itch.io

I am not sure how your statement is meant. Also, you quoted me, but replied to someone else.

I hope you do know what the " mean. Because you answered like you do not.

But is it right to teach children to stop playing sports so they can play sports video games?

You seem to assume a swap between a virtual activity and a real one. Exchanging one for the other. Simulating a thing in a video game, so you can avoid the thing in reality.

If you believe this is possible, it should apply to all other activites in video games as well. Including killing people. And that discussion was done ad nauseam. It's just not true. Playing a video game is not the same as doing a thing in real life. 

You might construct trivial examples, where it could be so, like playing online poker or chess.

But your concern is the same that's with any non physical activity. Like watching television. Or even reading. You should not focus on that one tiny aspect where coincidentally some kids would play virtual tennis, instead of actual tennis. There is not really a difference from them not playing tennis, because they play virtual tennis, play minecraft, watch netflix or read vampire novels. They're not jumping around in either case.

As you say, playing sports games is always right because it's fun.

I did not say that. I explained the reason why someone would play. And that reason usually boils down to fun. There are other reasons too, but all this is not touching the morality of "wasting time with games, instead of some socially approved recreational activity".

I've always thought that the point of video games is to do things you can't do in real life

What.

Like, war games? We can do that in real life too. It's not about what is possible in real life. That's not what games are about at all.

I kinda get the core idea, but that applies to fiction, not games. Why make fiction about how your neighbors live their life, if you can have fiction about wizards and dragons.

So. What is a game? There are many answers to that question.

Doing things that are impossible in real life, makes the story of a game more interesting and exciting. But you do not need a story to have a game.

The root of games is playing. You play a game. And what is playing? From an evolutionary point of view, children and young animals "play" things that will benefit them in adult life. Better do pretend play with your parents and siblings, than get eaten by a real wolf.

So it is kinda funny to me, that you assume that one plays things that cannot be done in real life, as the actual roots of playing is exactly the opposite ;-)

To answer your question, Why play sports games when you can play sports?, because, well, you are a developer, are you not. You might be familiar with this image here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images  

But why an individual plays a specific (sports) game will always be answerd with: because it's fun. Also, that's not mutually exclusive. You could play a video game about the very sport you do in real life. And some people actually cannot do lots of sports physically. And most people could not compete in professional sports. Or the sport is too expensive. The list could go on for a very long time... ;-)

how would it inflate follower count

If you make something exclusive behind a prerequisite, that prerequisite is obviously needed to get the exclusive thing. For paid content, that prerequisite is the payment.

For free content, the cost would be giving the developer your user name and to get the developer's activites in your feed, which can be seen as subscribing to a newsletter. And the gain for the developer would be visible popularity. The follower counter.

On a site like GameJolt you can directly see how they value this. They only allow new developers that have a follower count of 1000+ on social media.

So to answer the question: it would inflate follower count, because people would have an incentive to follow. Without being a follower, you cannot get the content.

Patreon introduced something like that. Previously, any "follower" would be people that subscribed, and that included payment. But since a while ago, you can subscribe to a creator and the creator can make posts that are "free", but exclusive to subscribers. Having more subscribers, even free ones, makes a creator look more popular. But you still subscribe to the mailing list, in other words, you agree to get advertisement from the creator.

Anyway, as I said before, you do not even need to have an account to use Itch. Using the follower mechanic for any kind of mechanic for distribution does not fit in with that design.

It is practically certain, that you have silent followers. People that put your game in a bookmark. Or a private Itch collection. And probably some people that gave you money on Itch, but do not have an Itch account and cannot follow.

If you just wish to quietly give your followers content, but not block non-followers, just use a devlog or even a regular update. Your followers will get a notification. You could make an unlisted project and link to it from a devlog. But blocking non-followers is not something that Itch has any easy mechanics for, except payment.

that only includes real MS-DOS games

No. There is no strict tag enforcement. 

Games in https://itch.io/games/tag-ms-dos and https://itch.io/games/tag-dos do not promise that they run under a specific version of any DOS.

A tag only means that the game has something to do with the tag. So even games that just look like a DOS game might use it.

The operating system meta tags do not even include the OS version. It just says Windows. Which Windows? Windows 3.11?

In theory, you could try to establish a tag that means, that a game has a version that will run under a specific 30 year old DOS version. But as no time pointed out, the challenge is, to convinve other people to use it.

