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Admin (3 edits) (+9)

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

(1 edit) (+4)

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.