There seem to have been more spam accounts leaving comments saying things like "Updated version here" with links to suspicious sites. While I delete and report these whenever I receive them, it feels like there should be a way to not have these very obvious spam comments be displayed on game pages. (It is a slight improvement over the porn gif comments that were being spammed previously, at least.)

Would it be possible to implement a feature where comments that link outside of itch are not displayed until the creator of the page approve them? This could be an opt-in feature so creators who want to have their comments be a free-for-all like they are now can still have that, but it could be a nice in-between option for people who don't want to close off comments entirely but also don't want to keep deleting suspicious-looking spam comments, and it would make itch comments safer because people wouldn't be led off itch to suspicious external websites.

Yes, this is a problem for me too. Every day, I receive 3-4 spam comments that the spam bot doesn't catch. There should be an option that requires moderator approval for comments containing links before they are posted.

What about a limit on how many comments a user can post in say an hour? I feel there is no need to be able to post 50 messages in 30 minutes.

If we can get fancy, use something like Leaky bucket -algorithm, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_bucket

Set bucket size to 3, so user can post 3 messages in rapid succession. Bucket fills +1 every hour or maybe 30 minutes, so after those three rapid messages user can post one message per hour.

Hi, I was about to post my own thread about this.  

Itch.io already has the ability to detect links on their platform, and indicate where they are coming from.  I value comments on my page, I don't value people spamming links from malicious sources to it.  

I could even go as far as saying there should be a whitelist that a developer can control, for instance, because I do appreciate people who leave feedback via a youtube video of my work.  

But at the very least, you should be able to give developers the tools to prevent a comment of posting a link onto our comment page.  

Was gonna post about this as well. Getting a lot of "updated version here: (link)" comments. 

If you could auto mod certain phrases or make it so comments with links require approval,  it would probably prevent that type of spam.

It's been happening much more frequently lately, we need a solution from itch about this. I'm tempted to submit a support ticket about it.

This topic is 3 months old...and it doesn't look like itch.io did anything to adress the issue!

just came on here to complain about the same thing. I'm getting 2-3 of them a day

I still say that limiting rate of postings would help a lot. Recently it is 2 days old accounts that have posted 320 messages. Limiting to one posting per hour would reduce that substantially.

We're absolutly spam-bombed this days. Anything that would make it harder for bots to post hundreds of messages daily would help
- Comments with links automoderation
- Option to ban links in the comments
- Limits for users on the comments number per hour
- Captcha before comments
- Allow for comments only for users that have downloaded/purchased the game/product

Anything!  

I’ve been getting this daily at last for a couple weeks now.

exact same phrase and link, but never caught in the spam filter. 

It’s quite frustrating 

I host a game jam, and almost every single game submitted to it is getting spammed with these links. Can't wait until itch.io actually does something about it.