Post by Lust And Roll in Problems with the Indexing System

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-You should review those two documents, because they mention that a few days to a week isn't an unusual waiting time.

There is absolutely no complaint from me about this anywhere in my text — on the contrary, I explicitly stated, "After double-checking everything step by step, we patiently waited as instructed — since it said the process could take 1–2 days, or even up to a week. So, there was really nothing to do but wait."

-They also tell you what to do while waiting. And the rules of this category tell you what to do if it takes much longer than that.

Therefore, I have no complaint or criticism about this either. However, it’s worth mentioning that instead of passively waiting, I drove traffic entirely outside of itch.io by sharing my page’s link elsewhere.

But again, my issue is not "why hasn’t my game been indexed yet" — there is no complaint about that anywhere in my text. My problem is that there are pages being indexed without even following the most basic rules stated in your guidelines. This is not just my imagination — you can check the Most Recent page yourself right now and see many examples with your own eyes.

The abundance of such cases seriously undermines the legitimacy of your guidelines. What does it say when an empty page is approved on the day it’s published and immediately placed at the top? In that situation, how seriously should the points your guidelines tell us to pay attention to really be taken? The problem isn’t waiting; the problem is that the process proceeds in a meaningless and unfair way.

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No Time To Play69 days ago

It says that not all games are placed in the review queue, as the official FAQ points out:

If you're selling your first project, then your page may be placed in our review queue.

Your page may be marked for review by one of our internal checks designed to prevent abuse.

That's neither a secret nor arbitrary. Following the guidelines ensures you have the best chances to speed up the process or even skip it entirely, but there's no guarantee.

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redonihunter69 days ago(+1)

In my estimate, those guidelines are for cases where staff actually looks at a project. It might help decide an edge case, to show you put in effort.

In my estimate the indexing is not a quality test. They try to keep bad actors away. Think malware, scams and bad joke projects or bot uploads.

My issue with the official faq is, that it is outdated and therefore overly optimistic. It would be more accurate if they exchanged days with weeks for their estimates. The current wording makes people think they did something wrong, then they contact support and still nothing happens for "days", so they worry and worry. The project is in limbo and no one tells them what is going on. The truth, in my opinion, is that staff just has a huge backlog of things to do. You do not have to pay 100 $ upfront like on Steam, so there is not really a budget for checking out every release. Automatics can only do so much, and staff does get bombared with a lot of bad things. Actually I guess the recent rise of spam comments mean, that uploading bad projects has gotten harder and the bad agents try different approaches.

Your traffic generation is one of the few things that are said to help speed up the process. It makes sense. If the project really is a bad one and it has traffic, it shoud get removed earlier, so staff has incentive to check it out earlier. Also, doing your own marketing and not relying on being indexed is the recommended course of action by Itch. You will see this stance in some threads about similar topics.

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Lust And Roll69 days ago(+1)

First of all, thank you for your comment.
It would’ve been much better to hear these thoughts directly from an itch.io moderator, or to see them shared on an official information page. Knowing that itch.io is doing all this to make the platform a safer and better place truly feels reassuring.
However, being directed to outdated guidelines and receiving brief, surface-level replies to legitimate questions ends up leaving dedicated developers—those who genuinely care and follow the rules—in uncertainty.

An outdated FAQ makes people question whether other parts of the system are still reliable, and unfortunately, this weakens the trust of new developers who are just joining the platform.

Of course, I understand the challenges and workload the itch.io team is facing—and I genuinely believe that understanding is important.
But at the same time, as a developer, I also feel that we developers need a bit of understanding and transparency too.

Lastly, thank you again for your thoughtful comment.
Maybe this was exactly what I needed to hear from itch.io.

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redonihunter69 days ago(+2)

That the guidelines are outdated is my opinion and conclusion. It might be from a time when staff was not as bogged down as they currently seem to be.

But if you read threads about this topic, it sure feels like a good estimate, exchanging days with weeks. Waiting 4 weeks for such an issue is not uncommon. It might fluctuate with seasons and other challenges. Like the current ddos attacks.

The wording about the strictness of the quality guidelines is a bit vague, which is not helping, when people wait for over a week.

The (blue) mods moderate the community message board. You should not expect admin/staff level information from them. Only the red ones might speak for Itch.

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