Please don't try to brush off this problem. Yes, it's tiring to see the same post over and over again, and yes, I know that you personally can't do anything about it, but trying to shut down the conversation or offer unhelpful "solutions" isn't helping anyone.
If anything, I think this should be a sticky topic. It's obviously of great concern to a sizable portion of the community, and making a sticky topic removes the need to create a new topic for this every few weeks.
Done! But absent the solution people want, or at least a more official answer, it's frustrating to see everyone refusing to do the one thing they can try right now to improve their experience a little, even if it's not good enough.
yes. I do realize that you can filter out one (and only one) specific tag by adding something after the url. no. one exclusion isn't enough, it's only gonna turn the horror games flooded page into a visual novel flooded page.
and yes. I do realize that I can just skip a few pages to actually get something that's neither of them. no. it's not consistant nor efficient as I'll have to do it everytime I look for games, and there's still a lot of horror and/or visual novel after the third page.
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.
sure that might work if you could do OR/Boolean filters in tags. (fantasy OR fps OR puzzle NOT (VN or anime or adult). But since you cant, if you like multiple genres and want to just remove a few from your search results, this is meaningless.
makes me wonder which framework this page is run on, maybe the internet can help getting an actual search function?
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.
/games/genre-puzzle?exclude=tg.anime
I saw this method before, but it didn't work yesterday. But now it works like a clock! imo, this is an ugly workaround for such famous website
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.
The truth is they are super liberal and they don't want people filtering out their 19 different forms of gay tags. They won't say it, but it's true.
Meanwhile can we get a SINGLE "Straight" tag added? I'd be happy with that is I can't exclude the rest.
Straight is the default, for 99% of the games on itch.io, and that's a super liberal site, as you pointed out. The ratio is much worse anywhere else. You shouldn't have any trouble finding those games you want among the literally one in a hundred that you dislike.
That... is literally the problem? Straight is the default, so it is not included within the tags, so you can not search for it to use it for filtering stuff. Which might be fine if you could exclude the various gay tags (19 might be an exaggeration, but I can think of four common ones: Gay, LGBT, Bara, Lesbian). But we can't, so we're trying to come up with a new workaround that does work within itch.io's ridiculous framework. And you're objecting to even that???
Oh, and just so we're clear: there's nothing wrong with all the LGBT stuff, I am glad that it exists and that this can be a platform to host it, so that gay players have stuff to enjoy as well. I just don't want to see it myself. And guess what: they don't want to force it down our throats either; during one of the ten thousand or so previous times this topic was brought up, the author of one of the many gay furry visual novels came in and made it clear that they are just as annoyed by the lack of tag exclusion as straight people are.
On a platform with a sane and reasonable search feature, sure, maybe. But that's not what we're dealing with; we're dealing with a platform where you can only filter content by adding more tags.
On itch.io specifically, it seems pretty easy to find both, just sorta mixed in with each other randomly, especially among the highest rated stuff. But the problem isn't even really, ease of finding what we're looking for. It's a matter of, excluding what we are explicitly not looking for. Let's take a look at the current top two rows of highest rated free nsfw web games, and what we can guess from their title cards:
1. Max the Elf: Looks straight at first glance? Then at second glance, nope, you can see screenshots of the male player character on the receiving end of cocks. Did not want to see that, did anyway. LGBT is right there in the tags, coulda avoided that with tag exclusion.
2. Sileo: Tales of a New Dawn: Looks gay, explicitly states that it is. Okay, cool, that was straightforward! Not gonna click it.
3. Five Nights at FuzzBoob's: Looks straight, judging by how the title card is literally just a pair of breasts. Haven't played it myself though so I can't be sure. After a brief look at the description though, I see the phrase "her two girlfriends", so... lesbian, then? Not seeing any tags to indicate this, though!
4. Superstition S1: From the title card, I can't even guess. I was even on the verge of suspecting it was one of those things that gets called "nsfw" for reasons like, horror or trigger warnings or some such thing? In the description though, I saw "Play as male, female, or non-gender specific, along with transgender choices.
Romance one of five characters, have flings, or stay single because life is hectic enough as is.", so... optionally LGBT, optionally straight? No way of guessing that without checking first, though.
5. Factorial Omega: My Dystopian Robot Girlfriend: Looks straight... and actually is!
6. After Years: Appears to be another obviously gay one.
7. Bad Ritual: Another where I can't even guess. Upon closer examination, LGBT and LGBTQIA are in fact in the tags (hey, there's a 5th gay tag!). No indication in the description whether it is gay, lesbian, transgender, or something else, but from a brief look at the comments it seems probably gay... unless it's actually bi and everyone is just focusing on the male characters.