If the download file is big, maybe there is freedos included. Or, it's just a game simulating the dos style, but the description should tell you more. 

And if you missed it, tags are not created by Itch. The list of tags you see, is just the "suggested" tags, which basically is self referencing, since it just means, the tags are in that list. There is https://itch.io/games/tag-386 and https://itch.io/games/tag-486 , but only a handful of games use it.

Ok. Looks like an artificial method to inflate follower count. Itch does not like metric manipulations. Even if you do not intend it that way. It is unlikely that they have or will implement any gate keeping mechanism (except payment for paid content).

As I said, you do not even need an account to buy things on Itch. So even if you would sell something exclusively on Itch, people would neither need to follow you, nor have an account to buy it.

There is a mechanism to bother your customers with an email. But that is for paying customers, not for followers.

There is an incentive mechanism to have people pay more than 0. Put an individually priced file with price 1 on the project. The people that have paid can be rewarded in several ways.

But being a follower as a prerequisite? The reward of being a follower is getting notified in https://itch.io/my-feed about your public activities. It will be mostly your followers and the three people accidentally reading it in https://itch.io/feed and some few that might stumble on it with google. Talking about a changing password to your exclusive content in such a notification would make it kinda exclusive to your followers.

I do not understand what that means. There is no "a gmail". There is email and there is service providers. Your service provider seems to be gmail, but it will still send an email. If that bounces, it could be temporary server problems or some obscure reason like the one I linked.

Whatever the issue is, this message board is not the Itch support. There is no support team reading here. It is users answering here.

Probably another ddos attempt.

Or a variety of this issue here https://itch.io/t/4185817/not-receiving-verification-emails-from-itchio

Why is that a feature anyone would want?

You do not even need an account on Itch to buy games here. You can only follow, if you have an account.

And why would anyone follow you to begin with, if they can not see your project.

Maybe you are talking about something else. You have a patreon. There is some options to make files accessible to patreon followers.

A manual check is what is happening, if your game does not get indexed right away.

But the problem is, that the waiting list for manual checks is long.

Read here https://itch.io/t/4120453/unofficial-search-and-indexing-faq

If you visit any specific place daily, marking the things you have alreay seen works wonders. It's not just about visual novels that you do not want to see. Marking things you already know, was the motivation behind that script, and for that it works very efficient.

Imagine there would only be like half a page each visit visible, even if you scroll down 10 pages. You would even immediatly spot new games that were indexed later. The recurring games that appear there every month or two will be gone. The developers that release slop after slop will be gone (you can also mark developers). And if you run that script, you can also combine it with the other script that gives you a genre filter for the main genres.

But beware, on some days, half the games you see will be malware. That's how it was a year ago. I hope it got better.

Filter options from within the site's system sure would be nice. So would an ignore this button, as Steam has it.

But I have doubts that it will be implemented any time soon. The exclusion filter from years ago was never expanded, nor got a user interface. But it was not removed either. Maybe it will rank higher in the priority list, if enough people officially request the feature. There is a feedback button on the left and request feature is one of the options.

There are some games that just tag vn, because they use renpy or because they have dialogue. I even have seen games that tagged point&click, because, you pointed and clicked, but those were not the type of games that are called point&click.

Not really efficient to try and exclude each game individually when they just keep coming consistently.

My point is, there are not that many adult games, once you select a tag or two. Selecting those individually is not that much effort. Also, if you browse by popular sorting.

Btw, if you want to, you can use my script to exclude multiple tags, but it takes a few minutes to set up. About a minute or so for 1000 games.

1. You configure the style {display:none} to be on button 1 (should be default). 

2. Search for whatever tag combination you do not want to see.

3. Have endless scroll active and scroll down

4. Go to top of page.

5. Hover over the first game.

6. Press and hold 1

7. Do not get dizzy, while the games dissappear. 

8. Repeat after a few months or add new games as needed.

It's easy to select more than you wished for and a hassle to remove it from the list (you need to switch style and press 1 again on the games you accidentally added). You can also export and import lists and there are two lists and two styles to switch between for each list.

If you try this, you could also use the genre filter tampermonkey script I made. It can filter 1 genre. The main genre. If a game did not set visual novel as the main genre, it will not work.

