"Unanswered" filter is cleared on returning to list. Can it be made sticky?

Whereas the other filter flags are 'sticky', the 'unanswered' flag is not. So when you return to the list to find more unanswered questions conforming to your filter selection, then you have to set it again. Please could this be corrected.

1 Answer
Nov 23, 2017

As far as I know, no.

Explanation:

As it turns out, the team designed the filters to work that way back when they designed the filter system.

  • Unanswered and Need double-checking # -># not sticky
  • Practice problems and Conceptual questions #-># sticky

The rationale here was that the filters for practice problems and conceptual questions were more of a general preference thing.

For example, if a contributor sets the Conceptual questions filter to 'on', then that would pretty much hide all the questions that do not fall into that category from the feed, regardless if they have been answered or not.

By comparison, the Unanswered and Need double-checking filters are more restrictive in the sense that they target specific questions based on their temporary status.

So one could say that the sticky filters are a macro way of sorting and the non-sticky filters are a micro way of sorting.

To use an (imperfect) analogy, the sticky filters are supposed to sort based on the genre of the movie, i.e. drama versus horror, for example, and the non-sticky filters are supposed to sort based on the movie, i.e. if you're a horror fan, the macro choice, you can choose to watch Psycho, Frankenstein, The Exorcist, and so on. which would be the micro choice.

Long story short, changing the filter system would require a lot of work, which basically means that this is automatically a very, very low priority project.

The team can't change the way the filters work without doing some major-league restructuring of the entire filter system, which would most likely affect other systems as well, so for all intended purposes, the answer to your question is 'no'.

As always, this does not mean that they won't do it at some point in the future, but as far as I can tell, that won't happen anytime soon.