Look, I don't care that femboys and dickgirls and furries and tentacle porn and monsters and people smothering each other in their collective fart clouds, and games made for people to enjoy it all, are out there. I'm glad we've reached a point of tolerance in humanity for all of it to exist and you won't catch me judging anyone for enjoying it.
It's not for me. I'm not the target audience. That's just as acceptable as anyone who is in that target audience. I'm never going to be the one to click on these games, let alone play them. I don't want to pretend they don't exist, I just want to be able to narrow my search results to things I would actually enjoy playing.
I'm not here touting myself as a saint with no weird interests btw. I'm not a judgmental pants-on-head dumbfuck. Someday I'll make a 3D sandbox game myself where you stuff sexy women with washboard abs full of so much food and make them gain so much weight they turn into gigantic immobile sacks of fat that just want to eat and orgasm all day long. You think I'm deluded enough to believe every person on itch.io would want to see that? Want to play that? I can only imagine the experience of someone who had the AUDACITY to make a generic search for an adult romance sandbox game coming across my obesity simulator.
I couldn't believe the top reply to the only other thread I saw about this (which is locked, by the way, because it's been brought up too many times - hilarious, it's almost like this is something most people want!) was to "instead search for what you DO want to see."
Well, let's see, I want a new romance visual novel I haven't already played. No problem, easy to search for. Scroll past the first couple rows of results (because I've played them all) and half the results are futa, gay romance, monster people, furries, cannibalism, so many other things.
And let me repeat myself again because I can only imagine the kind of accusations people on the internet will baselessly throw at me if I don't: I'm not here judging anyone who likes those things. That's absolutely not the message of this post and at no point have I implied otherwise. I don't care what other people like, it's none of my business. You're free to do and enjoy anything you want and I'm glad you have that freedom. I will never be in favor of taking that freedom away from anyone. Judge not thy fellow human for sinning differently than thee. I live by this motto.
I don't like some of those things myself. I will never be the target audience for certain things. I'm not here advocating for these things to not exist on itch.io, but I still have preferences and tastes myself and some things make me truly need to vomit.
This is such a basic function of ANY searchable database. And after hours of searching somehow I found a deeply-buried thread with a reply from someone that said you can manually append a query string object into the URL to exclude one (1) tag. There are MANY TIMES more results for people asking for it than for any kind of answer thereto. That's nuts. Give me access to your codebase and itch.io will have exclusion filters implemented in a few short hours. This is neither a controversial nor a difficult feature to add.