I have come upon the situation where I see a question that really interests me.  I have nothing to add to this question at the moment, not a comment not answer but I'm particularly interested in what people have to say about this.  This leads me to think that in this situation, the favorite isn't enough.  My argument:  One of the main ideas of this site is that the questions you post may help others too, so that "allows me" to be as interested as the OP in the answers and comments to that question. (Even though it's not mine).  This is why I think that the favorite doesn't "notify enough", in the case where you want to be a very active participant/viewer of the question, even though you didn't ask it yourself.  Just to clarify, you should receive the same notifications as if you had asked the question.  The counter-argument:  I realize that this is particular situation, it is not every question that you would need to do this in every question.  It would probably need another button in the SE interface, and that is a BIG change.  It may mean too much information if over used.  Conclusion:  Despite this I think it would make a pretty good and useful feature that would benefit the site because of a greater user involvement in a question.  Thanks in advance.    EDIT: As ChrisF points out in his comment there is also the RSS feed, I'm not a big fan and I like to keep my inbox very clean, but it true that it is quite similar to what I have "requested". The difference is that this feature keeps everything on-site.       Somehow related:
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What does bookmarking a question mean? How do you bookmark a question? Do users get updates on their bookmarked questions? Are my bookmarks publicly visible? How do you see your own bookmarks? How do you see other users' bookmarks? How do you see which users have bookmarked a particular question? What impact does the bookmark system have on the voting system? Can I &quot;un-bookmark&quot; a question? Can I search within my bookmarks?
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I just went to comment on , saying something like "hey thanks that solution worked for me; You know anything about extending it to ?"  I was confused why I couldn't find any sort of "add comment* button, and it took me an annoying bit of searching just to find out why. :/  So could us new users see a notification like:     you need a minimum of X reputation to comment on questions that are not your own, and on answers that are not to your own questions   in the space where the add comment button would be?
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I've recently run into many questions where to author asks several related questions in one post, many of them asked before.   I'm wondering what out policy is on such questions:   Should I vote-close them as being not constructive? Should I vote-close them as duplicates? Should I leave them be? Or even suggest an answer?    - Each of the questions: Waiting for an AJAX request with selenium, and headless browsing in selenium have been asked here before, but he asked both in one.  I've done my best to search for similar questions here in meta but I was unable to find any, reading appreciated.
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I wonder if it is possible to search in just my favorited questions?  If not, can it be considered as a feature request?
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tl;dr  We rolled out some improvements for how you track the topics you are interested in for your favorite Q&amp;A sites. This feature used to be called Favorite Tags. We are renaming it Tag Watching. Naming is hard, but we think this better captures the value of the feature. There were a number of confusing elements to the old feature. We've attempted to clear these up and refocus the user experience on the core functionality.     This feature is live as of today (07/26/2018) on all sites. We turned this on for all sites earlier than expected so that we could do some code cleanup.   Key improvements:   Released   On boarding: new users are introduced to tag watching and how it can help them Cleaner pop up: new pop up is more focused on the key actions.  Coming later   Notifications: When watching a tag you're prompted to set up notifications, if desired. Also, changing notification settings will be supported when you edit your watched tags in the right side bar.    On boarding  Many users don't actually favorite any/many tags. Part of this is likely due to fact that we never explained why you should bother. In the old system all you saw was:  Tag Favorites on boarding    Now you see a description of the value tag watching provides.    Tag pop up  Our old tag pop up was very comprehensive and confusing. So many options. Watching/ignoring a tag was a tristate button (those are never a good option). An every action is essentially presented on equal footing. This makes it really hard for new users to understand what they can/should do.    The new pop up is focused on two primary actions (watch or ignore tag) and two minor actions (view tag, access RSS).    Notifications (coming later)     We have some work to make the notifications scale to SO. So, while these improvements are live for Teams users, they will be enabled later (timing TBD) for SO and the rest of the network.    With the old system watching a tag and getting notifications were two separate steps. With the new experience, you will be prompted to set your notifications when you watch a tag.    Also, changing your notifications will be integrated into the experience of editing your watched tags.    Feedback wanted  As usual, we are happy to hear your constructive feedback. Feel free to post an answer below if you think of an improvement.
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For me the distinction between sites is purely topical. I get that there's a right and a wrong place to ask questions, but I regularly ask questions across a number of sites. They all log me in (in a weird sort of way), and now there's the global inbox.  I've read that there's a feed  and that there's a  but neither of these are what I want.  What I'd like is to have an RSS feed from my global inbox, i.e. to include notification of updates to my public questions, answers, comments. Is this possible?
