A few days ago, I posted about some updates to the curation tool that were inspired by community feedback. In that post, I teased a few more features I wanted to add, and today, I'm excited to announce that the first and biggest of those features is now live: more powerful, multi-part, and negative filtering!
This was one of the most requested features, and it adds a whole new level of control to how you can discover content.
What's New?
Previously, you could only filter by a single author, tag, or community. Now, every major filter field (Authors, Tags, and Communities) supports multiple entries and negative filtering.
Here's how it works:
- Multiple Entries: You can now enter a comma-separated list of items. For example, you can search for posts from
alice,bobto see content from either author. - Negative Filtering: You can prefix any item with a minus (
-) to exclude it from the results. For example, a tag filter ofart,-nsfwwill show you posts tagged withartbut hide any that are also tagged withnsfw.
You can, of course, combine these. A query for authors like alice,bob,-charlie would show posts from Alice or Bob, but explicitly exclude any posts from Charlie.
How It Works (Under the Hood)
For those who are curious about the implementation, the application's backend now has a helper function that parses these comma-separated filter strings. When it receives a query string like art,-nsfw, it intelligently splits it into two lists: one for items to include (['art']) and one for items to exclude (['nsfw']).
These lists are then used to build a more complex and precise query that is sent to the database, allowing for the powerful filtering you now see on the front end.
This was a fun feature to implement, and it makes the tool significantly more useful for drilling down to find exactly the content you're looking for. I hope you all enjoy the new level of control!
Edit: Can be found at https://thecrazygm.com/hivetools/pct
As always,
Michael Garcia a.k.a. TheCrazyGM