No, I mean filtering in the other direction: pointing out what games you want to see, not what you want to exclude. That's how itch.io is designed to work. Try browsing by specific tags, or tag combinations. Yes, yes, I get it. You want to see "mostly everything except for these specific genres". But again, that's not how itch.io is designed, and until this problem can be solved, using the site the way it's made to be used would help, even if it's not exactly what you want.
You said "filter needs to pint out what games you want to see, not what you want to exclude". But you forgot the crucial thing - games has several tags, not only one. Imagine I want to find Puzzle game without Anime tag - why I can't do such simple thing?.Is it to difficult to implement, really? That's a shame for such popular website.
That one actually is an easy thing. In that other thread it sounded, as if it was coded in an hour. But if there is an easy method of exluding one tag, I did not stumble upon it yet.
https://itch.io/games/genre-puzzle?exclude=tg.anime
Maybe you had a typo. And for that specific exclusion, there were only like 2 games filtered out on the first page.
It is not a workaround. It was specifically coded to do what it does. Scroll down a bit, there is the link to the 5yo thread.
Maybe that feature is not requestet that much to warrent coding the version with multiple tags and search integration. Or even integration of that quick unadvertised addition to browse. I did not even know, that Steam could do such a thing. And I bet most people do not even know they can use negative search terms in search engines with a - sign. Because that is, what tag exclusion is: negated search terms.
I mean it's a workaround bc there is no UI to turn this on.
I personally use excluding filters all the time, in Steam and many other programs. It's a big QoL feature for better searching.
Moreover, on this website, it's a BIG NEED feature - just open the popular games tab, it flooded completely with horror games. Sometimes I don't want to play a certain genre, BUT I always know what I certainly do not want to play. It's where this feature comes in handy.
This doesn't work. Let's say I want to play an RPG. If I try to filter for RPGs, all I find are horror "RPGs" and visual novel "RPGs". Without the ability to filter out tags, it's impossible to find the kinds of games I want, because all these creators tag their horror and visual novel games with every other tag as well.