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There are times when I'd like to communicate something to the Stack Overflow community but it doesn't fit a question.  Right now, I have the product of many answers (a bunch of code) I'd like to share back but can't.  If each user had a blog or wiki (or something) they could create articles / blogs on and then link the related SO questions to it. You could then add an icon to those questions to show there is also more expansive information available.  By linking to the questions, this means anyone could author articles addressing a question outside of the scope of the more simple Q/A scenario.  Of course, many people have blogs but they must link that in a not so immersive fashion and not everyone has a blog (and also many blogs are inadequate in displaying text from a coding viewpoint (e.g. formatting code). Folding such a mechanism into SO would open up all sorts of creative opportunities and make the site even more sticky for users.  I think it's a winner and I'd use it for sure.
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There are many, many old posts on meta asking for suggestions on how to better organize favorites.  ,  and , among others.  This is not meant to be an open discussion on how to improve favorites, but rather a specific feature request that I'd like feedback on.      I would love to see a feature added that would let users arbitrarily create "groups" of favorites, and drag individual favorited questions under these groups.  I have about 2 pages of favorites (I know others have much more), and finding an individual one is quite difficult, especially since the specific question title is usually forgotten.  I just added  to my favorites, since I liked Andrew Whitaker's answer, and might want to come back and look at it later; I'd love to add this to a group called, say, "Useful Code".    I've favorited other posts since they had neat tricks in them, or because there were answers written on interesting theoretical computer science topics.  Having different groups for all these areas would be immensely helpful in finding posts later.
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I often have the situation that I read a question and leave a comment requesting an edit to provide more information by the OP.   Currently, I add the phrase that he/she should please also write a comment containing "@ByteCommander" to notify me when they're done. This is not optimal as it's additional typing and often the OP does not follow it.  I know that the star/favorites feature allows me to bookmark questions and see on my user profile site how many/which questions had a recent change. But I think this is pretty complicated. I don't want to fill up my list of favorites with tons of questions and I don't really want to check that section out regularly.  My suggestion is to add a button similar to the "watch"-button on GitHub that enables notifications on edits, answers and/or comments without ping to appear in my global inbox instead of being hidden somewhere down in my profile.  Do you think this would improve the usability of the sites and increase the question solving rate? I do.
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We're considering adding favorite notifications to the global inbox, and are looking for feedback on the idea (as we're not completely sold on it).  But first, some history.  Favorites are kind of like bookmarks, in that they're kept in a handy centralized place.  They also follow you across browsers.  Ok, ok... "bookmarks, on the internet" is not the most compelling feature, but Favorites also opted you into notices for those questions as if you were the owner (edits and new answers, at least).  This was probably the most confusing part (though a  feature) of the old envelope behavior judging by erroneous bug reports, so a way to opt out of this .  Now, favorite updates go nowhere.  But we could* put them into the inbox.  Here's how we envision this feature working:   Every current user has their "notify me on favorite changes" preference cleared (new users start with it cleared). The first time someone favorites a question, they're prompted to opt-in to favorite notices. Whenever a question is commented on or answered (or, possibly, edited) a new notice is pushed into the inbox of users who have favorited it, and have opted in.   Opt-in would be per-site, and it would remain possible to opt-out from your profile page.   This is not a final design, but the basic idea is correct  As I mentioned above, we're not 100% sold on this idea.  We've had a policy to date that nothing goes into the inbox that isn't specifically targeted at a user; this would be tweaking that policy.  *We could also put changes into their tab on the user page, but that reduces their visibility.
