itch.io

I dare say all online stores keep a record of your purchases. It's just a question how you can browse those purchases. The wallet on Steam is like a, well, a wallet. It lists transactions, which often are purchases, but can be other things, like refunds, increasing funds and such.

Itch has no list, but I guess it is because they have no wallet and everything you can buy is either a project or a bundle. So they just list all bundles and projects you "own" in your library in their library view. Hmm. For a collection there is two ways of displaying it. I wonder why there is no list overview for the purchase library. Or a hide function for the people that make that purchase list public, but do not want to show all things they bought. Itch does lack a lot of features one might expect.

while I can find the library of things I've purchased

I assumed you found that, but wanted a list overview, like the Steam wallet does ;-)

Yeah, the purchase collection links to the unique pages you got sent by email.  

Apart from this being a 5 year old thread, that was brought back out of context because of the recent spam blocker false positives...

... it was talking about comments on games.

The default setting for a project is, that comments can be upvoted and downvoted. 

This here is public community. Comments can only be liked.

In list format? Probably not. You do not even need an account to buy on Itch. Maybe your email software can sort all the purchase mails in a nice list view, but it will not tell the amount in the header.

Is that a thing other stores have as a feature?

Do people browse the recent section for assets? Really?

There is about two ways this will turn out.

If there is rights violations, that account will be removed by Itch sooner or later. And there most likely is an issue here. You cannot have brand names in your assets and project titles and then use them in games, without having those rights and the rights to redistribute. And I cannot belive that this publisher has those necessary rights. But Itch might be slow to take action or does not do anything, unless people make them aware of the situation. Also, I am not quite sure who made those assets. The huge number alone indicates usage of ai, but they are not marked as such. And what is very concerning, there is no word at all about what you actually buy in terms of rights. This is supposed to be assets. That's important to know, and the project descriptions say nil about it.

If everything turns out to be ok, those assets will be buried in obscurity. Or Itch might decide to revoke indexing privileges for that account because of the flooding, unless they are ok with that, for whatever reason.

Using this in a user style browser extension and changing the user name accordingly will at least hide those users. 

@-moz-document url-prefix("https://itch.io/game-assets") {
div.game_cell:has(a[href*="//example-user1.itch"] ) { display: none !important }
div.game_cell:has(a[href*="//example-user2.itch"] ) { display: none !important }
}

How do you know that those downloads are unpaid downloads? Did you never ever make a sale? Do you know which customer downloads which file and when, and can thus determine, that a non-customer downloaded something?

Pay what you want with minimum of 0 is not the same as a free game. There is no blurred line. It is monetized content, there is no discussion about that. It's the suggested payment method for games on Itch. It's even advertised as working better in many cases than a paid only game.

The underlying issue here with the indexing is not of a technical nature, and they need to come up with a solution sooner or later. Disabling payments on pwyw games is not a solution.

Also, payment on a 0 cost project does have some consequences. It is not a donation. You own the project in your library, even if the minimum price is increased later.

No, it's not ok, in my opinion.

I might understand it, if someone migrates their existing catalogue. But this? Also, split into such tiny projects, instead of packs? Come on.

I have doubts that this publisher has the necessary rights to publish models of existing vehicles.

You mean like Yandere AI Girlfriend Simulator. There's a ton of videos about that.

There is also discussions about how that would not be a very good idea for classical npc usage for various reasons. The ai, as the word used to be used for what npc do in a video game, does not benefit all that much from what llm gen ai can do. Or maybe they do, but it is used at a much, much smaller scale. It sure would make 4x games more interesting and other types of games where you play against ai players.

Developes of adult game make blog posts all the time. They appear in https://itch.io/feed?filter=posts 

I guess unattached blog posts might be filtered, at least I hope so. Maybe they now filter posts for nsfw marked developers. I do not know.

The bigger problem of those posts is all the fake posts that link to malware. You can't even scroll two pages without seeing them. I counted roughly. Over 30 of the last 50 "published a post" posts were malware .

The adult games you see are attached blog posts, or better named: devlogs/updates and such.

As far as I know the account plus email gets reserved for quite a while, if you delete your account.

So, no, you cannot make a second or a new account with the same email adress.

You have 0 posts, can rename your account and even delete this topic and remove your ratings. I am not sure what you would gain by a fresh start.

Oh, I am sure there are people that do their own reading of such content. Seeing how there even is a asmr crowd, it would be baffling if there were not some youtube channels about reading no-visuals games, and relying on their charismatic voice.

