I open up "Visual Novels" and am suddenly flooded with what looks like pornographic pictures/covers here and there. Is there a way to look for Visual Novels that doesn't have such filthy covers on them? Thanks and God bless!
You can go to your user settings (click the dropdown next to your username in the top right corner, click "Settings"), scroll down to "Content" and you can uncheck the box that says "Show content marked as adult in search & browse".
I don't know if this will help much since I'm sure there's a lot of suggestive content that isn't marked NSFW.
Actually, that's very much on purpose: so that creators don't flood support with questions of why they can't seem to find their own games on the site. Feel free to make a feature request, but unfortunately this is a common occurrence in other regards, and support is busy enough fielding more legitimate questions.
On any browse page, like https://itch.io/games/genre-visual-novel you can append /sfw to apply a “not-NSFW” filter to the results –> https://itch.io/games/genre-visual-novel/sfw
Likewise, you can append /nsfw to do the opposite
The reason why publishing an NSFW project causes the NSFW games to show up on your account by default is because many people who publish NSFW games would attempt to search for their own game, not see it, then message support thinking something is wrong with their account or our system. This was the easiest way to reduce the load on our team and clear up any confusion about how projects are indexed.
Hope that makes sense.