Kathy,
I ignore a lot of threads with my brain filter, but if I could have got them pre-removed from what comes up when I click 'New Posts' then that could reduce the list of 9 pages that comes up when I check in after the weekend. More importantly, I sometimes miss things because I'm busy skipping over threads I ignore.

I agree that it would be great to have a feature that filters out everythingthat's annoying here.

I just can't think of anything that would know in advance what I might find annoying. I could pay a personal secretary to do this for me, but I wouldn't trust any machine making this decision.

Also, "annoying" threads sometimes get interesting on page 37 or so... you never know. I recall some situations when I used to ignore a thread and then became curious again when I found out it got unusually active. Sometimes the reason was a specific piece of information dropped in this very thread that I wouldn't want to have missed.

I can easily filter out off topic posts in the Active Topics sidebar "in my brain", the downside of that (well besides the extra mental capacity, hah!) is that it reduces the effectiveness of the Active Topics sidebar, lately by about 25% or so. So I'm missing active topics because of, well, you know, no reason to repeat it. It's not right.

Frank

It's ironic that people here belittle iPhone/WinMo/Other-than-linux users, and calling them stupid when they're having problem exercising a little self control whlie reading threads with contents that they don't agree with.

Well, it sounds to me like there's a question for contextual filtering on the active sidebar based on user prefs. (e.g. block this thread from appearing on *my* active sidebar for 1 week, 1 month, forever, etc.) - the time limit is to help with benny1967's thoughts (with which I concur) re revisiting threads later. A pop up of a previously barred thread might re-spur interest...

Thing is, I have no idea how to do that, or even if it's possible. Perhaps a brainstorm idea...?

There is a lot of that, I've mentioned it previously that the us and them (or us and anyone without an NIT or an N900 or whatever) mentality can only be damaging if encouraged.

Still, I think the active topics problem is one that's approachable from a user-centric point of view, per my previous post, without even bothering about that mentality (personally, a little less of the antagonism even on potentially inane threads would do my head in a lot less...)

OK, who put the tag on this thread?

I like the idea of a time limit on putting a thread on ignore (one month sounds good to me). Apart from anything else, that will keep stop the database from growing too large. I don't use the active sidebar, by the way, but use New Posts a lot, so hopefully this suggested ignore thread feature could work on that too.

Since when? I can only remove tags that I created.

Agreed.

IMO an individual should be able to select being not interested in a thread therefore making this thread not appear anymore in 'Active threads'. This makes 'Active threads' personal; more useful with information the user is interested in, based on blacklisting.

I don't know if this is possible with vBulletin because it'd require additional information stored in the database (additional fields in user's profile as saved in MySQL), and also this would need to be queried every time a user is logged in and browses around t.m.o. If you want to also extend the function to when browsing (sub)forums, more queries. There also should be an unignore option.

A workaround may instead of using 'Active threads' subscribe to threads which is essentially the same as whitelisting without changing default 'lists'.