But I also guess that the rarity of such things has to do with how unpopular text only games are, in comparision to ... all other games. Even the https://itch.io/games/tag-text-based games usually use still images for flavor, but just do not have active responsive graphics, like moving sprites and such. Most people probably consider visual novels to be text based.

I guess you would need a popular purely text-based game and just search for let's play videos of that to find such content creators. I am failing at that first step, as I do not know such games.

It should of course be obvious to come up with a game idea yourself and be creative, to participate in a jam.

But if you draw images by hand or use stock images, asset packs or use gen ai, does not change the creativity of the game itself. It depends on the jam what rules apply, and some jams even are about making games with ai.

And it also depends on the jam organizer why they would not want generative ai things in their jam or how they specify that in their rules. Or what type of ai usage they do not want.

This one here is rather interesting: No AI-generated art in-game, or the project page. You may use AI in design or code, but assets must be human-made. Tools that build the entire game from promps are also not allowed.

So you would be allowed to use an ai to design the actual game! The part that should be the most creative part, in my opinion. But you would not be allowed to use ai gen assets. Or use it to create your game page description.

A good idea for the feedback button. Some of that should go in a good reply. Automatics should be good enough to distinguish between "indexing" questions and other questions and be able to reply with something similar like you suggested, instead of giving merely the ticket number.

Read the part of the AI disclosure question again, where it says "even if you hand-edited it".

https://itch.io/t/4309690/generative-ai-disclosure-tagging has some discussion about it, including this advice  https://itch.io/post/11423702 It’s just a tag, use your best judgment. If the output of Gen AI is something you put into your project, then tag it.

And to clarify, it is not a tag. But it can be filtered by the tag mechanic. You should not advertise your game as being ai free or the assets to be 100% gen ai free.

Think about the people who would use those ai tags. Is it important to appear in the result of no-ai or imporant to not appear there? My guess is, that people that use the no-ai tag for browsing games, would consider your game to contain gen ai. While the people browsing for ai-generated might not. Hilarious.

The ai tools in Photoshop and similar are problematic, because they are not always obvious as gen AI. It's not just a color filter, but it literally generates things. And it does not generate a complete image. Also the case of "gen ai edited" is not specifically covered in the AI disclosure, only the other way round.

I prefer the way Steam displays the info. They do so in text form. Where it would read that you created minor deatils with gen ai and polished them by hand. Itch currently displays no info at all. All the ai tags you see on game pages are manually added and not the result of the ai disclosure question.

There is too many threads by people reading "Questions & Support" and think this is a tech support message board, where site staff would answer questions and give support.

Yes, there are category rules below, that would explain. But this does not work, and the proof are all the threads where it gets obvious that the poster still did not grasp, that this message board is not what it says on the tin.

They key word "support" is too strong. It needs to go away or read "community support" or something similar.

Compare

"Questions & Community Support" with "Questions & Support"

Would you think the first to be a staff answered message board at a glance?

Why do people keep using that term shadow ban for things that are not shadow bans?! A shadow ban is, if you would see the game in the index, but everyone else would not. If no one sees the game, including you, it is a regular ban. Or rather a removal from index. If your game was actually banned, it would be suspended or removed.

Is there something wrong with my page that prevents it from being indexed?

Yes. It is quarantined. Quarantined games are not indexed, while they are in quarantine.

If that is going on for longer, maybe your game keeps getting into quarantine again and again.

Oh, and "contacting support" happens by email. Not by creating a topic in the public community message board. If you are unable to contact support, that would mean, you cannot send an email. Read the rules of the message board.

But to answer something, before your contact actual support: they will not tell you, what is wrong. They will not tell you, when it is indexed or answer similar questions.

This is a guess: several factors contribute to the system heavily thinking your account is hacked. That means they will investigate this at some point, by whatever means they use for such tasks. It should not take half a year for that, but my other guess is, that your game was sent in quarantine several times and got bumped at the end of the waiting queue.

My advice, since no one told you about quarantine: do what the warning tells you and activate 2 factor auth and otherwise act like you normallly act and ignore the quarantine. You are doing very well for an unindexed game with that particular nieche topic.

That moderator is a community moderator. Not Itch staff. No time moderates this very community here, where you currently write. While no time might forward any ticket number again, if you post it according to the message board rules, you did not do that. Yet.

I can only repeat the observation, Itch does not answer indexing issues. And they do not display that status anywhere, or give notification. This is intentional. Yes, it is frustrating and seems bogus. But that's how it is.

