Exclusion filters are broken

[tau-dev]

Describe the bug
Appending ?exclude=tg.visual-novel to a link has no effect anymore.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Go to https://itch.io/games?exclude=tg.visual-novel
2. Witness many visual novels in the results.

Expected behavior
Games with the excluded tag should not show up.

Screenshots

Desktop:

• OS: Windows, Linux
• Browser: Firefox
• Version: 130.0.1

Additional context
This feature was introduced in https://itch.io/t/160014/can-i-use-exclusion-filters; without it, a large proportion of any results page is irrelevant to me, making browsing extremely unpleasant.

Long before this regression, many users have been requesting basic improvements to the exclusion feature for many years (#475, #738, #739, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), and have been so vehemently ignored by the dev team that they have begun suspecting ulterior motives on behalf of itch (1, 2).

Acknowledging that you are a small team managing a big website, even if this issue is not fixed right away, I (and evidently many other members of the community) would really appreciate any scrap of communication on the apparent priority inversion of this feature.

[tau-dev]

Works again. Keeping this issue open because my last paragraph still stands.