Ignored Topics

[brucehoult]

A year or two back the maximum size of the Ignored Topics list was increased from 100 to 1000.

This was great. A few times a day I hit "Show unread posts since last visit.", click the checkbox to select everything, then read the subject line and unselect the topics I'm interested in -- taking a look at the thread first in marginal cases. Then I hit the button to add all the still-selected topics to my ignore list.

On average I'm ignoring around 20 topics a day. When the limit was 100 and adding new topics cause the oldest ones to drop off the list this wasn't great because topics I didn't care about were often still active 5 days later and would reappear. With a 1000 topic limit it worked great. Pretty much every topic is dead after 50 days, and in the rare cases where it's not then it's probably had topic drift and is worth a quick look before ignoring again.

There was some talk at the time the limit was increased to 1000 that this increased load on the system and might not be kept if it proved to be too much. Fair enough, and tbh 200 or 500 topics would still be plenty.

I just took a look at my list for the first time in a long time and found to my horror that I now have over 8000 topics ignored -- 324 pages of 25 topics each. The oldest on the list are from March 10 last year. And every day since then.

I'm not noticing any performance problems on the site.

But I don't know what to do now. I seem to have three choices:

- do nothing and let it grow forever. That can't be good.

- delete all my ignored topics, including the ones I just ignored today or yesterday etc

- go through 300 screens of topics, doing "select all" and "un-ignore topics" on each page

Ugh.

[MK14]

On your behalf, I've done some playing around.  There does seem to be a very quick way (i.e. a minute to set up, then just leave it until done), of making all the ignored topics, disappear, if you can accept getting your hands, slightly dirty.

There are a number of utilities, that let you program in mouse movements/presses.  Typically a hot-key to start recording, and you do one demonstration of what to do (i.e. one set of keypresses, for one page), then press the hot key, to stop recording.

I find it usually best, to have ALL applicable windows open on a single screen at the same time, otherwise, these utilities tend to get confused and mess up.  Pauses, may be necessary, to give the windows time to operate.

So, if you have the appropriate (ignore/unignore) page open, you can set up the mouse utility, to click select all (for that page), and press the remove the selected ignores.

It then seems to refresh itself with a new (another), set of them (25 a time?), so repeat the same button (mouse) sequences.

Summary:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/profile/

Press 'Ignore Topics Options' to get to the right section.

Depending on utility, set the repeat count to 250 or similar.

START OF MOUSE MACRO:::::::::

Press (via utility) the unlabelled, select all on this page, tick box.

Press (via utility) un-ignore topics.

Let the utility go back to START OF MOUSE MACRO::::::::::::

Sit back for several minutes.

Then put up with the fact, it will take several days, for your ignore topics to build up again.

[brucehoult]

If you just want them all to be cleared, there is a single button for that.

That seems to be the least bad option.

The 1000 item rolling window that was there for some time was I think fine.

[MK14]

If you just want them all to be cleared, there is a single button for that.

That seems to be the least bad option.

The 1000 item rolling window that was there for some time was I think fine.

I didn't notice or know about the clear all button.

When you said:

- go through 300 screens of topics, doing "select all" and "un-ignore topics" on each page

Ugh.

I thought that was the only way, of mass deleting them.  I stand corrected.

I guess the delete all button, could be improved, if it had a select-able date option, such as delete all ignored topics, older than 30 days (since last new post).