Filters?!

[tally]

Yooooo okay so I just discovered the power of filters here on DW.  These things are great!  This is going to make my reading page so much easier to go through!

How are y'all using filters?  By fandom?  By type of content people post?

Right now, as first iteration, I'm separating people into like "gamers" and "writers" for example.  But of course then what do you do if someone is both an avid gamer and a writer?  Do you put them in both filters even though that creates a redundancy, or do you pick one for them even though that is less accurate?

Or is it more useful to mainly use filters for categorizing communities instead of individual journals?

Comments

[althea_valara]

I have three reading filters: Default (which is personal journals), DW Stuff (which is anything Dreamwidth-related), and comm (for communities). This works for me, because I check DW multiple times a day and usually don't miss posts with this breakout. If I was starting to miss posts, I'd break it down further.

Back on LJ I had friends broken out into "group I really wanted to read/keep in touch with" and "second group of acquaintances". That worked for me then, but I don't feel the need for it here.

I also have numerous posting filters. Just about everyone I add has access to my general locked stuff, but I have some smaller filters for more sensitive posts. I don't use those as often, though, but it's nice to know that's available if I need it.

[althea_valara]

Oh, just saw your question about redundancy - yeah, sometimes I have people in two groups. I don't mind much - I mean, I'm also a weirdo who has herself "friended" so I can see my own posts on my reading page. I like this, even though it's duplicating my journal, because I *do* check my reading page often and this way, I can see if someone posted a comment, probably faster than I would by checking my email. Definitely not by checking my DW inbox - I am really lazy about cleaning inboxes out so there's always ~600 entries in my DW inbox, and I can never remember the exact amount in there so it's less notice for me that there's a new comment. I do clean my DW inbox out sometimes, but usually only delete like 5-10 pages of comments to get me back around 400-500 unread comments. I found out the hard way that there IS a limit to comments in the inbox!

But yeah, I am good at scanning past things I've already seen, so it wouldn't bother me to have someone on two filters.

[tally]

Huh, I didn't even know I could friend myself! I'm learning all kinds of neat things about Dreamwidth now that I've sort of gone all in on it.

I think I'll try some broad groups of filters for people to start with and see how it feels. Or it might be enough to just filter all the communities I'm in by type and not filter personal journals, OR on the other hand, I could get really specific with it...gosh I love organizing things. ♥

[tally]

Excellent, this helps me a lot, thank you! I'm very excited to get everything organized into filters. It will be so satisfying, like a well-designed spreadsheet.

[darkoshi]

I have a set of reading filters that separates the journals I follow into a few different groups. I have links to each filter on my browser's home page. It reduces the number of unread posts I see when I open any one of them (versus my full reading page), which gives me a more manageable chunk of posts to read at one time without feeling overwhelmed.

If I want to see if a particular person has posted something new, I can open the link for the filter which they are in (I usually can remember that), and scroll down to check the unread posts (versus opening my profile to get the link to go directly to their page, which takes more clicks).

There is one person who posts many links. I have them in one filter; I'm more likely to skip that one when I'm low on time or not feeling up to reading bad news.

I have another person who posts one link-post per day (which they tag as "links"), but also other non-link posts. So in one of my reading filters, I include their non-link posts by including the condition:
"and the entry is tagged with -none- of the selected tags: links"
Then I also have a separate link on my homepage to just their link posts, which again I skip when I'm low on time: https://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/tag/links
You could do the same thing if you never want to see posts with certain tags, or if you *only* want to see a person's posts with certain tags. That only works when they use those tags consistently.

[lassarina]

Honestly, I only use filters for posting things with varying degrees of personal information, and have never used them for my reading page. XD I catch up on that (ideally) a couple times a week (practically speaking for the last few years it's been every 2 weeks because my life has been on fire), but I am apparently an outlier, lol.