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No, not like this:    Hear me out!  As Stack Overflow grows, it becomes increasingly ridden with extremely newbie and mediocre questions. It's just natural. The team are fighting hard to keep the crap out, but there are many very basic questions that are okay on their own. They don't deserve to be kicked out* - they are just very, very, very basic and/or localized.   Too much basicness tires users who are interested in discussing more advanced topics.  As has been discussed many times over, the voting system is not suited to identify advanced questions due to what is known as the . A group of people will vote on what they understand, which puts truly expert questions at a natural disadvantage that a democratic voting system can't overcome.  Now, there is a small number of users on Stack Overflow who I, as a user, know share my basic values (like, teaching a man to fish rather than fishing for them); I also know they are experts in their fields. It is safe to assume that what these users regard an interesting question worthy of attention, is likely to be interesting to me as well.      The idea is to introduce an opt-in "follow" mechanism that allows followed users to share what they find interesting, with very little fuss and on a purely opt-in basis.   Allow every SO user to follow any other SO user with a certain minimum rep, say 3000.   To every user who is being followed (or every user), display a new link underneath every question, "Recommend".    Introduce a new filtered view somewhere, named "Recommended". The view will show me all questions that my followed users are recommending.   Whenever I browse a list of questions, highlight those questions that have been recommended by my followed users. (I haven't put much thought into how to implement this graphically - you get the drift.)      I'm not especially fond of social networking, and I think most of it doesn't have a place on SO. But I'm starting to think this specific thing could be the right way to go in order to tell apart expert content from the 10000th dreary "how do I upload a file" question.  This is an entirely opt-in feature - unless I actively follow some users, I will never notice this.   Maybe for a bit of ego-stroking, the profile page can show how many users follow you. Or even who. Everything else would simply be kept under wraps - no publication of follower data in the data dump, no follower leagues or anything like that.      * At least not under current SO rules. Maybe those rules need to be changed - but that is a different discussion.
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The thing about the Hot questions widget is that it's a neat idea, and well executed. However, it shows questions from all around the network. And most of the time from topics I have no interest in.  I suggest another widget be added* to show questions from a specific user-defined set of sites. There could also be the choice of showing "new" questions** or "hot" questions from the chosen sites.  I envision this new widget to be useful as it will give us hot trending questions from our favorite sites to read on (less refreshing, more reading) or new questions, encouraging us to contribute more to the site. :)  Also, tapping the site icon should open the relevant list of questions at the site, not the current question. That will be a handy shortcut (can be applied to the existing widget as well).  * Or the existing widget could have added options to choose between hot network questions and the above.  ** There could be an optional filter of selecting only new questions with 0 or more nett vote score for the widget.
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Problem: A lot of the time I downvote something that clearly shows lack of research or effort on OP's part, and when they edit to improve it, I usually find out pretty late, because there are no notifications to help with that.  Proposition: add a Get notified when this post is edited button/checkbox under a post which you have downvoted (per post, not just all posts ever), so that if there is a significant improvement, you could remove your downvote or even change it to an upvote to show you recognize the improvement.  I believe this would improve public thinking about votes, and make people (who choose to participate like this on the SE sites more often) vote more freely and more often, and everybody else would not think of a &lt;0 post score as a death sentence for their contribution.  I'm not asking to enable this on SO (for a number of obvious reasons), and that's why I propose an opt-in subscription. This would be most useful on lower activity sites like the SE, in my opinion, but who knows.    I want to know if someone has improved their post after a downvote to reinforce the positive behavior and I get -4 on my good intentions? What kind of culture are you trying to cultivate? Please, explain why you disagree without silently downvoting. If you think there's a better way, yes, I want to know your thoughts.
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Simple enough:   The OP is the best judge of whether the comment is obsolete, and has no particular incentive to be unscrupulous in leaving an old comment - and even if they did, chances are this feature will lead to more obsolete comments being cleaned up than status quo in my estimation Right now there's no real way for two users to jointly clean up an obsolete comment thread.  If I delete mine, I need to let the conversation partner know they can cleanup their half...  but then my "notification" comment remains, and there's in general no way out of this loop If OP doesn't take action in, say, 2 days, can notify mods anyway It proselytizes itself:  if 100 people on meta see this thread, when they flag other comments as obsolete, they are educating the rest of the user base that it's okay to flag comments as obsolete. Plus there is already some badge-incentive regarding flags to help encourage people It solves the problem we have that it's impossible for an OP to notify a downvoter (who comments) or commenter that the improvement has been made with no weight added to our UI   So yep, sounds like an easy enough win to me.
84006
Most users seem to vote mostly on answers. How can users be encouraged to vote on the questions as well? (This was discussed in podcast 62.)
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Clearly, that was the result of an inexperienced user.  If a question gets a bunch of replies, then the "comment" could easily get lost in the other answers.  I think that if there is no activity on the "comment" (no comments, no votes, etc.), then I think converting the answer to a comment is a valid operation for housekeeping purposes. If there are comments, votes, etc., then the answer should likely be left alone.
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Since Stack Exchange is doing pretty well what it was meant to do, isn't a donate button worth it?  This would help support site expenses in a better manner. There would be people willing to donate, since the series of sites has done so much for the world. It's not easy to manage something like this so efficiently. It's perfect and deserves some crowd funding/donations.