Many creators do not regularly search for their own projects.

We do those searches when we expect problems. Like me— wondering why the official documentation says over and over again that indexing takes days when these forums were showing that it can take weeks, months, to never without communication about a restriction— was checking on my own projects and those of creators on similar themes.

That’s why so many creators were surprised when word of the delisting spread on social media from those of us who first noticed. They weren’t expecting their projects to not be indexed, because they believed they followed the rules.

Leafo is acting like there’s communication going both ways between itch.io staff and the targeted accounts, but it’s almost entirely creators asking what’s going on to no response or taking “few days” and the “no payment” indexing suggestion at face value.

There’s not even a simple banner announcing that roughly half (my estimates from this morning on the numbers I could dig up) of the projects are currently hidden from title searches and tag results or that there’s been a bunch of deletions. People know about this only by learning it offsite from tech news, anti-censorshio blogs, or affected creators.

That isn’t the worst form but it is what shadow banning looks like.