itch.io

As you stated, this topic is 5 years old. And yet the number of users who are continuing to request this feature still rises higher and higher without any formal response from itch themselves. And no, a community mod does NOT qualify as a “formal response” from the company.

As for why saying “No justification” is a valid statement, the fact that the URL structure exists but even after so many users posting constant requests for this feature to be a physical in-page GUI feature and not just a hidden URL feature despite the devs providing support but never actually finishing the job of fully integrating a system into the site’s GUI…. yeah that is the part that is why I also said it comes across as “sheer laziness”. You claim to be a pro web dev as well, but would you ever willingly roll out a half finished product and then claim you’re looking out for what’s best for your users? No, I doubt you would. Unless you were lying about being a fellow “pro web developer” you would release a finished product or pull it completely from your store since leaving it would damage your image when your mods of your online store site are telling the users that its only some “secret feature” when any other web dev who can identify an excuse when they hear one would look at it and think it was just “incomplete” and not “secret”.

As for other web-based stores like itch, the only stores I’ve seen who DON’T have an “exclude tags” filter option are store platforms that it wouldn’t make sense to have it from a functionality POV. But even those sites don’t pull the lame cover up line of “its a secret feature” since many of their users would call BS on that like I’m doing here.

Just so you know and so its on record, I’m NOT trying to pick a fight with you or be rude. I’m being critical of what I – as a user of itch.io and as a professional software engineer – am personally witnessing as a blatant excuse for attempting to justify ignoring user requests to actually apply the finishing pieces of what clearly looks like an incomplete feature that was rolled out before it was ever finished. I have no idea who in the chain of command at itch.io holds the control over this feature’s “completion status” verification, but it is clear they failed to properly verify that status at the UX Design stage or the maybe the executives pulled the plug on the task during the Development stage. Whatever the case is, it does operate like an incomplete feature that was rolled out far too soon. If you’re a pro web dev like you claim then I would expect you to be able to see that. Also, since the chat showed you as a mod, you do have the power to let your liaison at itch.io know that this is being viewed by their users as a missing or incomplete feature. (if I were in your shoes, I would tell them it is “missing” since the GUI filter component is in fact “missing” from the page UI.) If they actually cared what their users feel and want and request, they would in fact add that physical UI component to the page UI.

This has to be the weirdest way a mod had to response. Yes, I know. You’re a mod, not a dev, not much you can do about it.

But isn’t it funny that the developers failed to apply a globally norm feature with such high demand? Not to mention that, as someone that has experience in software/web development field, this feature is far from being any hard to implement. You just need a few buttons and a database script.

The least I wanted to know are but two small things, what are the devs up to in all these years, and why do they refuse to implement this basic feature?

so you’re saying we should be relying on 3rd party solutions that we have no idea what they do under the hood and simply trust that such a 3rd party tool with zero official safety stamp of approval from itch.io won’t actually be secretly scanning our search criteria from the URLs it digests and believe that it isn’t going to generate its own analytical data or maybe even include some sort of search tracking feature? Yeah I don’t think you guys really get why blindly trusting 3rd party tools and the fact that the company itch.io isn’t adding this feature in an official capacity is really a pretty major safety risk.

I get that the inconsistent tag list is due to the fact that the platform allows sellers to list their own custom tags, but the reason I’m being as forceful with my responses isn’t only because of this feature being handled officially thru manual modification of the URL by the user – which if any of you were UX Designers and didn’t cringe at that then I gotta wonder where you learned what proper UX Design is… – You should NEVER have your users interact with the website by forcefully modifying the URL. If you don’t know why this rule is important, then clearly you don’t get that this is how hackers hijack websites and even do forced injections into databases. I’m starting to wonder if anyone who as replied to my posts here have ever even learned what the standards are for full-stack development and why if you don’t create an on-page UI element to modify the URL but instead force the user to interact with the page by directly modifying the URL params… sorry, clearly I’m not addressing professional programmers…

my last thing I’ll say is this: If you don’t get why the use of 3rd party tools for this feature that should instead have an official method provided by the itch.io dev team is a problem is that it opens up the door to anyone who has even a little bit of programming experience or even AI slop tools to be released that may or may not have features that can be malicious in nature. This is a very possible security risk for the users of the platform.

Oh and redonihunter, nobody cares if you “know your analytics”… facts are facts. security risks are a danger no matter how small, thus relying on a 3rd party tool for this isn’t an acceptable option for those of us who value our online safety and security and privacy.