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It does not affect all pages, because Itch uses obviously some kind of scoring or whatever automatic means there are to evaluate the situation. It is not all humans that do the delisting. What affects this is secret. They will not tell. And it probably changes regularly.

There are some verified accounts. You see them with a checkmark. But I suspect this is something Itch will ask of you, and not something that you can apply for. Also, I doubt it would protect against all the quarantines and delistings. Neither does having a big account. I saw someone with 15k+ followers get quarantined.

So, if you are not informed about being quarantined or delisted, just ignore it. Act like a human. Act like a developer. Not someone trying to game the system or trying to circumvent delisting. Maybe their automatic sees you being a regular non hacked account user and speed up quarantine/indexing. Itch views the index as a bonus anyway and you should do your own promtion. That is what you will be told, if you get an official statement.

What affects this is secret. They will not tell.

So it turns out that itch punishes us, but does not say why. This is very strange. Imagine how a similar situation would look in court: you broke the law, but we will not say which one, and you will still be punished.

If the itch administration gave clear rules, the violation of which leads to blocking, people would not have to create topics like "why did my game disappear from the index" over and over again and guess what exactly they did wrong.

>  if you are not informed about being quarantined or delisted, just ignore it. 

I can't because not appearing in search results reduces sales, and this money is my only income at the moment. An additional problem is the type of content I create - most traffic and promotion sources do not allow advertising 18+ games. Therefore, site search is the main source of buyers for me.

You assume that you and other devs are delisted/quarantined because you did something wrong that you can help. But this is not court, and it is not punishment. If you want an analogy, try airport security.

They will also not tell you how they select people for "random" inspections.

This is done to protect users. And it is very much needed. I saw malware indexed in the hundreds. Not hidden away in password protected files advertised via discord. Malware out in the open on the index. And this is just the stuff I saw. There is bound to be a lot more that I did not see or recognise. And since Itch does not scale with users actions due to a lack of advertisements, they need to do this protection for cheap. So shotgun quarantine it is. Bad for you, my sympathies. But I believe it to be more important to protect users. And your games will get out of quarantine eventually.

My advise for ignoring was meant for your account actions. Maybe the algorithm can recognise this and speed up the quarantine. Actually, outside advertisement is said to speed up all this indexing things. It makes sense. If a lot of people access the page and it turns out to be malware, it would be better to remove it earlier. That you have a hard time advertising your content on sfw sites like youtube is tough for you, but there are more than enough places where you can advertise. And, uhm, people looking for your content do not go looking for it on youtube...