But my recommendation is, to select individual games. It is more effecitve than you might assume, unless you browse the recent page. And if you do browse recent, that method above will obviously not work.

For your case, using the genre filter and individually selecting games should be most effective. You could also add the regular exclusion of 1 tag to that.

I am afraid, there will not be a straightforward solution. Itch will not change their policy for you. If they quarantine a page, they will display that warning on all links and downloads on that page. And that warning includes all the countries the account has been connected from.

My guess is, that they display the location to let people decide with more information, if they will trust the page. If the developer is known for being an Australian developer and the account was connected from Canada, that looks kinda strange. Some of those quarantined pages are indeed fake accounts trying to impersonate someone known.

Removing your pages from quarantine is not a permanent solution. It can happen at a later time again. They cannot protect an account from future quarantine, else the system would be trivial to overcome by using a hacked account, that already has that protection.

While you might contact Itch to get your games out of quarantine, after you notice the quarantine, that's actually redundant. They already have the game on a to-do list, because it is quarantined. Unfortunately, waiting time for staff to handle these cases can be rather long and they typically will not tell, why the game is quarantined.

So. What could you do?

Have a webgame and no external links on the page. And no download section. After a quick glance, your games look like the type of games that could easily be played in browser. While browser games can get quarantined, at least if they have links or download files, I am not sure, how you could trigger to display the quarantine message without those.

The documented features are in the faq/docs, which are linked at the bottom https://itch.io/docs/general/faq Also helpful for some searches is the https://itch.io/directory at the bottom.

There recently was a sticky posting added with some answers. https://itch.io/t/5805284/useful-answers The sticky thread includes a link to Can I use exclusion filters? Some other links in the sticky posting also deal with features and functions of the site, because people keep asking about those.

If you seek a feature you think should exist, but do not find, a google search might help. Some features are just called differently on Itch. Or work differently. For example, there is no private messaging system. And a game review will not appear on the game page - many people are confused by that.

On a side note, I only discovered that Steam has an exclusion filter through reading discussions on Itch.

That's been talked about often.

There's an undocumented feature to exclude 1 tag. https://itch.io/t/160014/can-i-use-exclusion-filters You can put it in a bookmark. And you need to be logged into your account for the feature to work.

In my experience, the tags are not accurate. Your favorite game might be tagged visual novel, even if you would disagree. I think it more helpful to "exclude" individual games. That way you can filter away not only games you have seen and deemed one of those vn you do not like, but also the games you already have played and still clutter your searches. https://itch.io/t/1018893/a-never-show-me-this-again-please-button

I do not think we have completely different views... ;-)

You do want to include it with narrative and use that meta tension. Which should help sell this point to the players.

Though from a design choice, it is an outdated concept. It once was a necessity. And it might be only tolerated nowadays with a good excuse. If I remember correctly, Resident Evil not only had only special save locations, but you needed a ressource to save at all. A limited ressource. Plus the game was difficult.

What I've observed over the years, saving restrictions disappeared more and more. Either you could save practically everywhere, or the game design would make saving the game obsolete. A prominent example is Dark Souls.

From your description above, I would rather expect a game with no save option at all. You would save automatically to avoid losing progress when leaving the game or when it might crash. But you could not load previous save games, only "continue" the game. And there might be some kind of milestones or progress points you might be able to return to, when madness overcomes the character. Like, waking up from a nightmare with your childhood toy in hands.

Restricting saving to certain locations does not solve the issue of save scumming. It's not saving you need to restrict, but loading. Restricting it to your safe house or a specific point in an area just makes save scumming annyoing, but it does not forbid it. Your horror meter and the abilty for a game over places your game more into the roguelike category.

I suggest you think about this point: what do you expect the player to do, when game over due to full horror meter or bad choices, etc,  is reached. Redo from last player save. Redo whole game, but with more knowledge on what to do. Redo last chapter. Redo weakened, but not reaching true game over - yet. Something else.

And to a lesser extent, what do you expect players to do, when they made a bad choice, but survive. If they are supposed to play on and still finish the game, you need to restrict loading, not saving. If you just restrict saving, a part of your game mechanics would be to carefully select where and when to save, and redo chapters/chunks till they managed to do it optimal. This of course can be your game mechanic, but it did not seem that this is your intention.

That's a standard message that is not specific. There is a lot of spam lately and the detector seems to do a lot of false positives.

