How to block a specific post category

December 6, 2019 12:18 PM

I'm grateful for the fact that I can block US politics posts. However, for mental health reasons, I really need to not see any Metafilter posts about the current environmental catastrophe - climate change, microplastics, mass extinction etc - even just the headline. This is not about keeping my head in the sand; I have taken personal and political action on these fronts in many ways. But reading about it has a profound emotional effect on me and can ruin my entire day, sometimes more than that. When I'm on tumblr, I use TumblrSavior and XKit to make sure I don't see posts about these topics - is there a greasemonkey script or similar that will take these posts completely off the front page for me?

I know that there's been talk before about the doomy tone of these threads, which is very pertinent - reading comment threads here has made me suicidal in the past (I am in touch with a mental health team and continue to receive both psychological and psychiatric treatment for my depression/anxiety). But even though I am now mostly wise enough not to read the threads themselves, the posts themselves stress me out and upset me.

posted by Acheman to MetaFilter-Related at 12:18 PM (3 comments total)

So, one thing you can do to try to cut some of this off the front page is use the My MeFi feature (there's a link in the menu on the front page of the blue) and set up some excluded tags. "climate" is an obvious starting point but you can toss in a bunch of variations and related terms.

That does depend on matching tags that exist on a post, though, rather than a full-text search of the post text, so it's going to be porous and imperfect. I think the idea of a third-party script as you suggest is the likeliest way to get more consistent blocking going on, so if folks have suggests for specific scripts or extensions that are good for this that'd probably the best route.

The wiki has a list of scripts but I'm not sure what the status of most of those are, since there was an issue with one of the major script hosting sites going away in the last few years. May provide a good starting point for searching even if the individual links are all working, though.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:24 PM on December 6, 2019 [2 favorites]

Hmmm, yeah, even without the full-text search issue, the main problem with My MeFi as a solution, for me, is that it's not the default landing page, or the page that's accessed if I click on the header link. That means that it's hard to get there without first going to the 'Recent Posts' page, so I'd likely end up seeing the posts tagged 'climate' anyway. If there were a way to make it into my default view, it would be another matter, although I'd still be interested in a user script, since as you say it would potentially give more powerful blocking capabilities.
posted by Acheman at 2:13 PM on December 6, 2019

No built-in site way to have it be the default view at this point, but I know at least a few folks have set it up as just literally a bookmark/shortcut on their various browser/devices to bypass the front page for filtering purposes. May be worth a shot and the muscle-memory training time if you think that would help some.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:15 PM on December 6, 2019 [2 favorites]