GIS StackExchange Improvement Tip #1

A quick tip to improve your experience with GIS StackExchange, or any StackExchange site for that matter.

"Watched Tags" and "Ignored Tags" accept wildcards. I like GIS.SE, but unless you tweak it, there's a lot of noise and not enough signal. One way to improve that is to add things you're interested in to your Watched Tags, and conversely those things you are disinterested in to your Ignored Tags.

I personally don't use ArcGIS, or related Esri- or Microsoft-ecosystem tools. So for me, I can't offer any advice on how to do anything with them. Yet there's a lot of people in the spatial community who do use Esri products. I had set up my filters with a very long list of exclusion rules using specific tags, e.g. arcgis-10.4, arcgis-10.5, esri, esri-company, arcgis-online, arcpy, etc. This filtered out a lot of questions I was not interested in reading, however it's very verbose since there are a lot of arc* questions. It is also unwieldy because everytime there's a new ArcGIS major or minor version release, there are a series of new tags created.

To get around this, you can simply use wildcards in your tags. Now my Ignored Tags are simply .net, arc*, esri*, modelbuilder, oracle, sql-server*. I gave my Watched Tags a similar treatment (e.g. qgis*). Now I have a nice looking set of questions and should not need to revisit my tags as often.