Inbox custom filter exclusion/inversion

[samhh]

My employer hosts their code on GitHub, so my inbox is a mix of work stuff and personal/open source stuff.

As a rule I'd like to be able to look at only work matters during the middle of weekdays and only personal matters otherwise. The former is achievable now with custom filters (e.g. org:my-org), however the latter is not owing to custom filter limitations.

Is there any appetite to address this, or is there some other solution I'm missing? Cheers!

[AntonOfTheWoods]

This is also a problem with repos that have activated dependabot, where you can get 10s of notifications per repo, drowning out everything useful.

[ian-h-chamberlain]

Also brought up in #48846 although I think this discussion is probably a better general solution that would also solve that.

[ian-h-chamberlain]

Just to help others searching for this issue with different keywords, at first I tried to find it by searching "negative filter" and "ignore filter", or something like that. The docs for issue/PR search don't seem to have a canonical name for this other than saying you can use the - syntax to "filter out" unwanted issues, or to "exclude" with NOT.

[driesvints]

@ian-h-chamberlain I'm sure this is what you meant but just want to note that's for issue/PR search and not notifications where reversing filters with - doesn't work.

[ian-h-chamberlain]

Right, I was just drawing a parallel to the filtering that does work in issue/PR search and hopefully making this discussion more searchable. Presumably, if notification filtering were implemented, it would use the same syntax as the ones I linked, but it does not work today.

[mkurz]

+1 Highly needed feature!

[nelson-parente]

+1 being able to exclude repos on notifications would make a huge difference.

[ADTC]

+1 came here for this in Notifications search. Tried adding - before keyword and before value. Nothing worked. Very much needed feature.

I think as a clunky workaround:

1. Create a positive filter to search for all unread notifications you don't want to see. (one-time setup)
2. Use the filter to find and mark them all as read.
3. Look at the Inbox for the remaining unread notifications.

Of course it won't work if you want to keep those notifications as unread until you're ready to read them.

[dsantos747]

+1 I'd love to add exclusion filters for notifications - for the exact same reason the OP mentioned

[lukens]

Yes, I'd also like it, for also the same reasons.

[Farenheith]

That's a really important feature to make inbox notification more usable, especially when you have dependabot activated in many repos

[EgorDuplensky]

I believe many people basically just do not use github notifications because of such a simple feature is missed.
I think very big percent of the users have some "main" repo they work on and some other "minor" repos.

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[segln]

The GitHub team clearly does not use the notifications feature they created.
Filters without a NOT operator? Wow.

[BadLiveware]

After our org migrated to github, notifications are essentially unusable for me for anything other than my org.

[olivierlemoal]

Still no negative filters after 4 years. As someone working in multiple orgs, the notification inbox is effectively unusable for separating work/personal contexts. The only workarounds I found involve the API (gh api /notifications --jq 'select(...)'), which defeats the purpose of having a web UI. Moved my personal projects to Codeberg where I can at least manage notifications sanely.

[krillmango]

• negation