Unfortunately, the Itch staff that would unblock those comments is obviously overwhelmed with all the blocked comments. I think the developer can also unblock specific comments. At least there is a pending section where such comments are listed.

(The moderators in that message are not the blue moderators you see in the general message boards. It is either Itch staff or for those threaded comment sections this is handled by the developer)

That's just my viewpoint. If you restrict saving the game, my advice is, to be carefull, so you do not make people think it is just lazy difficulty increase.

I’m pretty sure I don’t want to allow saving at any time from the main menu.

... why? Don't you use a game engine that would handle this type of clerical work?

Sure, that is a design choice. A bad one in many cases. It is artificial difficulty. For that Resident Evil game, it added another meta layer to the horror. You were facing the real danger of needing to redo the level (and RE is old, so they technically could not save every place back in the day).

Ability to saving a game's state is a meta option. It is not part of the game. For the player it is a quality of life feature, like being able to configure controls.

If you implement saving restrictions, you need to be careful to implement them in a way that it adds to the fun and is not seen as lazy difficulty increase.

A typical restriction would be to not being able to save inside combat or while doing certain puzzles, but allow free saving while doing exploration.

I guess the end of the year cleanup they do will finally dig out any misplaced requests. I remember reading that they actually do have special options for payout that are reserved for things like those mega bundles. But of course it is an interface problem, if people can accidentally activate an option that is not helpful for their kind of payout.

Hints like that should go into the sticky https://itch.io/t/5345077/important-payout-or-tax-related-issues-read-here-no-th... and of course the options in the payout dialogue should be made foolproof, if at all possible.

(Ohhh, it's you. I misread the avatar icon. So that's why your issue was marked as resolved.)

There is two issues.

One is the payout. This obviously was not resolved. My mistake. It is resolved.

The other is talking about the first issue in a place where this kind of talk is "off topic" as per rules of the section. Talking endlessly and not accepting, that this is not helping the first issue is the "disrupting" part. You got your ticket number posted and forwarded as per the makeshift solution for the "support" message board. That's all the public community message board could have helped you. And I believe this was explained already.

Good luck with your issue. The end of the year cleanup hopefullly clears your actual payout issue too.

--

Sigh. Please use a different way of translating English. If you do not understand something, do not interpret it just in some negative way. I was just talking about literally the end of the year and how, for bookkeeping purposes, there is a cleanup to be made and that's how the other thread was resolved. And ironically the same reason was given for that other thread, as to why the payout was delayed.

Also, this is public message board. Why are people always surprised if someone enters and writes comments.

It's a complex topic.

The core philosophy behind it, in my perception, is just that indexing is seen as secondary by Itch. It is nice to have. But it is not essential. Five minute fame for being briefly visible on the most recent page is not gonna change the success of practically all released games. So why bother with such features. Or make indexing a priority, when there are other support issues.

Imho the most effective way to prevent unnecessary support requests would be to change the docs and if there are, other places where a time frame for indexing is mentioned. It causes expectations, that are not met and leads to frustration and the limbo of uncertainity, since the docs also do mention the possibility of intentional non indexed status.

I believe the solution for developers is to just use a banner. Not elegant, but should work in most cases. So the "side buttons" are over the banner and then the game area begins.

A sort of solution on desktop is to just tell your browser to display that area different.

This should work as a user css style.

@-moz-document regexp("^https://[^/]+\\.itch\\.io/.*") {
.user_tools {
    position: static;
}
}

What also should work, is zooming in, till the button area gets flattend on top. The Itch css is adaptive to screen width. But that does not work on some games, as they need default or even lower zoom.

I did not understand what you mean by that list thing. I guess much is lost in translation here.

If you refer to the game I mentioned, it was a game that is also on Steam. It is sold here too and for some time a version of the game was sold for cheaper price from a different account. It is an older game, so it might have gone unnoticed for a while. What exactly was going on I do not know. But the game disappeared after reports, so I assume it really was software piracy. Or an attempt of it. Meaning that someone actually tried to make money by selling it.

But this is going offtopic.

Edit:

You seem to have trouble following the flow of a threaded discussion with sub threads. You need to look at who replied to whom. I did not talk to you. I replied to that question about the money situation of frozen payouts. (Same as you did, and since both replies are directly under each other, you mistook that as the second posting to be an reply to your post).

