itch.io Community » itch.io » Questions & Support

Cannot search creator profiles at all anymore, only games they made

A topic by komehara created 2 days ago Views: 89 Replies: 3

Viewing posts 1 to 2

In 2022, I opened a thread about creator search sometimes failing: https://itch.io/t/2030207/cannot-search-some-creator-names-via-search-field but in most cases matching creator profiles would appear in a special widget when searching them by name (with also matching games below).

With the new search feature, we can now search games (actually projects) and jams and we can select what type we want to search with the top-left buttons:

However, creator search completely disappeared. I expected a 3rd tab “Creators” but it’s not there.

I think it’s a bug because we could do it before (regression) and the search field still says “Search for games, jams, tags or creators”

Fortunately we can still see the games made by that creator and find the creator from there, but it’s not the same technically:

the original creator search showed a small widget with creator name and avatar to quickly confirm we found the right one
if creator has 0 games, it won’t appear (sure, you should be interested in a creator once they create at least 1 game but I can imagine a scene where I’m exchanging contact info with another game developer at some event and they say “hey, I haven’t published my game on itch.io yet but I can give you my profile so you can follow me: just search for “xxx” on itch.io!”
if creator has a common name that is used a lot in game titles, things will get mixed up quickly

Could we have a tab for Creators that restores the original creator name search?

I can also make a GitHub ticket if needed, since it’s a kind of regression.

Like Reply

hechelion2 days ago (1 edit)

I think it’s a bug because we could do it before

This is not an error, it is a change announced by the administrator:

Because we’re now indexing pages by their author names, we’ve temporarily removed the account search functionality from the search results page. We may revisit this in the future.

https://itch.io/t/3818776/new-search-backend

And just to let you know, no, there hasn't been any announcement of a change that would bring back the author search feature.

Like Reply

komehara1 day ago

Ok, too bad but I can wait for this since the first displayed games are likely to be made by the author I’m looking for.

In this case I assume that the “Search for games, jams, tags or creators” description was kept because we can still find games whose creator match the search string, hence “Search for creators” is ultimately doable (with the caveat, as I said, that they must have published at least one game)

Like Reply

redonihunter1 day ago

Nah. That's just Itch being Itch.

There is more places where the texts and labels are technically incorrect or misleading.

Look at the select a tag box. That's a write in box. You can select a tag. But you can freestyle write in a tag.

Or worse, the link you see on all browse pages. "View all tags". Nope. That's not all tags.

On the plus side, the name matching was improved when the search was changed. It matches more typos and different spelling. Search was much more literal before.

Like Reply