Trying to add this mod to an existing save, which has https://mods.factorio.com/mod/productivity_fix, meaning every recipe accepts productivity, and so is getting a group of techs made for it.

Trying to add items and recipes to the blacklist to block certain items, there seems to be no change and the items and recipes still get techs made for them,

For instance, I have tried adding the Loader recipes for AAI Loaders to the black list, both with and without the "Overwrite blacklist settings?" option enabled, but a chain of techs for each loader tier still show up.

Comma separated, tried both with and without spaces as well

"aai-loader,aai-fast-loader,aai-express-loader,aai-turbo-loader"

Added that to both the Item section, and the recipe section, since Ctrl+Shift+F seems to indicate both the recipe names and the internal item names for these items are identical.

Looking at the code, it looks like the check for the blacklist might be checking it against the tech name, not what the tech does? I'm not super familiar with how techs and their effects get stored though, so that might be totally fine and the right way to do it, it just feels off to me. The tech name for the aai-loader is the same as the item name and recipe name, though, so that should be working either way... I dunno.

I suppose I'll just need to not research those items, but it would have been nice to be able to clean the tech tree up a bit of all the Text Plates prod techs, for instance, or all the rampant capture rockets (since each rampant faction type gets its own for some reason)

I'll have a look. Once I fix this, the techs should disappear in your save without any negative repercussions.

It didn't work, because I am an idiot. :P
In V1.2.4. the blacklist setting is properly parsed, so it should work now.

It does work now, yup! Thanks! It does only apply the blacklist when the "Overwrite blacklist settings?" option is checked - the option for a whitelist was added, but a middle ground of just using the built-in blacklist, and adding the blacklist on top, could also be a nice option. Otherwise you have to either specify every single recipe you do want included with the whitelist, or specify every single thing to be excluded including re-creating the built in black list. Maybe the blacklist settings fields could default to containing the built-in one instead? That way its easily available to have expanded. Mainly bringing this up since the mod I mentioned is making every recipe included even when only the "intermediates" option is in the mod, but to disable the combinator productivity research, for instance (which is off when the default blacklist is used), I would have to specify every single item in it manually to the blacklist. It could be done, but would be more user friendly to just expand the existing blacklist with the user specified one instead.

Also, I could make a separate thread for that, or the following, but the barrelling option doesn't matter. The outputs of barrelling and unbarrelling recipes are treated as catalysts, like the 40 input U235 in kovarex - bonus productivity crafts do not output those results, so no amount of productivity being forced onto barrel recipes actually does anything, you can't duplicate liquids with it. They should just always be unaffected since it has no effect even if they are, so they are just unnecessary fluff if anyone did enable them.

Good point with the catalysts - I forgot about those. I'll add a check to ignore recipes/results that are completely unaffected by productivity and also remove the option with barrelling recipes as this takes care of that as well.

Regarding the blacklist, I'll probably remove the "overwrite" flag and simply add the built-in blacklist as a default, yes.

The problem with mods that change all recipes to allow productivity is that there is no longer a marker on what would be an "intermediate". So, I could do either
a) try to filter for items appearing in the intermediate tab. This will break with mods that rearrange items and might not be 100% accurate.
b) try to "remember" which recipes are intermediates in an earlier stage of the startup, before any mod changes the flags. That would most likely mean that no modded recipes will get detected automatically.
To shore up the gaps, the user could then use the whitelist/blacklist feature.

It'll likely take a few days until I can implement these changes, but I will look into it.

The changes are implemented in Version 1.3.0.

The "remember intermediates" solution is a bit hacky, but it should work for most recipes.