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.
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:
alice,bob to see content from either author.-) to exclude it from the results. For example, a tag filter of art,-nsfw will show you posts tagged with art but hide any that are also tagged with nsfw.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.
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