I’m trying to take a break from a certain stressful subject, so I followed the instructions for muting the tag, but threads tagged that way still show up in the “Unread” list and under “Suggested” at the bottom of threads.
Bug, or am I doing something wrong, or misunderstanding the feature?
This is my canned reply, I’ll come back later if that doesn’t help.
Steps to Mute a Tag or Category (Forum)
Click your user icon next to the menu.
Click the last Icon for Profile
Click Preferences
Click Tracking
The lower right hand box is for Muted Tags.
Enter tru and you’ll be prompted for trump. Click trump.
Click Save Changes
.
.
To Ignore a user from Preferences
Click your Profile Avatar in the upper right hand corner
Click the Profile icon (at the bottom of the icons)
Click the 
Gear icon for Preferences
Click the Users menu item
Click Add button under Ignored
Type in the username
Select a Timeframe, which is a pain on a phone.
Click Ignore
That’s exactly what I did, and the notifications page shows that it’s muted, but I’m still seeing posts with the fucking “Trump” tag all over the place.
You appear to have everything setup correctly. You might need to clear your cache for the SDMB, but it shouldn’t be needed.
I’m going to moved this thread to Site Feedback as it appears to be a bug. I’ll also do some testing.
So I just selected “trump” under the Muted Tags and then selected Politics & Elections to check. No threads tagged as Trump.
But if I click Top I see Trump tagged threads. This is a bug.
I asked Ed Zotti to bump this up to Discourse Tech Support.
I verified the trump I saw on the list aren’t ones I’m tracking or watching.
In my experience those thread recommendations at the bottom are entirely their own thing, divorced from other site settings and preferences. If you ignore a poster, for example, their threads are still featured down below. It doesn’t surprise me at all that muting would be similarly disregarded. Discourse seems to have a basic design bias of “come on, engage, it’s not healthy to avoid stuff, everybody just get along okay?”
It took forever for them to accept the utility and value of ignoring at all.
Now I’m being shown that there are 2 Unread threads, and when I click on that link I see 8 threads, all but one of which are tagged as Trump, which is still muted. This seems like a bug, too.
Given that “Unread” consists precisely of those threads you have set to “tracking” or “watching” status, it’s unclear to me that muting a tag that applies to some of those tracked/watched threads should be effective.
On one hand, you’ve told Discourse: “I am directly especially interested in this particular thread”. On the other hand you’ve also told Discourse: “I’m explicitly disinterested in this kind of thread.”
Faced with those inputs If I was designing the system I would say the thread-specific expression of interest should override the generalized expression of disinterest.
Which is exactly what Discourse does.
My proposed remedy:
Go to your unread list, click the check/check/dot icon at upper left near the word "Topic, then check the box next to each want-to-ignore thread. Then click the [Dismiss [#]] button at upper or lower right. In the "are you sure?pop-up, check the box that says “Stop tracking these topics so they never show up as unread for me again”. Then click [Dismiss] on the popup.
That will kill your following on all those threads and allow mute to take over from there.
You’ll have to do this a few times, like every couple of days until every offensive thread that you’ve previously followed gets revived by somebody.
But I’ll be that’ll be pretty easy. You might have to un-follow 100 threads the first time, but probably only 3 the second time and their may not even be a third time.
ETA sorta …
After the first bulk killing of tracked/watched-but-also-muted threads as described above you can go to the advanced search page and do a search for your undesired tag and also for “I’m watching”. From that list there’s no way to do a mass checkbox selection, but if there are few enough such threads you can click each one then unfollow it. Then repeat the search for the offensive tag and “I’m tracking”.
At least from those two lists you could identify the ones you suspect are in danger of being revived (and thereby enter your unread list again) and kill just them.
This is a good point that I hadn’t considered, although conceivably the software could allow one to choose which – mute or tracking – would override the other.
[Pedantic nitpick: disinterested means impartial, uninterested means not interested. One of my pet peeves, but it’s pretty much a lost battle for most of the public.]
As for your suggestions for how to fix it, thanks for taking the trouble. But I only wanted to block noticing TFG for a day, not forever (would that I could!). In an attempt to maintain some level of sanity, my wife and I try to avoid seeing or hearing anything about politics on Shabbat.
Yesterday we took a nice 2.5 hour ride up to North Conway, NH, to ride on the Conway Scenic Railroad. Unfortunately, New Hampshirites are very politically active, and there were tons of yard signs of every stripe all along the way. It was tough to focus on the beautiful fall foliage and completely ignore the signs. But we had a good time.
Damn. I even know of that difference and try to use it correctly. IIRC you (or somebody) was fussing about that in a rant / pet peeve thread recently.
Can someone confirm that this bug has been corrected? I just tried again, and it seems that the tag in question is blocked in places I had been seeing it before.
Woohoo this works! I just muted a certain word seen in too many places today and those threads (if they are tagged correctly) are now gone.
That is excellent news. Thank you for updating the thread.
Also thanks to whoever at Discourse noted and fixed the bug.
Okay, now all Trump-tagged threads seem to be muted, except “Is Trump Confused?” which shows up with unread threads at the bottom of whatever thread I’m reading. No others, though.
Did you check what your following status on that thread is? If it’s showing up in the unread list, your following status isn’t [Normal].