I noticed when filtering questions by my tags that the tagged filter acts like a SQL AND condition. For example, I can filter down to vb.net javascript and php, I will get results back for this query against the site (questions returned all have those tags). However, if I leave my tags alone ( by default they are vb, javascript, php, c++, c#, vbscript, and python) then no questions are returned at all. As a user, I would expect SO to return any questions that match any of my tags, but the way it seems to me is that it returns only questions that match ALL of my tags.

I also just discovered the [intags:mine] filter while writing this, which does what I thought the filter should do by default anyway. I'm of the opinion that this should be the default for SO. Does anyone really want a question that matches all of their favourite tags by default (no advantage if the particular user has a lot of favourite tags)? What would be the rationale by having it act like this by default?

  • @Hans Passant Stack Overflow by default takes all of your tags into consideration when filtering a question, that's what I meant by "leave them alone". My point is that I think it is asinine to return questions that have all of my tags against them, it should default to "a question that contains one or more of my tags". Yes I know I can change it, but it didn't answer my original question in this post. I hope that makes it a bit more clearer what I am talking about? – D. Foley Jul 5 '17 at 11:24

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