itch.io

Yes. Imdb has a lot of money and a lot of advertisement that would scale with usage of comment features. But even they decided to drop comments, a feature so popular, that it was rescued by moviechat.org

I was thinking more along the route of IMDB being a site collecting info on all media and there's a lot of places to discuss particular media pieces, genres or other categories. Meanwhile most of the Itch games are, for the lack of a better word, slightly obscure and exist only here, meaning if you can't discuss them here, you basically can't discuss them at all.

"Meanwhile Itch gets negative money from your comments."

If we're going by that logic, our discussion here (and by extension most, if not all, posts on the forums) are also just costs and as such why not scrap it altogether?

"Is this an annoying situation that you are unable to comment? Of course. But that does not make it a sob story."

I wasn't going for a sob story though. More like... Uh... Fairness, I guess? Any changes to the system that actually gives an unfairly treated person with restricted access a way of doing something about it? An efficient and effective way.

"The rational would be to deactivate comments for all games. Just as many developers actually did! Itch chose the lesser evil of using a hyper aggressive spam detection system."

I don't think that would be rational at all. Lesser evil, huh? Can You post comments? Have You tried? When was the last time You've seen the "Awaiting moderation" message? How long did You have to wait? Did You make it? Were Your comments actually moderator-reviewed and posted? Because if so, then the problem is not a hyper aggressive filter that flags the comments, it's how only specific users are deemed important enough to even have their comments reviewed. That's what we call a "verified user".

"Your oldest visible comment is 43 days old and on a game. Has that comment been approved by the developer without you noticing or how does that fit together with your claim that you could not post comments for 10 months?"

I can't guarantee when it was approved or by whom, as I didn't get a notification on that, but what I know is that I've made 23 comments and 6 forum posts before that one. None of them exist. This one popped up for me as new with a tag of "30 days ago", if that helps anything. Why? Don't know, but it might have something to do with a passive-aggressive third Support ticket I've sent, while being fed up with this issue. The dates coincide a little.
Just for funsies, I posted a test comment on Your project. Let me know if You can even see it or if the filter hides it that well.

"And I do not understand what you mean with voided tickets and tickets still being up. Typically you do not get any answer to such a ticket. You get an automatic confirmation with the ticket number."

I meant I sent two tickets, around first and third month on the site, which is like 9/7 months of no action being taken, no reply given, which for me means the ticket basically ended up in a void. Either it was ignored, skipped or nobody got to it for almost a year. I clean my mail quarterly, so at most I could provide the confirmation message for the latest one (beginning of April). And yes, I got confirmations on all of them.

"Hmm. It seems it leads to here, the place you are currently quite active posting and talking to other users."

I'm not sure if You're being slightly condescending on purpose. You said that Itch is not a blogging nor commenting site, yet it has both comments and a blog. And a whole Community tab. I'm just saying that having a functionality built in, doesn't mean the focus of the site has to change. Under every game a space is provided to discuss said game. And yet some are not allowed to do so. But hey, you can use the Community forums! So... You're telling me You want me to make separate threads for everything I comment? That's kinda spammy. I do wonder though what would happen if I started reposting the malicious links the filter was designed for here. Would that work? Are only comments automatically flagged, while posts need to be reported manually? Cause that would be yet another odd solution to a problem.

And just for the record - all of my posts from before this thread (less than a dozen, but still) don't seem to exist or have since been deleted, as I'm pretty sure I've seen at least one or two up as I posted them.

"Comments on games are not the core function of Itch. Evident by how developers can deactivate it on a whim. And they can delete comments on a whim."

I wouldn't go as far as calling a choice evidence, but sure, I track the idea. Doesn't change the fact that comments do help in a lot of ways. They open a discussion, counterpoints, provide feedback, give a sense of "belonging" in a community and offer other users to take part (even if just by reading) in what's happening. A lot of good games actually came out, because people went through comment chains, soaked in opinions, improvements, ideas and then went on and made it a game. And no, I'm not talking about a dev taking feedback, just random people/other devs stumbling upon comments with feedback for different games and rolling with it.

"The reason for the situation is, that it costs a lot of money and brings zero money."

That's how a lot of things are, unfortunately.

"The recommended course of action is"

The recommended course of action is to jump through the hoops and see who gives in first. Send a ticket - done. Wait for response? Done. Post a thread on forums? Done. Anything happened? Nope. Do it again two months later - done. Anything happening yet? Nope. Third time the charm? We'll see, it's only been 32 days since last ticket. Do You really not see how stupidly inefficient and overcomplicated this is? How much text we've typed for this pointless discussion, because my comments are blocked? None of this makes sense.

"And no, those five weeks are not overly long. Developers often wait longer for more important things. Comments are lowest priority."

How so? The ridiculousness of wait time for devs in important matters aside, what does that mean for a regular commenter? Would I have to jump through these hoops every time I make a comment? Do You? Does everyone? I know they don't, cause some comments go up hours after the game launches. Sure, might be the dev actually paying attention, as You've pointed out, or it might be that some people don't get hit with the spam filter (or not nearly as often as 100% of the time).

If "lowest priority" means it's okay to wait for a press of a button for 8 months or so (furthest date on a posted comment I can confirm), then... Well, let's just say the site being targetted by malware doesn't sound surprising.

"Also, consider renaming the section to questions and community support. "

Well, if I'd have to go through here and wait for a Moderator to forward my Support ticket that the Admins received to the Admins in some odd comedy skit, then I'd argue it might as well be official Support. But that's probably just semantics at this point.