Hi,
We've recently found out that one of the entries for our jam was not as genuine as we thought and was in fact a plagiarized game. The author took the hard work of another and passed it off as their own in order to pocket the rewards from our jam. And mind you, it wasn't a lot; a golden certificate and 71 USD, but they still did it. They even had the balls to ask for their real name to be on the certificate!
We were only alerted to the fact of their cheating because they made victims in other jams in China and elsewhere (though all of those were hosted on itch as far as I'm aware). The people affected contacted us and other gamejams where the fraudster was active and it is only thanks to them that we were able to spot the fraud. In hindsight there were many things we could have done to prevent the incident from happening and we will now incorporate googling the game and reverse image search, among others, in our vetting procedure. This is going to be tedious even with few entries, but honesty and trust are not good systems on the internet as the dose of reality that hit us in the face demonstrated.
But also, I was wondering if people would be interested in forming a network of jam hosts so that we can collaborate together to prevent known bad actors from doing too much damage. A place where we can share information amongst organizers independent of platform, because let's be honest, if it happens on itch, it probably happens everywhere and the more we are, the more information we can collect. Though this thread would be a good start at least. But I was thinking of using reddit and or discord.
Ideas? Thoughts?
Edit: due to the positive feedback here and on the itch forums, I'm tentatively creating this discord server: https://discord.gg/eaZYGwQePc I'm not too familiar with subreddits, so if anyone would like to step up and create one, it would be appreciated.