Ignoring specific forums

[_dandy_]

vBulletin (which this site runs on) doesn't seem to have an option to automatically ignore a specific forum for its "What's New" filter, which is typically everybody's main entry point into this site (after login). However I've found a way to do the equivalent of that, that I'd like to share.

But first a bit of background to describe the problem (sorry about the wall of text).

I visit this site and tend to stick with the "what's new" link. This is generally great if you just want to quickly catch up with the new threads or threads that have had something new added to them since your last visit. Anything that hasn't had new content just isn't part of the list. So the list is kept as small as possible, while at the same time bringing you up to speed with everything everyone had to share.

The "problem" is - and this is not the first time I see this - when someone visits a forum with lots of very old threads under it, and decides to post a message in each thread. I won't get into specifics (I've brought this up before and got some very negative responses), but there are threads that have been started more than 10 years ago, were active for a few months, and then abandoned - there's nothing wrong with that, this is how most forums work.

Then some person thinks it would be fun to "bump those threads up", after a *decade* or more of inactivity. From then on, unless you visit each one of those threads, the What's New page will consider all of that to be "new" content and you'll be stuck with it, until you visit potentially dozens and dozens of these pages just to make them go away. Needless to say, that's very selfish of whoever brought back all of those old threads.

If you think something is worth bringing back from the archives, please, by all means, start a new thread. That's the polite thing to do. But reviving old forum threads is considered bad etiquette. This is generally agreed upon, discussed in many places, and isn't something I'm making up for my own self-interests.

In any case, the bottom line is that the "what's new" page now contains dozens upon dozens of "new" posts that are really not relevant to anyone but to the recent poster.

The saving grace is that these threads all happen to be in the same forum, and the forum in itself isn't of particular interest to myself. Solution: Get the What's New page to filter out that forum altogether. If that's okay with you, read on...

Every forum has an ID that is shown (typically) in your browser's status bar when you hover the mouse over it (for example, the What's New page shows a grid of threads, with the Forum as the last column); the link for the forum will show up as http://.../...f=### where "###" is a number (important: if the link contains multiple numbers, the one identifying the forum follows "f=")

If we assume the undesired forum's ID is 999, then browsing to:

http://www.ahsforum.com/forum/search...ew&exclude=999

...will essentially load the "ordinary" What's New page, but exclude any content from that particular forum.

Problem solved.

The only thing is that I see no option to make that a default in my own profile. But I can live with making this my new permanent link to this site.

The drawback is that if you ever go back to visiting the main page without the filter, all those items will come back again...

Debating whether that poster's spamming of the forums is good behavior or not (which affects *everyone*) is a debate I do not wish to engage in. The only reason I opened this thread is to share the technical knowledge.

I hope this helps someone.