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Add ignore option for individual games or devs

A topic by Christiaan Moleman created Jun 22, 2022 Views: 9,711 Replies: 10

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Christiaan Moleman2 years ago (13 edits) (+9)

It would be nice if there was an option to mark specific games or developers as Ignored when browsing itchio so they don't show up in your recommendations or other pages. When I open the Browse (Popular) page it seems to be almost exclusively jump scare horror games (a sub-genre I personally don't care about) and things like "poop killer" (???)... I would like a way to filter out these games I'm not interested in, because as it stand this makes the Browse page essentially useless to me when 90% is stuff I can tell from just the title or thumbnail I don't want.

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Christiaan Moleman2 years ago (7 edits) (+7)

On that note, it would help a lot also if you could filter by negative Tags or search terms.

Right now it seems you cannot say "show me everything except this". The Browse page defaults to 90% Horror because I guess that is popular, but if I'm not looking for horror games there's not much I can do because looking at the Tags page the same set of games seems to show up at the top of almost ALL tag pages. So because YouTube loves screaming at jump-scare games it's almost impossible to find anything else on here without going to specific Collections or some highly specific non-horror Tags. That seems not great, as far as discoverability goes.

Itchio does a commendable job of making the curated front page selection much more eclectic and catering to a wide range of quality games, but it seems to me it would still be good if ONE type of games didn't completely dominate the rest of the site.

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Christiaan Moleman2 years ago (2 edits) (+6)

In some older threads it has been suggested that you can do this by typing "?exclude=tg.nameofthing" but I don't think I need to explain that if the only way to do something is to type obscure hard to remember text commands into a url and there's no button or other interface element that also does this then it is not really a feature and still needs to be added. Itchio already has so many good sorting tools... I get that you're a small team and have limited bandwidth for adding new features but why has more robust exclusive filtering still not been added after all this time? Especially when its absence is negatively affecting the experience of using the site in such a big way?

(it's certainly not just me, judging by all the similar request threads going back years)

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Late Summer Winds2 years ago (1 edit) (+2)

Maybe those arguments could be added automatically to the link as you click in a set of available filtering options, like you can do on, e.g., GOG or that site that tracks massive Itchio bundles.

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Christiaan Moleman2 years ago (3 edits) (+2)

To expand on that last point, let's say you were to use above obscure text command, that you can only find by unearthing a forum thread from 2017 or being told directly, to filter out horror games: https://itch.io/games?exclude=tg.horror

That works for that one tag (if you happen to know this command), but what if you want to filter out multiple tags??? Maybe I want games that are not horror and also not pixel art, or visual novels or who knows what... Do you add a comma? Does it even support more than one tag at all? This is a pretty clear example where there really needs to be an interface for this so you can easily combine different filters, positive or negative, to get the results you want.

Perhaps look at Random Bundle Game for inspiration: https://randombundlegame.com/

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Unsilicon2 years ago(+1)

Indeed, I feel the same way, itch always recommends horror games to me on the home(maybe not, but to be honest, those games are always weird).

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Zireael0743 days ago

Years later but it's still needed

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redonihunter43 days ago(+1)

If you are on desktop and are willing to use a client side solution, my project can do some of this. I think it will be a while, till Itch presents a server side option for such things.

It is three things. A button for that obscure url thingy (It is an unpacked browser extension for chrome. The selected tag stays selected.) Buttons for the genres to filter them out (only by main genre. It is a tampermonkey script, so you need an extension that can run tampermonkey scripts).

And the last one is another tampermonkey script that does exactly what you want: ignore option for individual games or devs You hover your mouse over an item and press a key. The item or items of that dev go poof. Or get mirrored, turned grey or whatever - it is css.

I should update the description of the project a bit to emphasize the third tool, but I struggle how to screenshot what the third tool does. It is by far the most powerful and useful in my opinion.

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Christiaan Moleman43 days ago

Interesting. Will have to give that a try. Though I still hope itchio can build some more filter options into the official site too.

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redonihunter43 days ago

leafo said something on the lines that the search features are worked on. But no specifics. There was this overhaul a short while ago. But I would think that any changes would be done to the actual search button.

The stuff discussed in threads is usually about the browse features and this is tags and filtering or lack of filtering.

I do hope they improve the recommendation features. But I suspect this is difficult, as their algorithm would have to evalute games better. And since tags are dev chosen, they lack accuracy. Also, only 11 tags. Steam has 20 tags that are user chosen. That's a ton more accuracy to work with for recommendations by tags.

Oh, and don't spoil your browsing experience too much. It is just so easy to hide a lot of games with this. I added all the basic functions to the tool, including togging it "off". I really should rework the description of the tools. Should you try it and have an idea for a screenshot that shows what it can do, let me know. The other two tools were easy.

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Benevolentwanderer22 days ago

Used the official Suggestion function to suggest almost exactly this right now, because not having the option is actively decreasing the chances I buy things on Itch.io.... because in order to buy an item, you have to see it exists....

Any staff member reading this: my recommended demonstration is to turn on "see adult content" and, with no other filters active, browse "Comics" > "Newest"

Full respect to the 3-5 creators making 90% of the entries there, but I can basically guarantee I will never, ever be interested in buying their works! Since I would hazard a guess most of their patrons will probably never, ever be interested in buying the adult-only content I would want to buy, they'd probably appreciate the feature too!

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