Curation Tool Update: More Powerful Filtering is Here!

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.

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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,bob to 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 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.

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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