things.