Some of recent discussions on meta revolved around various ways to deal with the growing number of questions posted on the site. For example:
I started this thread to collect some of the ways in which users improve their experience themselves. This is not for feature requests.
By opening Math.SE via https://math.stackexchange.com/?tab=interesting, you will get a customized list of recently active questions. This tab brings forward questions which have more of your favorite tags, as well as the tags which you tend to answer. The algorithm is described here.
The "Interesting" tab is seen in the customized interface pictured above. You can also see the "hide the question" button (-) described later in this post. Without modifications, this tab is not visible on SE sites other than StackOverflow. If there is enough interest in making it visible, this could be a feature request (in a separate thread).
For now, I made the tab visible for myself with jQuery:
$(document).ready(function() {
$('#tabs').prepend('<a href="?tab=interesting" title="interesting questions">interesting</a>');
});
The above script should be matched to URLs https://math.stackexchange.com/ and https://math.stackexchange.com/?*
The "hide ignored tags" option carries the risk of missing questions which overlap your areas of interest: a question with both ignored and favorite tags gets hidden. This behavior can be changed with the CSS rule
.tagged-interesting {
display: block !important;
}
It ensures that a question with at least one favorite tag will not be hidden from Questions or Unanswered tabs. Unfortunately, the rule does not have effect on the home page of the site, including the Interesting tab. For this reason, the following method may be preferable.
Instead of choosing the tags to hide, one can choose the tags to be displayed and marks them as favorites. The following jQuery command hides everything else.
$('.question-summary').not('.tagged-interesting').css('display', 'none');
The highlighting of favorite questions can now be turned off everywhere with CSS, since it no longer serves a purpose:
div.tagged-interesting {
background-color: #fff !important;
}
This method works particularly well on the Interesting tab, which is rich in questions with favorite tags.
If one primarily uses the same computer/browser combination to access Math.SE, it becomes feasible to hide individual questions from the page. This method was developed by StackOverflow user Kos. Questions are hidden by clicking (-) in the upper right corner of the question summary. The list of hidden questions in kept in your browser's storage (which all modern browsers support). The option to reset all hidden questions (and thus clear the storage) is provided at the bottom of right sidebar.
This method uses both CSS and JavaScript (with the jQuery library).
.kos-hide-button {
color: #666;
}
.kos-hide-button:hover {
color: red;
cursor: pointer;
}
.kos-hide-button-hide {
display: block;
width: 2em;
float: right;
text-align: right;
}
.kos-hide-hidden-question {
display: none !important;
}
The JavaScript code by Kos is copied below to make this post self-contained. It's a neat example of jQuery use.
$(document).ready(function() {
var keyPrefix = "mse.hiddenquestion.";
function hideElem(elem) {
elem.addClass('kos-hide-hidden-question');
}
function clearHidden() {
var toRemove = [];
for (var i=0; i<localStorage.length; ++i) {
var key = localStorage.key(i);
if (key.substr(0, keyPrefix.length) == keyPrefix) {
toRemove.push(key);
}
}
for (var i=0; i<toRemove.length; ++i) {
localStorage.removeItem(toRemove[i]);
}
$('.kos-hide-hidden-question').removeClass('kos-hide-hidden-question');
}
if (!('localStorage' in window && window['localStorage'] !== null)) {
return;
}
$('.question-summary').each(function() {
var that = $(this);
var id = keyPrefix + $(this).attr('id');
$('<span>(-)</span>')
.addClass('kos-hide-button')
.addClass('kos-hide-button-hide')
.attr('title','Hide this question')
.insertBefore($(this).find('h3'))
.click(function() {
hideElem(that);
var tab = $
localStorage[id] = 1;
})
;
var hidden = localStorage[id];
if (hidden) {
hideElem($(this));
}
});
$('<div>Reset hidden questions</div>')
.addClass('kos-hide-button')
.appendTo($('#sidebar'))
.click(function() {
clearHidden();
})
;
});
The home page tabs, such as interesting, do not display two-line snippets of question body. However, these snippets appear as a "tooltip" text when hovering over the element:
This amount of text is often enough to decide whether to hide the question by clicking (-), eliminating the need to navigate to the question.
The details of using custom CSS and JS vary by browser. Some of the options are listed below. (Feel free to expand the list: the post is a CW.)
The URLs to match are
https://math.stackexchange.com/, https://math.stackexchange.com/?*, https://math.stackexchange.com/questions*, https://math.stackexchange.com/unanswered*
My personal choice was to implement 3 and 4 via an unpacked Chrome extension. The extension consists of JS and CSS described above, matching rules (.json), icon (.png) popup bubble (.html), and a copy of jQuery. Feel free to use or modify.
I am a current university student and depend heavily on math.SE for answers, especially when my faculty refuses to give solutions to his answers.
Typically, when I have a question, it is the usual routine :
I think this is the best way for math.SE to move forward - good questions and answers. There have been an increase, especially since the new year, of lazy students just posing questions. The indicators of a new user are very obvious - copying the question wholesale, posing the question with little or no $\LaTeX$ formatting, and then expecting some magic to happen.
I am very appreciative for math.SE because it has taught me $\LaTeX$, which is a highly useful Markup Language to represent mathematics, and have been fascinated by it. This, I guess, is one of the bigger takeaways from math.SE.
People should never abuse this system. We need to clamp down on these couch potatoes-lazy people - not answering the questions and locking the question for answers, so the OP needs to put in his own fair share of effort to earn his own answer.
Beyond that, I hope the interest does not close down because my learning depends heavily on this website - all the holes left uncovered in real life are covered here.
Some of the tricks in this thread are much too technical. SE already provides a way to see only questions that carry at least one of your favorite tags: favorite tag filter. Using the filter may be slightly disorienting at first, because it's located on a different site, stackexchange.com. But one does not have to log in there to use the filter; being logged in on Math.SE is good enough.
The filter results can be presented in three ways, including my current favorite no answers. The best part about "no answers" tab on stackexchange.com is that it orders the questions by activity, while a similar tab on Math.SE orders them by votes. One can take the filtering further and bookmark the second page of search results instead of the first; this eliminates "low hanging fruit" questions, including most routine homework questions (if they were not already eliminated by the tag filter). The site looks much better through this filter.
It would be even better if the search on Math.SE supported favorite tags, so that I could search for [favorite-tags] answers:0, order by activity, bookmark the search URL, and be a happier user. Unfortunately, this option does not exist (yet?)