8. The Forest of Love: Can not even guess from the title card. Or from the description. There is no LGBT tag in here. And yet, it seems that there is stuff with both male and female characters? So, this one is apparently bi, but just, poorly indicated in general?
9. Crown of Exile: No indication from title card. This one appears to have the ability to play as male or female, and romance male or female characters. No idea whether your own character's gender limits your options or not, though; there is no LGBT tag, but we already know that isn't completely reliable.
10. Some Sword/Some Play: Another with no indication from title card. Sifting through the description though, I see: "All three main romances are playable as any combination of M/F/NB with any configuration of naughty bits.". So, another that could be straight, gay, lesbian, or anything else depending on what the player chooses. No tags to indicate this.
11. He Fucked the Girl Out of Me: Can't guess from the image, but from the name, I would guess some sort of transgender thing? In the tags, I see: "Gay, Lesbian, LGBT, Queer, Transgender, Yuri". Wow that's a lot... okay we've gone from 5 all the way up to 8 gay tags thanks to this one. But: the description also states "Trigger Warnings are listed in-game.", and from the comments I am not even sure if this one is porn at all, but rather a deeper story which just happens to focus on nsfw subject matter?
12. Nicole's Risky Job: Would guess straight. Seems to actually be solo female though, no males involved, which means... would probably be equally fine for a lesbian as for a straight man. And would not be fine for a straight woman.
So, out of just these 12, that's quite a few incorrect guesses and stuff that is just poorly indicated without playing. Seriously, this is even worse than I thought, only like a third can be correctly guessed ahead of time without clicking on them. At this point, additional tags, even without the actual tag exclusion we all want, would be helpful for filtering for everyone.
How dare you bring an argument with logic and statistic in a discussion about lgbt!
But yeah, interesting idea. How many of the top listers are tagged in a way that you can find them easily. Or rather, distinguish them from stuff that would not interest you.
Though optional content or possibilities are an interesting subject. There are games where the mc and interactions are freely choseable. This is more like a life simulator. Does this even qualify as "gay", just because you could play it that way. Even play it exclusivly that way. Would you search for something like that with a gay or with a straight tag? Well, I would not tag it gay, as it's focus is not. It's focus would be simulation and lewdness and customizablity. But this is my opinion, since there are no user tags, we are at the mercy of the dev, what tags are given.
As long as we do not have user suggested tags, tag filtering is rather moot anyways. You need to rely on tagging by the dev. And let's face it. They will have a different opinion about the tags of their game, than the players. I liked that example about the different lgbt tags. Will you find yuri, if you search for lesbian, but the dev did not tag gratiously? Is yuri even lesbian or is it specifically lesbian in a romantic way that may or may not be sexual and should have anime style graphics.... ;-)
I never said logic cant be used in the conversation. You're literally assuming that I'm against logical arguments because I'm queer. Anyways, all I said was lgbtq+ content isn't that difficult to avoid. Just look at games more carefully dude
You do realize, that you do prove my point, that I made as a joke? Your two responses show that you take it emotionally, instead of responding to the points raised. You try to shift it from complaining about the available content filter options to people hating on specific content. We just do not want to waste our time sifting through the description of a game to find out, that it would not interest us after all.
The discussion at that point was about being able to identify the content that interests you or rather, that does not interest you. Within the scope of what is currently doable on the platform. Like tags and short descriptions including screenshots, like the stuff that pops up when you mouse over a game. xlksk tried to do that to a random slice of games selected by their popularity and results were not really satisfying.
And what you assume is, that I do not play lgbt games, my dear furry looking friend ;-)
So what does a tag really say? Imho, not really much, and I do not really use them much to find games, because of how unreliable the tagging is.
I do not like kinetic novels for example, the tagging for that is ... lacking. Similar problems, I have to read very carefully to distinguish some "visual novels" from kinetic novels. Some devs do tag that, some do not.
If your main focus of the game is actually content aimed at people that like gay/trans/furry/ntr whatever content, you do not hide that. You want to be recognised by your target audience. If your "existing " gayness in a game is the focus of the game, it should be obvious from a short description, but if it really only exists, it should not even be tagged.
Uhm, to clarify, I did not assume anything about you. But I do know from observation and experience that discussions about this topic are usually emotionally driven and far from sound arguments. So I found it refreshing to see a factual post and made a remark about how unusual that is.
