itch browse tag exclude

The short of it, look at the screenshot. It gives you a reset button and an input box to use the tag exclusion feature on browse pages - instead of pasting the exclusion query in the url. Also, it sticks.

It is an unpacked chrome browser extension. This reads as: it is not in the official store and it was developed and tested on Chrome. You need to load it up by activating developer mode in the extension settings.

Important: This feature will only work, if you are logged into your itch account. This has nothing to do with the extension. The feature will just not work, no matter how you add the tag exclude query.

The long of it, well, there is this years old feature on itch to exclude a single tag while browsing. It involves adding a search query in the form ?exclude=tg.tag-to-exclude.

Works when logged in, but one should have it in bookmarks or other methods of adding it, or you would have to copy paste or write it again, and again.

I was playing around with extensions on chrome when I thought, hey, actually it should be trivial to have a button to do this from within the page. And, yeah, it was.

Usage is as simple as it gets. After you loaded the unpacked chrome extension, it will activate on any of the itch browse pages my regex knows to be a browse page and adds a little button and text area next to the tag box. (You might need to specifically allow the extension to modify your urls.)

Enter a tag in the box, hit enter, and it will persist as an exclusion query string on the browse pages. Click the button to clear it. Enter a different tag to exclude a different tag.

So why is this not on the official Chrome Extension store? Because, I am not a web developer and dealing with all the surroundings of that distribution method is not something I want to do. This exclusion thing is a thing that came up in forum on itch, and so is this solution of mine.

Tested on Chrome. Firefox does not support service workers and you cannot have a persistent unpacked extension anyways.

The source code is rather uglyshort, so you better glance over it anyways to check for suspicious things. I am not a web developer and there might be blunders in the code, I am not aware of.

The second version only removes an unneeded right from the extension and has a minor adjustment to make the code more compatible with firefox. No need to update. The firefox version does work, but as it is unsigned you have to load it on each browser start with the developer options and give it manually the right to do stuff on your itch url. Might be clumsy, but still better than posting the exclusion query to the url. I also tested the chrome version on opera. Again, it only works if you are logged in - and strangely enough while it does work, I could not see the added url query.