Normally my expectations of such a large platform when it comes to performing basic automoderation/flagging of pattern-matching content would be higher, but given they're still dealing with the well-deserved blowback from their recent deindexing stunt, and the fact that these comments are doing little to zero damage to the one thing they(itch) care about:(which is money), I'm not at all surprised. There are multiple behavioral patterns that line up from spam account to spam account, it would take minimal effort to find probably at LEAST 25 accounts created approximately 8 days ago all around the same exact time, with similarly created names, the same exact "game" which were all updated 2 days ago, with the same comment pattern. Would this be a temporary solution that the spammers would work around? Yes, but frankly that excuse is not acceptable, as doing nothing about the problem, and refusing to acknowledge the problem even exists, shows that you as a company simply do not care.
Edit: After my by no means exhaustive search of recent support posts, I have yet to find a single one relating to this problem, have a response from a moderator, furthering my point about "refusing to acknowledge the problem even exists". If someone happens to know of one where a moderator(or higher) has actually replied to one of these with something, feel free to correct me and link it if possible.
rant over, sorry, I'm just sick and tired of so many large platforms failing to perform this seemingly basic task. Google for example, could put this """"extremely advanced AI"""" that they continue to kill the planet with, to tackle this problem on Youtube, but they haven't.
Viewing post in Automatic moderation for comments with links
It seems someone in the moderation chain has responded to such a post, linked below.
https://itch.io/post/14441818
Thanks for that link, I've sent a Feedback - Feature request. Hopefully something will be done, but as that mod said, it's better if there's "more noise"
If anyone else want to request the feature, mine is to have an option, enabled by default on a project, to moderate any posts with HTML tags. Mine as below, for anyone that wants to copy-paste:
Please add an option for creators to manually review any comment that is posted with html tags on their games, turned on by default.
With this, any comment that has an <a href>, <img> or any other tag will be automatically flagged. The comment's contents will not be shown to page viewers, or will show up like the "Deleted" posts, but with the text reading "Awaiting moderation". The project owner will then be able to see the correct comment as it would appear and either approve or purge the comment.
This should allow creators to better handle the spam influx, since the majority are either posting direct links to external sites, or links to the spam account's own "games" which are malicious javascript code.