I see your point but nothing can "look" straight or gay without relying on heavy stereotypes and it is not our responsibility to warn you for gay people EXISTING in a game. NSFW should be warned for accordingly but I don't feel we should have to make everything stereotypically gay just so you don't have to deal with seeing two lesbians since that upsets you so much. But anyways I understand not wanting 2 see nsfw but seeing a gay game you thought might be straight bc its not a walking stereotype really isn't that big of a deal and if that upsets you you are the problem
From some of your other posts on here I am thinking you are probably just a troll, but I'll respond anyway for the sake of anyone else reading this in the future. To the overall points anyway; don't care enough to bother with the ad-hominem junk, this ain't about me.
When it comes to nsfw games, as in porn games, generally they're going to put a picture of a girl up front if it's for people attracted to girls, and a picture of a guy up front if it's for people attracted to guys. If they put multiple characters on, then you can sometimes narrow things down further depending on how they are posed; they could be together, or they could be different options. Also, justified or not, the target audience of any sort of porn tends to be men, even if the actual audience is much more varied. The end result is: if you see a male character on a porn game's title card (and especially if you see two or more male characters together), it's probably gonna be gay, and if you see a female character and in many cases even if you see multiple female characters, it's probably straight, though lesbian is still a possibility, especially on this site. Yes I know the latter half is half of what you are objecting to, please don't hyperfixate on just that.
If we were talking about actually safe for work games, that's a different story. Nothing wrong with lgbt characters showing up, or being in romantic relationships on screen, I fully support that. Plenty of awesome characters out there who happen to be romantically/physically attracted to their own gender as just one of their many character traits. Being openly out there and having representation is outright vital, not just for public support to acknowledge and accept it as normal, but so gay people don't have to deal with random police raids and shit like in the bad old pre-Stonewall-riot days. But we aren't talking about safe for work games, we are currently talking about porn.
In the sort of games being discussed here, the characters are doing a whole lot more than just EXISTING. Doing a lot more than even just kissing each other, too. They are having sex with each other, explicitly, on screen. Often, that is like 90% of the game's content; just the characters having sex. Nothing wrong with that, but depending on the genitals of the characters, not everyone is going to want to see it. In circumstances like these, male-on-male, female-on-female, and yes female-on-male as well, are all basically just fetishes, no different from stuff like bdsm or ntr or vore or poop or whatever. Some people will be into it, a lot of others will be outright grossed out by the sight of it. It is the responsibility of porn makers to properly tag the fetishes within the porn that they are making. And, more relevantly to this overall thread: it is the responsibility of the hosting site to make it so people can actually properly filter using those tags, and itch.io is failing in that responsibility.
Im not a troll, Im just a queer person who thinks it really isnt that big of a deal to see queer people in games but whatever. or straight people for that matter. Also while I understand that a sexuality isnt a fetish and shouldnt be fetishized???
My main issue is ppl getting upset over sfw lgbtq+ content, guess i didnt realize nsfw was the main focus. Thats a different conversation entirely. I responded the way I did bc the BEGINNING of the thread was VERY homophobic, "The truth is they are super liberal and they don't want people filtering out their 19 different forms of gay tags. They won't say it, but it's true."
Straight is and always has been the default for society. The reason LGBTQ+ people have our own tags is that representation is limited so we have to search for it explicitly. Also, most liberals are actually rightwing and not very supportive of gay rights please get your terms straight before whining online about how you're forced to see gay people
This is about tagging. Since exclusion of tags does not seem to come along anytime soon, a positive tag might be a solution for some cases.
Or do tell, if you have game that is tagged "gay", do you expect to see much straight content in it? Tags should tell the user the focus of the content.
But yeah, since in the adult erotica context "straight" is pretty much the base, tagging it straight does not give much information, so nobody would bother tagging it that way, as "adult" alone pretty much does it . At least not the developer. User given tags might go the extra mile to tag like this.
Also, this would not be the solution for horror filtering. Being non-horror is the trait of ... well, every non-horror game. So tagging non-horror would not happen. But you could tag non-lgbt as straight.
No that just gives you nothing.
I love how a site that hosts hundreds of thousands of games can't even make a simple functional filter. The average porn site these days has better filtering options.
basically a yes from the mods as seen from the replies above, never tried that before, might see if it works
still can't understand why they say "that's how it's supposed to work" when 8/10 of us want this feature tbh
Sorry. I meant to say that's how the site was built. That people want it to work differently is another story.
You only had to look around a little to find this topic. Also, you're mixing up mods and devs. Mods don't write code for the site and we don't know why this feature still hasn't been implemented after all this time. But it's been discussed many, many times in the forum. That's what a forum is good for: old discussions stick around and you can search for them. Yet all too often people prefer to ask again.
That's exactly my point. I did use the tools meant to avoid throwing new threads over old topics - but they failed me.