There is a feedback button you can use to tell them you think it is a bad idea and they should make certain things more clear at certain places. Like in the docs they should write that indexing is low priority and can take months in some cases. But if you write in public community, any answers will be from community -  even if it is a mod. Those blue moderators are part of the community.

There is a negated tag for ai search. https://itch.io/games/tag-no-ai 

It will display all games where the ai disclosure question was answered. Mind you, the ai disclosure question is only mandatory for assets. And for games, it would catch a lot of games, that just used ai assisted coding tools. That tag does not differentiate between the different ai categories. There are positve ai tags for images, sound, text and coding, but the negative tag is only a catch it all.

The AI infos are not implemented well yet. And the grace period for assets is still going on. https://itch.io/t/4309690/generative-ai-disclosure-tagging

I thought I read a hint a while back about the search or browse to be changed somehow. But no specifics, and I guess other matters got in the way, so it was delayed anyway.

For filtering, I belive that individual filtering of games is superior to "large scale" filters. If you go look for games you like, you are bound to see the games you already know very often. Imagine clicking them away, not be be seen again, except in your library. Even though I made a small gui button for that exclude filter and even a genre filter, the only thing I ever use for filtering is that individual filtering method.

Now, if Itch would have the tags on the browse page, like they have some tags on the itch.io page, doing a tag filter client side would be trivial. (That genre filter I mentioned works this way, since the main genre actually is shown.)

Unfortunately I can not help you, but I can summarize a bit what I observed.

Itch support is swamped by a lot of things and the indexing feature of the site is seen as a secondary bonus. It's just not a priority. They want you to do your own promotion. And the game being indexed or not, does not change any promtion you would do. People would click your link, not search your game's name. (Oh, and if people would search your game's name, like so https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sinathir&ia=web the very first result happens to be your game on Itch.)

They do have an automatic that sorts new games and even updates into two or more categories. The first category gets indexed. The other gets on a pile for human staff to look over. What influences this is intentionally kept secret. So do not expect any official answer anywhere why a game was not indexed yet, or put into quarantine. They will of course not answer any such questions per mail. Furthermore, there will not be any indication in your dashboard, about the status of the game in regard to indexing.

Intentional delisting is very rare, but it can happen. It might even be done by the automatic. There are mechanisms in place to protect against fake traffic. If they suspect a developer to cheat popularity, they might delist projects as an example. There are bound to be other reasons. But in most cases it will just be what I mentioned above: they are swamped. And maybe even misplaced the case. They do have a lot of ddos attacks and other problems. Plus, they see indexing as a bonus and not as a core feature of the site. You can even operate your game, if it is in quarantine. There is only the warning message, but the download is not blocked.

Whatever triggers the temporary delisting, it might be triggered multiple times with different updates. It might even put you at the back of the pile when you were close to be reviewed by staff. There are game that were quarantined multiple times. (Your game is not quarantined.)

From a quick glance, your game is not something that would be intentionally delisted. So the course of action is to write one mail (1) and after nothing happens for a few weeks, post it in a thread like this. The community moderator will likely forward it to staff for consideration of expedited treatment, as staff does not usually read here. The communication channel to staff is the support mail, but they typically do not answer questions about indexing. They just index the game eventually. 

So, there is a machine that was built to crush orphans and people are angry about it. And people using the machine defend it against various arguments against it. And within that discussion, it turns out, that the machine also leaks oil into the product, and is powered by slave labour. The oil leakage is only worth mentioning, since apparantly the machine was also advertised for processing food.

I do not like that metaphor. It does not catch the intent and usage of generative ai. People would be angry about an orphan crusher, be it human or machine. There are humans doing potatoe mashing. So, a slave labour powered kitchen appliance, that leaks oil into the food would work better as a metaphor. Better, let's use a robot instead of a mere appliance, and it was trained by watching human cooks. It lacks a sense of taste, so the food all tastes the same or is spiced extra weird.

But real life humans are not particularily angry about multi use kitchen appliances. On the other hand, many people do not really like restaurants that just microwave the food and sell it at restaurant food price tag, even though they happily use that device at home. They prefer human made food. But no one expects the cooks to not use the tools of the trade, like knives, ovens that run on energy, or to apply knowledge other cooks established.

The anger about gen ai stems from several points, and some of them are shortsighted. So we should concentrate on the things that would stay, even if the oil leakage and slave labour are dealt with. Like the boring taste of the orphan pulp. Or that it takes away the jobs of the orphan crushers.

