I’ve been a regular visitor to Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites over the years, and while I’ve mostly enjoyed the experience, I’ve been frustrated by the lack of control I have over what questions I see. I’m not really interested in looking at questions that have already been closed, or that have a negative score, but there’s no native facility for filtering questions like this.

I finally spent the time learning just enough JavaScript ~~~to hurt myself~~~ to put together a pair of scripts that let me present the questions that way I want:

sx-hide-questions⌗

The sx-hide-questions script will hide:

  • Questions that are closed
  • Questions that are marked as a duplicate
  • Questions that have a score below 0

Because I wanted it to be obvious that the script was actually doing something, hidden questions don’t just disappear; they fade out.

These behaviors (including the fading) can all be controlled individually by a set of global variables at the top of the script.

sx-reorder questions⌗

The sx-reorder-questions script will sort questions such that anything that has an answer will be at the bottom, and questions that have not yet been answered appear at the top.

Installation⌗

If you are using the Tampermonkey extension, you should be able to click on the links to the script earlier in this post and be taken directly to the installation screen. If you’re not running Tampermonkey, than either (a) install it, or (b) you’re on your own.

You can find both of these scripts in my sx-question-filter repository.

Caveats⌗

These scripts rely on the CSS classes and layout of the Stack Exchange websites. If these change, the scripts will need updating. If you notice that something no longer works as advertised, please feel free to submit pull request with the necessary corrections!