In my answer I remembered an example I personally saw. There is no way to interpret it as talking about your games. Unless there is something like translation problems. English is not my native language, and I think that goes for you too.

... why ... what ... please make sense if you write.

Your use of sarcasm or whatever that was, is not helping to understand you better. Or distinguish honest discussion from fishing for reactions.

Since you did not even notice, that I replied to you, it is questionable what you thought you have seen in the other thread. Maybe you mistook something for something else. But it does not matter. Your topic is your topic and your issue is solved anyway. 

I honestly do not know why not more such support threads are archived away. They are off topic for the section. They really should rename the section. 

I am not sure what the question is, because of grammar. And because the answer is trivial in most combinations.

https://itch.io/games/tag-virtual-reality has 10k games, so a lot of games are released with that type of graphics. It is still a nieche of course. Evident by how many ratings the top rated games have. https://itch.io/games/top-rated/tag-virtual-reality has games with up to 100 ratings. While https://itch.io/games/top-rated/tag-3d goes over 1000.

Otherwise, releasing a vr game is the same question as releasing a game at all. If you do not have a exclusivity contract and do not need platform drm, releasing an indie game on Itch is kinda what people do. Regardless of platform. There is even games for that 1 bit crank handheld game device. https://itch.io/games/tag-playdate

No, I called your behaviour trolling. That was a reply to your post.

Every software is free in his site!

And this is why I still think you are trolling, with statements like that.

On the happy side, your employers issue was resolved. And luckily no information was given who that is. Because that's part of the reason, why this is ususally not to be discussed in the public section. Seems your employer used a payout option that is not to be used with paypal/payoneer. Let's hope your employer does not use any special options when paying you.

Last time I had discussions with someone ranting about Itch being a thiefing company, it turned out to be invalid tax validation. Those expire after like 3 years or maybe less. Sure, Itch could do a better job at giving notice about any problems with special options or invalid information. The expired tax thing should have beeen improved at least.

No, I did not. You need to look at the indentation of replies.

If it were not obvous that you are bored, and decidedly not angry, and try to troll your way through support threads, it would be an interesting question.

What happens to the money, if payout cannot happen, because it was decided that the project was not owned by the account that sold it. I saw such a case of software piracy. It was a game and the same game was sold by a different account at a cheaper price.

My assumption would be, that refunds would have to be issued to the buyers. Or compensation would be due to the original owner. Some digging on search hints that this is basically what should happen in such cases. Refunds and should any be left, compensation to the original owner.

Cases where Itch would deny payout might be such cases. Indeed, some cases where Itch just takes ages to process the payout could be cases where allegations were made, but could not yet be decided.

has no intent to pay

Exactly. That's the thing. Being unable to pay, because the tax company or the payment processor is making problems, is not intent to not pay. And being slow and having bad communication with the hired companies is also not intent to not pay.

You just do not know why your or other payments are being held. It's part of the issue and cause for frustration. And it is also the main cause why such things are not to be discussed in public message boards. They just cannot answer you here and say, hey, we have some very dubious transactions on your account and some agency is looking very closely here and accuse you and us of money laundering. Or, hey, you sure you made correct statements here in your tax info and your registration info? And why are there so many complaints on your account of people that claim you scammed them? Or hey, why did you register your company in a different country than your payment destination? Things like that. And my guess is, that the most problems are taxes and maybe even money laundering investigations. Itch has pay what you want and suspicously looking things could happen easily. Transactions over a certain sum are monitored and will get extra scrutiny. Plus you might have noticed how the US government went extra crazy about tarifs and so on.

Anyway, intent to not pay would be fraudulent. And I go with the proverb, never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently be explained by inability. In other words, I do not believe that Itch wants to not pay you and other creators. But Itch is ... indie. You see this at many places. But for better or worse, it is bascially the best place for indie devs, because it is the only place. Most devs here would not be accepted at places like GameJolt, let alone Steam.

Please read the statement about payment issues.

... will take you to a special page where you can submit a request directly within your dashboard without writing an email. Your message will be associated with your account and payout, enabling our staff to review your requests more efficiently. Tickets created through this link will be monitored by the staff that processes payouts, instead of going into our regular support queue.

That's the right channel to complain.