Because we sure will not stop using pulp. Jams are all about pulp. But most of them require the chefs to do certain aspects of the crushing manually or under restrictions. Like no using knives, or only crush the legs. Some things are even encouraged, like using the rotary propelled gratings maker, or rending in a pyrex.

That's not what I read from the rules of jams.

You also imply that AI is recognised as a form of plagiarism. Which it is not. You can claim, that many view it as unethical, if you want. That would be true. But it is not recognised as a form of plagiarism.

There are jams for about everything. Including creating games with AI, like this one here. 

They are not for getting feedback for a finished game. But a lot of them are in part about the learning experience of creating a game for the jam, which would include a bit of feedback. Maybe. Depends on the participants.

A typical jam is an event where you create a game under restrictions. Using AI would trivialize most of those restrictions.

I copied a few random quotes from rules of actual jams, telling about their AI restrictions. And not all of them forbid AI. All jams have different rules.

Use of generative AI is not allowed! We want to see what YOU can create in the allotted time, not what AI can create for you!

 AI-assisted coding (autocomplete tools) is allowed. No copy-pasting large amounts of AI-generated code. No AI-generated art or music.

AI-generated assets are allowed, if you disclose their use on the game's project page. This applies even if these originally AI-generated assets are later edited by you.

Using AI as an assistive tool is OK, BUT games might be disqualified if: most/all of the game is obviously generated, entire game art assets are obviously generated, or the game audio is obviously generated.

No AI-generated art in-game, or the project page. You may use AI in design or code, but assets must be human-made. Tools that build the entire game from promps are also not allowed.

So you see, the tools of the trade, code assist done with ai, are usually not forbidden. But a jam is a contest of art and using gen ai defeats the purpose. It is not a contest of who can operate the prompt best.

Also, most jams have the implicit rule, that since you would make the game for the jam, you actually cannot submit it to other such jams. It usually is also not quite possible to conform to different jam restrictions at once. Like, make the game in a week for the jam and include topics a, b and c. 

I do not know. Since they did not tell you, I would igore it and update and work on the project like you would without knowing that it is in quarantine.

Maybe this has answers for you.

Your arguments are formally wrong and they are factual wrong and they are offtopic copy pasta.

https://ubos.tech/news/generative-ai-in-gaming-survey-shows-85-gamers-negative/?...

It is not a small group that gatekeeps and has negative opinion about ai in games. It is the vast majority of gamers that think so.

To go on topic again, as this topic is not about ai, but about filtering.

Some people flood the market with low effort projects. It's the low effort that makes it slop. And the usage of ai makes it ai slop.

You might not have noticed, but OP did not ask for a filter to filter out ai. This would be trivial, as there is one: https://itch.io/game-assets/tag-no-ai 

OP asked to filter out publishers.

The automated system might suspect your account to be hacked. Or it just triggered for a combination of other factors.

The filter is getting better in my opinion. At least I see less spam at the places where I used to see a lot. Unfortunately, that also results in a lot of false positives. And there used to be more complain threads about the spam.

The criminals tried a lot of different things. Links to github, patreon, Itch itself, images and whatnot. Posting from new accounts, from slightly aged accounts and from hacked accounts.

That would be nice.

Until then, you can ignore developers by using a cuser style css on your browser.

@-moz-document domain("itch.io") {
div.game_cell:has(a[href*="//username1.itch"] ) { display: none !important }
div.game_cell:has(a[href*="//username2.itch"] ) { display: none !important }
}

@-moz-document url-prefix("https://itch.io/game-assets")

You might want to specify more context, else you will hide them even in your library.

I made a tampermonkey script to do this on the press of a button. It works for individual titles, or for all titles of a developer. And it treats your library different.

(To clarify, you would exchange the moz document, not add it below. Also, the links need to be as written in the url, not how they are displayed. That usually means, it is lowercase, even if the display name is uppercase. Also look out how spaces appear or not appear in the url.)

what I need to do to restore normal search visibility

Wait and ignore.

One of your games is in quarantine. Two are indexed. And three have payments active and are nsfw and Itch delisted all such games last year.

Please do not send emails to your customers. It is an annoying feature that should be discontinued. It is deprecated anyway. You only ever see complaints about it.

Your followers will get notified about devlogs you make and your paying customers will also get updates to the game page in their feed, even if you do not make a devlog. They can deactivate emails and ignore the https://itch.io/my-feed of course. That's also what no drm means. You cannot push updates, if the customer does not want them actively.

The Itch app does handle updates, but users can refuse.

People usually know, if a game is in development and probably will look for updates every now and then, regardles what you do.