Only manually looking lead me to this exact thread here, which I then chose to add my 50 cents to. So people can see this topic is still important, without me opening something new over something old.
I've choosen the word "mods" because this thread apparently opens with the discussion that the mods rather frown over the frequent complains and attempt to shut them down, and another user (I guess) suggested that sticking this thread could help - which in my case, it did.
But yes, actually solving the problem apparently every week someone asks for - someone unaware of the dozens of times that exact question has been asked before - would be task for the devs, not the mods. My bad.
just wanted to note:
steam does have the option to blacklist stuff, it's just buried in the settings, so it's less of a "today i don't want this" and more like a "i don't want to see horror stuff at all"
I stand corrected.
Steam does indeed has tag exclusion. When you browse the catalog, and you narrow by tags, each tag has a - sign right to it and a check box left to it. If you tick the checkbox or click the tag, the game has to have that tag and if you click the - , the games with that tag are excluded.
I did not even know that was possible. But it has the same design flaw that would apply here. The tags have to be correct for that. And the steam catalogue only has like 140k items. So they have more resources, and less items. I am surprised we even have ability to excluce one tag here, even if that method is not known to everyone.
(What you meant is the mature content filtering. Itch has that too, but only adult, yes or no.)
Yes, and that does nothing. It still appears while browsing or even in recommendations.
Try adding this to a browse url. It's not the most convenient method, but it was easy to implement according to another thread. This thread has "multiple" in it for a reason.
?exclude=tg.horror
I even wondered about that , and still did not get it immediatly. Maybe because the exlude feature for one tag is not really advertised. So I never came across the question, how to do multiple exclusions, since I did not even know, how to do a singular one.
You have named the deeper problem precisly. Tags are inaccurate. For tag filtering you need precise tags in the first place. So my theory why this is not implemented yet, is, that it would be not very helpful, because the tags you could filter, are not helpful in the first place. Little gain for much work. Low priority.
That userscript fetches the tags and blurs the list while doing so, I assume. The comment about ddos implies that it fetches all of them in short succcession. So basically all the displayed items will get their tags fetched and get hidden accordingly.
Will this trigger the interaction for scoring the recommendations? Because, it would trigger all the stuff that is on top of the lists, like all those horrible games people complain about . That would tell itch you like to interact with them and recommend them to you in the future, if it will get triggered.
> Will this trigger the interaction for scoring the recommendations?
As with all questions concerning itch.io web UI and its reasoning, I believe the answer remains unknown to most of us here ;p
As of today, 35 out of 36 on the first page of /games are tagged 'horror' (hidden by userscript this screenshot)
Come on, am I on WITCH.IO ?
WITCH.IO nice
While one can argue for a policy of positive searching on a defacto non commercial platform, this exposes the flaw of tagging, or the algorithm that thinks this is popular - or , shockingly, the taste of many itch users.
Yeah, itch is not a non commercial platform, but the abundance of stuff is donation-ware and most so called indie devs are not even indie, but hobby. They are amateurs. Real indie devs are professionals, but they just do not work for a big gaming studio. It is like calling a blogger a freelance journalist or a youtuber an indie movie studio.
And I think it is not a policy thing, but does just not fit in the existing structure. That structure would include accurate tags.
I for one do not use that feature at all. I do search "positive". Mostly with similar games, recommendations (that is why I asked if it would trigger that), and global feed.
@de_g0od @Darxide23 Thanks for your review.
That speed's my take on a reasonable speed for openresty servers, coz as much as we're annoyed by the site UI, we love to see itch.io and the community around it lives on.
Yes, unfortunately I've to make the decision to drop support for Greasemonkey coz it uses the GM.(dot) API which is different from GM_(underscore) API supported by both TamperMonkey and Violentmonkey.
The slow bottleneck happens once for each game data fetching, that data is reused afterwards.
Maybe this wouldn't be a problem if Itch.io would ban games like "The True Ingredients", "Potrick Snaps 2" and the 100th PS1 styled copycat of PuppetCombo. They are intentionally shoddy because quantity is better than quality and on top of that these dudes make money off moron children who saw their favourite YTbers play them.
Hell I wish Steam did the same to asset flips and Garten of BanBan cos let's be honest here they've got no business even being there, but Steam is a faceless entity I don't think they'll ever do anything about it, so I hope itch does something about it. I seriously like using it and posting my stuff from time to time and it's lame to see the amount of effortless garbage on there.
If atleast they were funny (as in so bad it's good kinda way or atleast there was a real attempt to make a game), but free (as in it costs 0, period) bad games then I'd see the point in keeping them. Itch.io also faces the risk of some executive from Nickelodeon or whatever going after them for copyright infringement.
