For a jam that so heavily protests that it is aimed towards beginning developers, this one was certainly not geared towards it compared to the many others on itch.io

Making entrants fill out a third party form through a link just to participate is incredibly dubious and inappropriate, serving zero purpose beyond using people to harvest information. Virtually every other jam on itch.io does not do this, there is no excuse for yours to. Requiring entrants to give you their email address as well breaches into an entire new level of impropriety. Neither of these things are a part of the itch.io jam system because they are both completely unnecessary, serving only as an underhanded means of benefit for the hosts.

But much more significantly, arbitrarily threatening entrants that they will be "reported" if they dare to enter their game into multiple jams is ridiculous. Entering multiple jams that your game is eligible for, which is often the scenario with how many are hosted on itch.io at the same time, is an extremely basic means for which a developer increases their exposure. So much for having any interest in supporting developers in any way, when you threaten them not to give their game more exposure. Completely absurd.

Regardless, this jam has ended and because it has ended we will be entering our game into another applicable jam that it is eligible for. We hope that you learn from this and strive to make any future jams you host significantly more developer friendly, by simply not imposing inappropriate demands and limitations on participants. As this entire process is after all, about the benefit of developers.

Have a good day.

Hi, thank you for giving us feedback on the jam structure. The third party form and email prompt are both optional and are not required to participate in the jam, and we only use these to gather community feedback on different aspects of the game jam or to otherwise send out information regarding jam dates and other announcements. Essentially, it's our mailing list. As stated before, these are both entirely optional and have no bearing on your ability to participate in the game jam, and you're free to opt out at any time if you feel that it is an invasion of your privacy.

As for the reporting, every year we get a number of games that were not created for or during MFGJ, and due to the nature of the game jam we believe it is unfair to those who participate in the jam exclusively. These games we typically remove from the submission feed, but in the case of someone repeatedly adding the same game despite our warnings, we do end up reporting these as jams lack a block feature for games. We understand that your concern over exposure is well-placed and valid, but MFGJ isn't the place to submit a past project for exposure, because the ultimate goal is for the jammer to gain experience and try something new. Submitting a project you already created does not constitute as this.

Furthermore, as I mentioned, the forms we use help us course correct and provide insight on how to run the jam better. The exit form is specifically meant for concerns like this, and in the future if you have any other comments, we'd appreciate it if you reached us through there. This thread will be locked for this reason.