The problem is, as always with how the blocking system works, is what if we use the tag on something you might actually want to read?

For example, we sometimes post distro news, and while we have a tag for that what if we also added the Non Gaming tag and you're blocking it?

What are your thoughts? This is why I added the All News tag to temporarily remove filtering on the home page but still let's have a chat about it.

What about a tag "Drama" for this kind of news?

Not gonna lie Liam, I haven't thought this through, and you're raising good questions. I'll have to get a coffee and think about it, unless someone comes with a good idea first.

@ageres
For heaven sake man, you said exactly what I was thinking but never dared to say it out loud :)
The problem is, you might not know before hand if the topic deserves that tag.

But yeah, you've been in my head, get out.

J/k - An SJW tag.

I've been thinking about this too -- I don't want to see anything that exclusively concerns the humble store, so I have "Humble Store" in my list of excluded tags. This has the unfortunate side effect of hiding any articles that are tagged with e.g. "Steam" and "Humble Store". I want to see such articles, but the current system is a simple boolean (if not $tag, do show).

A possible solution would be to have a scale for each tag, e.g. ranging from:

• Never show (-100)


• Prefer hidden (-5)


• Hide if possible (-1)


• Show if possible (default +1)


• Try to show (+5)

"Never show" would be the equivalent of the current system, where the article is not shown at all (even if every other tag is "Try to show"), the other tags are used to calculate a score for the article. If the article has a positive score, it is shown, otherwise it is hidden.

This would probably cause a lot of extra load on the server though.

Quoting: dubigrasuThe problem is, you might not know before hand if the topic deserves that tag.

I think it's actually obvious. Someone said something, some people got offended, started writing things on Twitter and thus caused troubles for that person.

Quoting: Liam DaweFor example, we sometimes post distro news, and while we have a tag for that what if we also added the Non Gaming tag and you're blocking it?

Well, distro-specific news aren’t really gaming-related (besides the Ubuntu 32-bit stuff I guess), so I’d say this is fine. Personally, the recent articles on Manjaro’s new release were something I would block out if they were frequent enough that I couldn’t just glance past their titles on the home page.

But honestly a Drama tag is also what first came to mind when this came up in the Stallman article.

Quoting: Salvatos

Quoting: Liam DaweFor example, we sometimes post distro news, and while we have a tag for that what if we also added the Non Gaming tag and you're blocking it?

Well, distro-specific news aren’t really gaming-related (besides the Ubuntu 32-bit stuff I guess), so I’d say this is fine. Personally, the recent articles on Manjaro’s new release were something I would block out if they were frequent enough that I couldn’t just glance past their titles on the home page.

But honestly a Drama tag is also what first came to mind when this came up in the Stallman article.

I appreciate the distro news. It has only been about the popular ones and nowhere near overwhelming.

As far as a drama tag or not goes, how hard is it to not click on an article you don't want to read? I do it all the time with game articles that don't look like something I'm interested in at all.

So do I, but I can understand the appeal for people who are interested in specific subjects and have a lot of frequent topics they’d prefer not to have to sift through. If I were only here for VR news for instance, I’d filter out everything else.

[quote=14]

Quoting: Salvatoshow hard is it to not click on an article you don't want to read? I do it all the time with game articles that don't look like something I'm interested in at all.

OK, you're right. But then what's the point of having this tagging functionality at all?
I admit that I basically do exactly what you say, I never used tags for filtering out articles, but rather for searching.
Still, the setting "Do not show articles with any of these tags on the homepage:" is already there and in this particular case (non-gaming articles) I would personally use it. There's no harm for anyone else if that tag exists, is just an extra tag among the others (there's a lot of them, I dunno, maybe a hundred).

Edit: All of that provided if a suitable tag is found and indeed doesn't confuse the things even more (as Liam pointed out).