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I am once again, asking for negative filters.

A topic by Mixxium created 99 days ago Views: 256 Replies: 9
Viewing posts 1 to 4
(2 edits) (+2)

I know this won't even be hardly seen, so I'll be quick here. Yes, I know about the exclude tagline for the url. No, it is not a suitable replacement for a NOT logical tag.

 You guys have been online for over 10 years now, and are one of the lead indie hosting websites, in fact for those of us who frequent and (I don't want to understate this) ABSOLUTELY LOVE your website, we all hate to see this site be looked at poorly. But personally I would never spend a dollar here, and will recommend friends do the same on this site singlehandedly because of stuff like this. 

We're not mocking you, and this shouldn't be rocket science, but negative filters are important for any person who uses your site, almost nobody only wants to see one kind of game, and almost nobody doesn't dislike at least one. 

But yeah, I figure this is gonna get some nothing response or just get deleted immediately, I just thought it was important to keep bringing it up that we aren't gonna shut up until you guys eventually do it, or somebody else does it better.

Did you use the feedback button and select Feature request?

We'd love any feedback you'd be willing to give. It can be about anything: new feature ideas, bug reports, or maybe you just don't like how something looks or works.
Thanks in advance! — @itchio
P.S. We do not develop the games on our platform. This form is not for contacting game developers, but for contacting itch.io.
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Feedback

This is community, so you talk to other users here. You can try animating other people to also use the feedback button.

If the feature is in actual high demand, maybe they put it on the to-do list. Such a thread in community every other week is not high demand. It is strong demand of a few people. Most users never ever visit community. Just look at the view counter of threads. A thread like this will get maybe 100 non-unique views.

(2 edits)

See you say that but not only is that what the topic is for (ideas and feedback for itch.io staff), but the only currently existing exclusion system was put in place this way 6 years ago on this very forum by this very method. https://itch.io/t/160014/can-i-use-exclusion-filters. If you don't actually use this website very often though I understand that, but I imagine I'm on the lower end of usage here. 

Tldr: You're kinda trippin.

You still talk to other users here.

The tagline of this section is: "Share your ideas and feedback for things you'd like to see itch.io do."

And not: "Give us your feature requests here, staff will read here and discuss it with you."

You are campaigning for that feature. I get it. But asking for the feature with the ask-for-a-feature-button would not hurt your cause, now would it?

Also, convincing people that the feature would be good might help too, so they also use the feature request button. 

My current opinion is, that this feature would not be as good as people envision it. And that a different feature would be better: hiding games you already know. And improving the recommendations section. Why are people complainging about tag exclusions? Imho because they use the browse filters, instead of recommendations and related games. And browse is populated with popular games, a user might not like very much. Like horror. The top games in any particular section you browse for are not changing very fast. Marking them as seen and not interested would also filter out unwanted games and might even improve the recommendations.

Look man, I've already done so, and what is a lot more important than sending a random feedback posts is getting the concept back in people's heads. It's been years since the last push and it would help itchio traffic by an incredible degree. (Also, I've seen this debated far too much, you cannot sell potatoes to someone who doesn't like potatoes by replacing his apples with potatoes, he's just going to get mad)

 And as to the "wouldn't be as good as we think" part after installing a fork that allows you to do just that (albeit in a way that is a massive pain to change what you want excluded), it's fucking awesome. I haven't had a better time on this website, the problem is it took 3 hours to set up and understand how it works, and if it ever broke then it's just done. 

Again tldr: Yes I know, and I have, you should do it too, and not try to downplay the idea like is done every time the topic is brought up, logical variables are important for searching and its been a decade. Let's push for this.

(1 edit)

Also, most people search through by tag, it's the best way to find things that you want when searching online for anything. You can't just expect people to play what you serve them and like it.

it would help itchio traffic by an incredible degree

Now, if you can convince Itch of this, they would have a bigger incentive to implement it.

most people search through by tag

Is there any reference for this?

Of course this is plausible, as browsing for tags will give you games that have at least one aspect you are looking for. But this does not mean, that people would also want to browse negative tags. I know that Steam has this feature, but I never ever heard of that feature before the discussions on Itch. I even had to look for the feature, because it its not that obvious how to do it. If you click on a tag on Steam you do not get to a place where you can negativly select other tags.

A game I like is Backpack Hero. It has these tags 

Role Playing, Card Game, Strategy,  2D, Cute, Deck Building, Dungeon Crawler, Pixel Art, Roguelike, Roguelite, Turn-based

Is there a scenario in which I would find this game better/faster/whatever with the use of a negative tag? There do be scenarios, where I might miss this game, because I used a negative filter. Maybe I dislike "cute" games and negativly selected "cute".

I wonder how many people even know how to use - on a regular, non tag based search engine. Many people do not even grasp that you can enter freestyle tags in the browse box, or that there are two search boxes on Itch. It took me months to realize that. But I was used to Steam, and tag searching is not a big thing there, at least not for me.

I am not here to languish and spread despair however... I genuinely bring you HOPE. For there is a fork for itchio that does this very function, and even assuming the worst, it should continue to work for a while. It really does show how awesome this site can be with just even the slightest bit of extra quality of life to be able to use the site like this.

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Just want to filter the alphabet soup out of adult games... Just saying.

It's fine if people like that stuff, not going to judge, but I personally find it disgusting. Sad that I have to go somewhere like f95 just to filter it out.

(+1)

Make sure to also use the Feedback button on the left like dude before said. The best way to make things change is putting your voice out there and doing what you can with things like the Feedback menu. As kinda messed up as it is that we are forced to ask for a negative filter option.