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I think there is a misunderstanding about what I’m reporting. I'm not asking to be at the top of the "dungeon" search or to change the algorithm. I’m saying the game is missing from the chronological lists where it should be by default.

For example, if I go to the "Card Games" section and sort by "Most Recent," and I scroll back to the exact day my game was published, my game does not appear at all. This isn't about competition or relevance; it's about the fact that the project never entered the chronological feed for its category.

Also, regarding the tags, I did add them, but they only work for the search bar match, not for the category filters. I understand how Google and ranking work, but if a game is published and doesn't show up even once in the "Most Recent" list of its own category on its release day, that is an indexing issue, not a ranking one.

As for the support tickets, I only contacted them because after 3 weeks the "few business days" mentioned in the FAQ had passed. I’ll just wait for the manual review to eventually clear.

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For example, if I go to the "Card Games" section and sort by "Most Recent," and I scroll back to the exact day my game was published, my game does not appear at all. This isn't about competition or relevance; it's about the fact that the project never entered the chronological feed for its category.

Strange, I found it without any problem.

At the time of writing, it's on page 23, along with the other games that were published 62 days ago.


You are right!
Thanks for checking, I see it now. However, I’ve been checking the newest lists almost daily since launch and it was never there.

Do you think it's possible that the game was kept invisible while waiting in the review queue and then only got indexed retroactively? That would explain why it skipped the first pages of the "most recent" section and appeared directly on page 23. I'm glad it's finally up, but it's a bit frustrating to have missed the initial visibility because of this delay.

The last game on page one of recent was published 50 minutes ago...

The admin said in a post that when a game is reviewed and manually re-indexed, they "refresh" the page so that it appears in the most recent entries. However, I don't know the exact details of how it works in these cases.

https://itch.io/t/6187844/appearing-in-most-recent-should-be-based-on-when-your-...

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The issue is that the game isn't 62 days old, it was actually released on April 5th. You can even see the update I made 16 days ago, shortly after the launch.

I created the draft page 2 months ago just to prepare the layout, and it seems Itch used that creation date for the "Most Recent" indexing instead of the actual publication date. That’s why I never saw it in the recent lists during the last 3 weeks, it was buried 2 months deep from the very first second it went live.

So I don't think the game was "refreshed" when indexed...

It’s frustrating because I basically missed the entire launch visibility due to this date mismatch. At least now I know why it was "invisible" to me.

on its release day, that is an indexing issue

As I have said above: There is no such thing as a release date on Itch.

There is no greenlight phase, no early access, nothing of the sort. Your publishing date is your publishing date. The release date you can enter is cosmetic. Unless you have a paid game, then people cannot buy the game if the date is in the future. But it is still published.

but they only work for the search bar match, not for the category filters.

I have no idea what you are talking about. You did not add any more tags to your game. And games are not searchable via tags in the search bar. 

https://itch.io/search?q=Dungeon only will show games that have Dungeon in the title or in the short description under the title, but it will not show games out of  https://itch.io/games/tag-dungeon nor https://itch.io/games/tag-dungeon-crawler . Also, search results are capped. You will not see all games that have dungeon in the title, only a page or so.

 I’ll just wait for the manual review to eventually clear.

There is nothing to clear. Your game is indexed. If it was previously not indexed, that was already cleared up.