Post by kurochan in The ability to filter OUT genres

Viewing post in The ability to filter OUT genres

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.

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redonihunter26 days ago

If you talk about my solution, you can read the source code. And since you are a developer, I assume you would understand it.

The gui for the exclude url string is basically a one liner that uses a feature of browser extensions to make that modifier persist. If you do not care for persistence, use a bookmark.

And the script is an interface to utilize this mechanic in a comfortable way.

@-moz-document domain("itch.io") {
div.game_cell:has(a[href*="projectname"] ) { display: none }
div.game_cell:has(a[href*="projectname"] ) { display: none }
}

I talked about my Itch projects analytics. It shows me how many people land on my page.

sorry, clearly I’m not addressing professional programmers…

I could not follow your line of thought. Also I am not a professional programmer. The feature was made 8 years ago by leafo. It was and is an unofficial, undocumented feature. That means it has no gui. And you will only find about it, if you search comments or the net.

Why this never was expanded is not known. There is only speculation. But the feature also was never removed.

facts are facts

I asked you to name game platforms that have the feature. So please offer some facts.

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Hextonic14 days ago(+2)

I know this isn't my conversation to be had. But I can list the two platforms I use, that have proper tag filtering. GOG and Steam.
Needless to say. only the most successful storefronts, offer this to their customers.

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redonihunter14 days ago

Very good. I asked this question several times over the years to people that loudly proclaimed it was a standard feature everyone had. None of those people has answered me.

Took me a while to figure out how GOG does this. If I had not known it should be there, I probably would not have known they can do it. Similar to how I only know about Steam having this feature only because of discussions here.

My guess is, that it has to do with the mechanics under the hood. Steam and GOG have very few tags. It's maybe 200, give or take. Managing negated tags might be easy or cheap or both. Plus I guess those tags are a lot more accurate, because the are curated somehow, so it is also a lot more usefull.

Compare to Itch with thousands of tags and no curation at all, and a catalogue much, much bigger. GOG has 12000 games. That's less than 1% of Itch's catalogue size. Steam has 240000 games.

When I last searched, I could not find that feature in game stores other than Steam. In a store like the Google Play Store you cannot even combine more than one tag, let alone exclude tags. Many other stores did not have tags as seen on Steam or Itch at all. And from what I could gather, the exclude option on GoG is a newish feature. I see comments from people wishing for this feature even in 2025, so maybe it is new or people did not recognise the possibility. (You need to click the open eye near a tag.)

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Hextonic14 days ago

Yeeah.. honestly. I think itch is fine for my purposes anyway.. XD
As long as I can filter out the visual novel tag with "?exclude"

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redonihunter14 days ago

My observation was and is, that some games use visual novel as a tag, despite not being a visual novel (opinions will vary). The worst I have seen in such mistaggings was a developer tagging a game as point&click, because you had to click things with the mouse. For visual novels, some tag it, just because they used the renpy engine or because it is a story rich game.

I made two tampermonkey scripts that might help you, if you are willing and able to use a browser extension that can run such scripts.

Since visual novel is a genre, it can be filtered trivially on client side. But only if the main genre was set as visual novel.

And the other script gives abililty to filter games and developers individually. This is handy to filter away the content of your library and all the games you have already examined. Should you visit the same places every week, that will de-clutter those pages far better and more efficient than a mere tag filter. And you do not even need to hide those games. You can give them a red border or make them greyscale or whatever you like.

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