Possible to not show messages in a followed category as 'new'?

[hendersj]

All I’ve been able to find is related to searching, but this one is more about filtering the new messages feed.

I’ve got a user who asked whether there’s a way to filter messages in a specific category by topic.

For some context - we use the RSS Polling plugin to pull announcements from our news website. The messages come in, we close them for comments, and list them. Per the RSS polling configuration, the posts are designated as written by a specific user in the user table (they get to the RSS feed on our news site by way of e-mail from the user who creates the notifications with an automated process).

The challenge is that these users also, potentially, are participants in the forum itself.

The user wants to block particular announcements based on a subject line substring from showing up in the new topics feed. He doesn’t want to stop following the category, and he doesn’t want to block seeing the user’s other content. The automated process uses a consistent format for what becomes the topic of the post, so filtering by substring would be sufficient.

Is there a way to accomplish this?

He says it’s not a big issue for him, but something he’d like to see if he can do so he can focus on the announcements he cares about.

[Moin]

If I have understood the problem correctly, adding a tag that the user can then mute could work.

The RSS polling plugin offers an option to add tags per feed. If not all topics created by a feed should get the same tag, you could also try using the auto-tagging by watched words or manually add tags.

[hendersj]

I believe you had understood correctly. I’ll give this some thought, but I think this probably is an approach we could use (unique tags for that section would be needed, since we use tags for identifying Linux distributions and the announcements are also for those linux distributions.)

Appreciate the suggestion!