People posted here not to get their games indexed, but to flag an issue for you. I don't want to be rude, but what you're doing is completely unfair and just makes the only decent platform for hobbyist developers unusable. I don't know what you think you're achieving, but people are just desperate to get some attention, and you call it an "unusual activity" lol. Flagged for human review, we get it, you don't have staff to review things, but idk, add a notification at least? Implement some sort of KYC for the developers? I never dealt with that issue myself, I'm just here on behealf ot others, and what I've seen is kinda disgusting. Sorry, my dude. I know how it is, and you're gonna keep getting a steady flow of games, but for the love of people who are starting out, give them some kind of option 😒 IDK take 1$ payments to post the game without that issue or something if you have to.
Viewing post in My games are being deindexed
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
I appreciate the elaborate answer and thanks for providing transparency on the workflow behind the scenes. I personally didn't experience problems with indexing, but many of my friends did (as shown in this thread).
One thing that could've helped is making this transparent not in support thread, but on developer dashboard itself. E.g. show indexing status near the game and if it is not indexed show the reason and approximate ETA of the game to be indexed. If ETA has passed show the button to ping support.
At the moment it is very frustrating and some people don't feel confident to write to support to clarify why their games don't get traction. In the world where AI generates tons of slope it is extremely important to give fair chance to the games that deserve it and I believe itch is the best platform to make this happen.
> 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
I don't see where you got the idea that I suggest making it more lax. I suggested having the KYC process before you publish a game if you want it to be indexed. If you don't want it to be indexed, it can stay whatever. Again, as you might've noticed, I never had that issue myself, and I'm here on behalf of the community. Don't give an excuse for leafo to let this go. Although he doesn't need one.