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Is there a way to get reviewed for indexing before publishing?

A topic by Elias Sant'Ana created Jul 01, 2023 Views: 314 Replies: 2
Viewing posts 1 to 2

Hello community!

I apologize in advance if I got this all wrong. I made sure to read everything I could before asking, though.

So, I was reading the "Getting  Indexed" document and it seems there is no way to get your content reviewed before making it public. Is that correct? When I searched the topics about this issue, all I could find was creators frustrated because they have to wait anything between a day and a month in order to get indexed.

Personally, I wouldn't mind waiting a long time for content review if I at least had the option to not publish the project until it was approved. In fact, that's how I expected it to be in the first place. That way, you can still choose a release date without being worried about becoming essentially invisible for the first few days (which are the most important).

And just to get something that I saw mentioned in another topic out of the way: I understand you can get around the wait once you have already published something, what I'm asking if there is a way to change the order of the actions from Publish->Approval->Indexing to Ask for Approval->Set a Release Date->Publish + Indexing.

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From other answers that have been given, I understand that there is no prior review process, it has been requested more than once, but I don't remember seeing any official answer.

You also have to take into account that updating the game can lead you to have to be indexed again.

The process is not per account or per game, but apparently for each change, possibly to avoid malware or scams.

It is important to note that the page is public, that is, people can see/download/buy your game, even if it is not indexed, the only thing is that you will not appear in the searches within the itch website.

The best thing is that you create your own advertising, there is a post to promote your game here and it is always good to do it on pages or networks outside of itch and not depend to be indexed.

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Well, if every change requires indexing, this must be a nightmare to administer. No wonder it can take weeks. I also didn't take into account that updates could introduce malware, but that's really a different issue.

Being hidden from search on a launch day will hurt visibility, even if you are doing advertising elsewhere. For instance, if you make a trailer for multiple platforms and a customer sees the itch.io logo among them at the end and decides to search, nothing will show up.

And yes, the page will be already available, but the fact is, you get cut from a very important functionality for an arbitrary amount of time even if you finish setting up your page months ahead.

Anyway, at this point this is just derailing into a rant, I'll stop :P

Thanks for clarifying the situation!

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