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.