Yes! Even if it's not intentional, it happens regularly. Yes they do it regularly!

What you describe is people complaining that it took ages for payout. That is not the same as them not paying out at all. You claim they do such things.

Please cite occurances of that happening.

If claiming was enabled, someone might have claimed it. Immediate download is not necessary.

That was irony and sarcasm. That person is angry with Itch and commented with sarcasm on another person's thread.

Please cite a case where that probably become an actual never. Please include the circumstances. Like, was it software piracy? Other things like selling illegal content. Not paying taxes. Fraudulent activites. Incorrect adresses?

Waiting long is not the same as never. And waiting time between businesses can be a huge lot long.

Putting a "probably" bevore the never still implies that they do this regularly. Not paying out at all. They take a long time and there were communication issues about what hinders a payout. Read here https://itch.io/t/5345077/important-payout-or-tax-related-issues-read-here-no-th...

But what you are discussion with the mod is just, that these are issues that are not within the scope of the message board. It is individually for your case. Here you will only get general statements, like check your taxes right down to the zip codes used.

You sure? I read the comments on your game and have to assume you hade some kind of sale with claiming enabled and had previously a pay what you want project.

Itch is project based. Someone does not claim files, but projects. A claimed project gives acces to all files, even if the project is marked as paid at a later date. (The exeption are "individually" priced files that no one should ever use, because that mechanic is ill understood by everyone).

Also, if you have ever had a "donation", while the project was pay what you want, those people also can now download any paid files.

Download keys & URLs

A download key is a special URL that gives someone access to a project’s files.

There are a few ways a download key can come into existence:

Someone pays for your project (or purchases a bundle that includes your project)

You, the project owner, generate one from the project edit page

Someone “claims” your project in a 100% off sale/bundle that has claiming enabled

I wonder how you perceive photography. If you compare the creative process to create a picture between taking a photo and painting a canvas, there are some striking similarities. The photographer "just presses a button". Yet photography is an established art.

Sure, there is slop made with AI, because it is easy. Just as there is slop made with photograhy apparatus. Or slop made with cookie cutter templates on a premade game engine. Creating yet another pixel art rpg with a story seen so often there are tropes about it. There are even engines that advertise as needing no coding knowledge.

your entire creative process

You act like using AI helpers is like asking the machine: hey google, make a video game and put my name under it. Just like a photographer just pushes the button and "created" a picture. "No" creativity. If it is enough for the photographer to decide what's in the picture, why is it not enough for the AI operator to decide what's in the image? That's why I am asking how you perceive photography. What's the difference for you. Unless of course you have a similar opinion about the creativity of taking photos.

And what do you think about people using a magic box to have their game do things? Speaking of game engines. Someone using that engine relies on the blood and sweat of the people that programmed the actual routines to move pixels around. It's standing on the shoulders of giants.

What do you think about a movie director or an orchestra conductor? Are they "creative"? It's the actors that act, the musicians that play. The instrument builders built the instruments and the notes composed by a componist. The movie script was written by someone else, and the cutter puts it all together. Is the creativity of conductor and director outsourced?

Anyway, I suggest you read the post you replied to again, what was actually done with the llms. Googling an example from stackoverflow and adapting it to your needs is not really much different from asking chatgpt to generate a code snippet. Only, the chatgpt snippet might have bugs in it that are not obvious. In both cases, the coder did not spend days learning how that code fragment would be done from sratch. It is standing on the shoulders of giants, relying on previously done work. Googling it, is a huge improvement from digging through examples in written books. Summarizing it with the help of a llm is a further advancement, but with the risk of it being very wrong.

And refining text with llm is a glorified spell checker. I hope you do not use those when you write emails or texts. The knowledge in that spell checking relies on previous works of other people. You would be outsourcing your language skills.

Visual art is a bit different, as you do not need an image that is functional, as you would need a functional code snippet. That's probably why ai images look so bland. They fulfill the functionality requested. For code this is enough. So much enough, that one uses libraries full of functions and even whole game engines that do not even need coding knowledge anymore.

You can be against the usage of AI for all sorts of reasons. And we all should be, for things like the slop created with it. But things like spell checking and coding assistance, in terms of creativity, are state of the art methods, of what programmers are doing for as long as there has been programming. Reuse, rehash, copy, paste, do calls to things other people wrote.

