Post by redonihunter in Problems with the Indexing System

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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My issue with the official faq is, that it is outdated and therefore overly optimistic.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 Roll14 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However, being directed to outdated guidelines and receiving brief, surface-level replies to legitimate questions ends up leaving dedicated developers—those who genuinely care and follow the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An outdated FAQ makes people question whether other parts of the system are still reliable, and unfortunately, this weakens the trust of new developers who are just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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redonihunter14 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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