The music interests here are eclectic enough that most of us, I suspect, are "not interested" in 90% of any given day's threadlist.

Not sure, logistically, how an "ignore" feature here could actually function. My own interests, for example, are pretty well defined, and yet I cannot think of a topical grouping that could be created that would fit my interests and that would allow me to filter for it and then mass-check an ignore setting for all the rest. I don't often bother to use "trace," because it really works best to easily follow threads whose posts I might miss if, for instance, an old, old thread suddenly got a new post that happened to come while I've been away from the Cat for some period of time, or if I have some new info to add to a particular thread in my "interest zone" for which I might have worried I might not be able to recall the thread title-- like a little file cabinet. For me, a very small one.

So how I solve the "not interested" factor without missing threads I'd like to look into, I just upsize the screen's text size and page down instead of scrolling. The threads I'm interested in jump right out at me that way. I use "messages since last visit" a lot as well.

I also know and trust that what interests me interests several of my MudBuds, so I know at least ONE of us is likely to post to those threads, and thus the threads I'd hate to miss do eventually end up at the top of the threadlist where I can spot them without a whole-page-check.


But you know this IS a music site primarily, despite all the fights over the BS section. Thus I think it's healthy to have more than any one person can read on the day's threadlist. And I think it's healthy that no one arbitrarily categorizes the topics and that we get to choose for ourselves how to use the site's resources. It just requires different skills than other boards require, starting with being aware of the different features that ARE set up to allow various ways to organize one's use of the resources. (There's one other site I wish they'd categorize-- it's audbooks, with a weekly poetry project that "causes" me to "waste" a lot of time opening those up before realizing it's another poetry reading instead of an intriguing long-book title-- but then maybe a lot of the site's OTHER users hate the books I LOVE, so whose tastes should site mods satisfy?)


If you'd like to tell us what your particular interests are, perhaps some of us frequent-flyers could suggest ways of using site features to streamline your use. I know that with my periodic vision problems, people here have been generous about guiding me to things I might have missed.

~Susan