Positive filters ("I dislike everything that does not match X")

idea
#1

Currently I have two options for filtering:

  1. I like this, highlight it.
  2. I dislike this, don’t show it to me unless I specifically request it.

I have a few feeds in which I can easily identify the entries I want, but I can only identify the undesirable elements as “not the stuff I want.” For example, the Unshelved comic (http://feeds.feedburner.com/Unshelfeed ). I’m only interested in the comics, which are easy to identify because the title will contain the word “Unshelved”. The non-comic posts have a variety of unpredictable titles (often because they are the name of a book or a sponsor), but I can safely assume that the word “Unshelved” will not appear.

  1. I can flag the “title contains Unshelved” posts as Like, but that doesn’t suppress the undesirable entries from my feeds unless I specifically filter to just Liked posts. Not quite what I mean, and less useful given that I frequently read “ALL SITE STORIES” at the default level.

  2. It’s not possible to Dislike the undesirably posts; they vary far too much.

What I think I want is a third filtering option: Dislike all posts that fail to meet at least one “sorta-Like” filter.

1 Like
#2

Even without this, the filters are a huge win for a few of my feeds. Now that I’ve had the feature, moving to a reader without that functionality would be a real loss.

#3

You’ll love this, it’s already built in. There are four facets: title, tag, author, and publisher. The publisher facet is special. If you thumbs down the publisher but thumbs up other things, you will effectively turn off the entire feed *except* for what you want. You would be forcing every story into either red/hidden or green/focus.

1 Like
#4

That works. It feels a bit weird, since now the stories I want are flagged as green, implying that it should show up in my preferred list. But, I’m not using the preferred list at all right now, so in practice it’s moot. It could theoretically be irritating if I ever were to start green flagging items of important stuff, but I don’t know if I’ll ever do so.

Thanks!