Filters in Microsoft Tech Community

[Michael Holste]

You can use filters in the Microsoft Tech Community to help discover and sort content. You’ll find these filters on the Home page as well as on each community page. They allow you to allow you to sort by Newest, Popular, Experts, and Unanswered.

 The filters can be applied whether signed in or unauthenticated

Here’s a quick guide to how they work:

Newest: Just as you’d expect. This view shows you the most recent conversations.

Popular: See what’s hot and what posts are getting the most attention. This is determined

Experts: This filter shows discussions containing MVP and/or Microsoft Employee engagement. You can identify MVPs and Microsoft Employees by the green (MVP) or blue (Employee) badge around their profile picture.

MVP badges (Green) and Microsoft Employee badges (Blue)

Unanswered: As the name suggests, this filter shows you only the posts that have not received a reply. This is a great way to help answer community questions, showcase your expertise, and rank up in the community.

Keep an eye on the Tech Community blog for the next installment of the Favorite Things series and for upcoming changes to Tech Community. 

[Sergei Baklan]

What is missed that's filtering of the threads with unread posts.

[Anna Chu]

Hi @Sergei Baklan, we don't have a filter for 'unread' but we do give you the visibility to unread conversations and replies via the grey stripe on the left hand side for conversations. You can also see a counter of the number of unread posts within the Spaces view to give you a overview of where you may have missed the most activity. Once you have read the conversation, the grey stripe goes away.

[Sergei Baklan]

Hi @Anna Chu, - yes, but... You have no counters for blogs, to know if someone commented it you may only through strips (which are not necessary on first pages) or by email (which easy to skip since I have tons of them every day), or by RSS.

For conversation spaces counter shows what something was unread (sometimes with mistakes by the way) and follow to grey strips is good enough if you have few of unread posts. If a lot of them and you have enough time to check what was new in previous few days - it's an option to open conversations in new tabs (could be dozens of them) or open conversation, return back, click few "more" and repeat again. And if you check conversations not sequentially, but first newest and most interesting, less new and less interesting with another cycle, etc - that's bit annoying. It looks like "unread" filter could help.

I usually use RSS and return to web interface if only skip a lot (RSS doesn't keep entire history), thus perhaps didn't find the best way of working with web UI - as for now it's too many clicks.