itch.io

We have over 1.7 million indexed pages with around 700 indexed per day, that’s an enormous scale. It would be really bad if a piece of malware made it into one of our popular browse pages or homepage. We have to be cautious by default. It’s not apparent from your end, but I really do fight with scammers and malware on a daily basis. It’s a really difficult thing to balance. (In fact, I literally just restored a user’s hacked account that was used to upload a malware page where the scammer literally made a topic in the forum here asking about their “indexing status”)

Implement some sort of KYC for the developers

Our system already takes into account reputation on our service, the large majority of accounts operate without issues and have established reputation that prevents them from getting flagged. I know it’s very upsetting for those who get stuck with no course of action. Our system doesn’t reveal too much information to prevent scammers from reverse engineering the process.

I didn’t write my original reply to be dismissive of the issue, I know it’s frustrating. I’m just being transparent about the situation. As I mentioned in the previous post, I understand it’s getting to be a bigger issue and I am actively working on changing our back-end heuristics to prevent false positives. In the meantime, the same recommendations I always give apply: operate your account as normal. Your page is still fully accessible to your followers, profile, etc. Any changes we make in the backend about eligibility and risk scoring will automatically apply to your pages.

IDK take 1$ payments to post the game without that issue or something if you have to.

We will never take payment to allow a developer to post a game.

Note: I mentioned unusual activity because because I see comments here with over a hundred up votes in a very short period, that’s not common for our community here, so I’m guessing there’s a thread or Discord somewhere telling people to pile into this post.

Thanks

> the only decent platform for hobbyist developers

I don't *fully* agree with you as a fellow Dev.

Itch isn't just a platform for developers to publish their game, but also for *players* to actually play those games

Due to how straightforward the uploading process isz releasing malware on here should be pretty easy, yet I barely see anyone complaining about downloading anything malicious

Should the system get *too* lax, the moment players start being afraid they might be unsafe downloading off off itch, then it won't matter if the developers game would be indexed, because the players who actually play the games won't be able to trust said developers. 

It would be like those dedicated advertising spaces where everyone is promoting their games, but no consumers are actually there to play them

While I *agree* that the current system has flaws that can be improved and, myself have had a game not being indexed on release, I think what we have is still better than the alternative of malware circulating around the platform freely