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Using Advanced filters

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Why should you use filters?

People use social media to post about all kinds of stuff. Filters help you separate the signal from the noise to make your feeds more relevant. They can also be used to make sure content you don't want never makes it in to your feeds. Getting the most out of filters can require a little bit of creativity on your part, but once finely-tuned, they can be extremely useful and time saving.

Two kinds of filters: Include and Exclude

  1. Include filters - set rules for what words must be used in order for an update to make it in to the feed
  2. Exclude filters - set rules for what words must NOT be used - essentially a blacklist of words or phrases you don't want to let in

You can add an include filter and/or an exclude filter to each Author Group or Search Topic in your account. You only get one include and one exclude filter per author/topic, but the syntax used to write filters gives you all the flexibility you should need within those two filters.

How an update makes it through the filters

As each new update is pulled in, it is run through your filters. The logic for determining if it passes the filters and will be displayed in your feed goes like this:

  • The include filter must evaluate to true or not exist AND the exclude filter must not evaluate to true or not exist in order for the update to pass the filters and make it into the feed

The table below shows all possible combinations of how this works:

Include Filter Exclude Filter Result
True True Fail
True False Pass
True — Pass
False True Fail
False False Fail
False — Fail
— True Fail
— False Pass
— — Pass

Filter syntax guide

Our filter syntax is designed to be easy to use without having to read any instructions (like these) but to also provide advanced features that give you extra power if you need it and want to learn how to use it. Here are a few of the basic rules to keep in mind:

  • "and" and "or" are your two magic words - they do what you would expect
  • Groups of words enclosed in quotations will force a match on the entire phrase
  • Parenthesis can be used to form complex logic tests: (apples and oranges) or bananas
  • We follow standard order of operations rules when evaluating combinations of and/or operators
  • Punctuation and uppercase/lowercase are ignored - so "Squid!" will match "squid."
  • # and @ are treated as letters rather than punctuation - so "#obama" will not match "@obama"
  • Partial word matches happen automatically - so "auto" will match "automatic"

We will likely add more tricks like this to the syntax over time. If you have an idea for one, let us know about it.

Auto-correction

When you edit the text of a filter, we will attempt to make sense of what you've written. If you haven't entered the syntax just the way we like it, we'll edit for you automatically. Here's why this is usually a good thing:

  • By putting things in a standard format, there is no room for ambiguity as to what was meant
  • You can see the changes we make as soon as you click out of the edit box, so there is immediate feedback

Most of the time we understand want you meant and get the edits right. Occasionally you may need to go back and adjust things if our guess wasn't spot on. Here are a few examples of corrections we make:

apples, oranges, pears, grapes

becomes

"apples" and "oranges" and "pears" and "grapes"

Here's another examples:

dallas and ft worth or san antonio

becomes

"dallas" and "ft. worth" or "san antonio

Here's a quick run down of some of the things we're doing when we auto-correct your filters:

  • All words and phrases get put into quotes for clarity
  • Phrases are always separated by and and/or - so commas become or automatically
  • All punctuation is removed - we ignore it in our filtering process, so there is no point in showing it
  • Everything is made lowercase - filtering is not case sensitive so, again, no point in showing it
  • Parenthesis are automatically closed - this is one area that we don't always get right because we can't guess where the omitted parenthesis was supposed to go - but better to try to fix it than show an error, right?

More on filters

Maybe you want to check out these FAQ articles?