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I often want to see non-D&D related questions when searching on the site, but there's such an overwhelmingly large number of D&D related products (including Pathfinder and Starfinder) to exclude I sometimes get this warning when manually excluding then whilst searching:

an attempt to manually exclude all D&D products from a site search, using the minus sign, resulting in a warning transcribed below

Please shorten this text to 240 characters or less (you are currently using 331 characters)

n.b. the ranger tag shown, in the screenshot, is unclosed as I first spotted the warning when editing an existing search

How can I exclude these products quickly and easily from searches?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Follow-up question: What do I do to get the error message corrected to say 'Please shorten this text to 240 characters or fewer'? \$\endgroup\$
    – Kirt
    Jul 19, 2022 at 1:53
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Kirt it's ok to say that, Tom Scot said so. \$\endgroup\$
    – AncientSwordRage
    Jul 19, 2022 at 2:11
  • \$\begingroup\$ Tom Scott said "if the recipient...isn't trying to decipher what you're saying, then talk however the hell you want". That's fine for informal spoken communication, but I have a higher standard for written English in a formal notice from a professional company than 'as long as you can understand what they are trying to say, it's fine'. One site-specific 'reason to edit' is "to fix grammatical or spelling mistakes". By Tom Scott's standard, as long as it was understood, it's not wrong. YMMV. \$\endgroup\$
    – Kirt
    Jul 19, 2022 at 5:53
  • \$\begingroup\$ I think there's no ambiguity here in less Vs fewer. It's also an easy fix, so they may listen and do it quickly. The meme is deprecated but feels like this sorta thing... \$\endgroup\$
    – AncientSwordRage
    Jul 19, 2022 at 9:13

2 Answers 2

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Wildcards to the rescue!

You can use wildcards as per the search help page:

"Use wildcard searches to broaden results; add an asterisk (*) anywhere in the word, like encour* or Ex*nge."

It's not properly documented but you can do this within a tag. This will exclude all the products mentioned, as far as I can tell:

-[dnd-*] -[adnd-*] -[dungeons-and-dragons] -[pathfinder-*] -[starfinder]

You'll need to manually enter this as the wildcards are not preserved, and will expand out again (I suspect this is how you got into your original pickle with character lengths).

a successful search page showing all matching tags from the wildcards used above

There you go, a whole 9 questions to look over, vs the 441 without those products excluded.

Honourable mentions to -[odnd] which might suggest using -[*dnd*] as well as changing to use [*finder*] to exclude and , however as there are so few questions under those tags and leading wildcards often upset indexed database tables, I've chose to exclude them from the above advice.

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  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ I dropped the image size one level, it was longer vertically than my screen. The change did not affect mobile view and is readable without scrolling on desktop now. \$\endgroup\$
    – Thomas Markov
    Jul 17, 2022 at 19:16
  • \$\begingroup\$ @ThomasMarkov thanks, I hadn't noticed an issue as I haven't gotten to a desktop this weekend. It's a shame they can't load a higher resolution one for mobile, responsively. \$\endgroup\$
    – AncientSwordRage
    Jul 17, 2022 at 19:28
  • \$\begingroup\$ Going through my list of ignored tags I'm seeing that you are missing odnd as another dnd tag. \$\endgroup\$
    – Wheat Wizard
    Jul 18, 2022 at 10:06
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    \$\begingroup\$ If you replace -[pathfinder-*] -[starfinder] with -[*finder*] you can make the query shorter while also picking up the tags lorefinder and ponyfinder which based on the description are dnd related products. \$\endgroup\$
    – Wheat Wizard
    Jul 18, 2022 at 10:11
  • \$\begingroup\$ @WheatWizard those are honourable mentions, but I don't think significant enough number for me to worry about them on the whole \$\endgroup\$
    – AncientSwordRage
    Jul 18, 2022 at 10:47
  • \$\begingroup\$ You can save this in a filter and then later change [ranger] to something else that you want to search for. It's faster and filters just seem to work better with long tag searches. \$\endgroup\$
    – Laurel
    Jul 19, 2022 at 21:06
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Laurel what's a filter? (I kid, I've hear did them, never saw a reason to use them though. Maybe this is it?) Want to post an alternative answer? \$\endgroup\$
    – AncientSwordRage
    Jul 19, 2022 at 21:08
  • \$\begingroup\$ The new [one-dnd-playtest] tag is not filtered out by the main query, although [*dnd*] in the footnote catches it. \$\endgroup\$
    – Wheat Wizard
    Aug 29, 2022 at 21:37
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Create a new filter (not currently working)

There is an option to create a filter from a search, as shown below:

Screenshot of a search for many tags, and the custom filters card shown with a red freehand circle. Instruction below.

This can be accessed on a keyboard by tabbing through the tags until you reach a button labeled/named 'Filter'. Then you can click or tab to the textbox containing the searched for tags, and delete any tags not relevant to the filter (in my case, I deleted ).

Modal Dialog allowing you to name the filter. The keyboard will be focused in the 'Filter Title' input.

Unfortunately you cannot make an exclusively negative filter:

Tag queries cannot be exclusively negative.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I added this answer as a placeholder given this is close to working and I don't want to delete my lovely screenshots \$\endgroup\$
    – AncientSwordRage
    Jul 26, 2022 at 12:59

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