A big problem cropping up on Itch currently is that of scammers/bootleggers, especially in the NSFW creative community; there was the case of the Dieselmine Scammer, who was outed by HentaiWriter on Discord, the Dottoru Scammer, the Ses Scammer, and the Ru-Item Scammer who is still currently active, alongside many others who have yet to be caught out.

So how should Itch staff and moderators go about fixing this issue? My main suggestion would be research,research,research.

A lot of devs usually have a pre-existing form of communication; JP Devs have Ci-en, EN devs have patreon and everyone who is trying to grow has a twitter.

I propose that games (specifically those that have a former presence on other storefronts) be held in confinement by itch until contact is made with the dev through a reliable network. 

If it is them putting their game up, everything is peachy keen. throw it up on itch.

if it's not, the dummy account is banned. (and maybe do more harsh punishments; IP ban, MAC ban, etc?)

Very interesting hopefully itch.io mods will be able to ban them soon!

Hey there,

I propose that games (specifically those that have a former presence on other storefronts) be held in confinement by itch until contact is made with the dev through a reliable network.

I see where you’re coming from, but it’s worth noting in some cases this might be too time consuming. Itch.io is a place for indies, where publishing content is easily done by small developers. If we assume that there’s multiple new accounts daily, it would be too time consuming to confirm with the devs on each account.

Having said that, I have no visibility on the volume of new accounts, especially ones uploading games, so I can’t tell for sure how feasible this idea is, this was just my two cents.

I agree with you that these people must be punished in some way, but a couple of notes with what you propose.:

MAC ban It is impossible to apply on the internet, it only works on local networks because the MAC Address of the original sender isn't included in any of the network packet headers.

About Ban IP: The vast majority of ISPs provide dynamic IPs, a blocked IP is solved simply by restarting the router.

The problem is that sooner or later that blocked IP will be assigned to an innocent person (who has no technical knowledge) who will try to do something on itch.io and will have problems, it can even be worse, some ISPs connect several users via proxy, block one aIP, it can block dozens of innocent people.

Blocking IP is never a solution, on the contrary, it is something that simply worsens the quality of service for legitimate users.