It will disappear, once they manage to deal with the bug. Since it happens to everyone on every profile link on a creator page, they should rather sooner than later deal with it.

But displaying that scam warning is important too, so they might delay it till a good repair, instead of a rollback to no warning message at all.

That appears on every profile. To be precise, the link from the creator page to the profile page.

They obviously implemented a new warning for external links. But it catches the default link to the profile as well, for whatever reason.

Also, this is community message board. And not support by Itch staff.

This is "support"! Isn't it?

No. It is not.

Get help from the itch.io community. Have a quick question or issue, other members of the community can assist you in finding an answer. If you need to specifically contact itch.io staff you can message our support team. Although staff may monitor this forum, we request that any account related matters be submitted through our support system.

Your issue is about payout and the community cannot help you here, excepot if it helping you to know that other people have issues too.

There is a sticky where support for payout is. 

https://itch.io/t/5345077/important-payout-or-tax-related-issues-read-here-no-th...

We ask that you no longer post requests for payout help on our community forums. We closed the previous topic we had open as it was a temporary solution until we updated some of our processes.

There is an issue about what people expect from a message board. Some companies do have a message board for technical support, that is named similar like this and it is operated by the company and has staff answering the threads.

But Itch's message board is between users. But admins are people too (I've heard) and they are not barred from reading and posting here. This still does not make it a tech support message board.

Actual support issues have to go through actual support. Which is via email.

Problems and frustration arise, because waiting time for any issue is long. Longer than the docs promise. So people complain to support for issues that are not complain-worthy. Not in the way that they are eglible for staff time. Like getting indexed or having comments unblocked. And from what I read, staff might work on those issues, but they never answer any tickets about these low priority things. 

I think it is sending mixed signals, that there is an "inofficial" communication channel through the message boards anyway. By posting ticket numbers, after the rules even clarified that the board is not for this kind of support. Mixed signals indeed. Tell people what is not wanted here and then tell them how to do it anyway. I do not know or understand why this is done. From my perspective it only sparks people screaming loudly for things that would clear up by waiting like all the rest.

It is a squeaky wheel gets the grease method. At least it seems so. And I do not like that. What I would have expected it sharing frustration with each other in a community. People talking to each other how long support can take and basically telling each other, that everything is normal, and Itch staff is just overworked. And in some threads I did get the feeling that they were opened exactly for that reason. To check, if everything is normal, or if they did something wrong. Oh, but threads about how long support would take are discouraged. Mixed signals indeed. Maybe it is a language thing, as English is not my first language.

What am I trying to say? Itch offers services on a shoe string budget. And I fear for Itch's future, as they do not seem to get a grip on the support issues. Ignoring low priority issues like indexing and comments are one thing. Those are optional things that are not needed to use Itch (Sell a game, buy a game, download a game). But support tickets for those bog down more important issues like removing malware, double checking payouts and so on.

I would tackle parts of  this rather pragmatically and do things like update the docs. Tell people honestly what to expect. The docs talk about days and ecourage people to write unnecessary emails. Why. It costs nothing to rephrase that, so people do not write unneeded mails. If they know that indexing could take 4 weeks, and support will not answer mails about this, that avoids the often seen situation that someone complains in a thread: my game was not indexed after 3 days and support did not answer me after 2 days. Why do they expect this time frame in the first place? Why do they even expect an answer at all?

As for the comment blocking, some people forget the other side of the issue. Developers complaining about all the spam. It would be a lot worse, if there were no comment blocking for suspected spammers. The complainers are a sign that Itch is doing something. It could be more precise of course. But the criminials are working hard on their crimes. Sadly it is literally their job. I suspect they work in one of those tech agencies that professionally also scam people over the telephone. Itch is a side gig for them. At least it would explain a lot.

But here too, the message people get could be better. It could explain more what to expect and how to react.

As for payouts, I have seen how someone was so frustrated that he quit Itch. And for what? Because needed information was not at the expected place. Some tax information was outdated and it was not shown at the right place or not at all and of course, Itch did not respond within a few days as the docs promise.

Communication is an issue. It could be a lot better. It would not even need to be active communication. Passive communication could cover a huge lot. By that I mean giving people information at the right place at the right time, so they know what to expect. It would not reduce waiting time a lot, but it would dampen frustration a lot. Being in limbo about your situation is not a good thing.