Post by hechelion in My game or creator name is not showing up in search

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Games must be approved before being indexed by itch. This process takes time, especially nowadays and especially if it is your first game or if your account was created recently.

There's not much you can do but sit and wait. It's hard to tell you how long it could take, but from other posts, it seems to be currently between one and 2 weeks waiting.

By the way, in the rules of this subforum it says:

Before you create a topic asking why you can't find your game in Search or Browse READ THIS: https://itch.io/docs/creators/getting-indexed. If you still need to create a topic about it, then please write in your post that you read the docs and you still have a question, otherwise we'll close your topic.

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redonihunter1 year ago(+1)

Games must be approved before being indexed by itch.

I do not believe this to be true.

There are regularly even malware and stolen games indexed within hours of account creation. On weekends. And with payment options.

I suspect that an algorithm prescreens games. And has many false positives and false negatives.

It took not long to find in recent games an account that is 13 hours old. It and the 1 hour old game are indexed. One hour. It is sunday. I have doubts, that someone had a look at it.

That so many people complain about non being indexed after days, weeks and months has reasons. And it is not, that they look at every game and have a queue.

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Primarch_Interactive1 year ago

Good to know. So is there anything one can do to speed up the process? Or would the only solution would be to just wait?

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redonihunter1 year ago(+1)

This is observation and speculation based on said observation.

If you have been picked, for whatever reason, to be the lucky winner of a human clearance for indexing, the waiting time can be over a month. Support seems to be swamped.

I only see the stuff they let through, but maybe they are busy blocking 99% of the stuff. And meanwhile some (un)lucky games get on a waiting list.

If you are not indexed in a month and complain in this thread again, a nice mod might speed it up for you. If they are indeed swamped, complaining to support will only make it worse (for all of us).

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Primarch_Interactive1 year ago(+1)

So it would be appropriate to wait patiently.

Thank you so very much for your reply redonihunter.

Best regards.

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hechelion1 year ago

A clarification since perhaps I didn't know how to explain myself, I don't mean that every game must be reviewed manually by a human.

I mean that every game must be approved (manually or automatically) before being indexed. In the absence of exact data on the process, as you say, it is most likely that they have some program that makes these approvals automatically and under certain conditions, throws the game into a manual review process, as you suggest.

However, this automatic process is precisely a review process; if it did not exist, every game would be indexed as soon as it becomes public and we know that does not happen.

If a given game has not been indexed shortly after being published, it will surely enter the queue to be reviewed by a human.

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