Hi everyone,

I have a question regarding the Featured Game Jams page and possible issues with automated access.

I run a private Discord bot (not public, no commercial use) that once every 24 hours checks the itch.io Game Jam page and extracts the currently featured jams, which are then posted into my private Discord server.

For quite some time now, it seems that Cloudflare protection has been enabled more aggressively on itch.io. Whenever I access the site manually (PC or phone), I have to pass the Cloudflare browser check. Since then, my bot no longer finds any featured jams at all.

My concern is that Cloudflare might be blocking or altering the response for non-browser requests, which would explain why the bot suddenly receives no usable data.
The bot runs on a Raspberry Pi in my home network, but I assume that should not matter in principle.

My questions to the community:

• Is automated access / scraping of publicly visible pages (like Featured Game Jams) expected to be blocked by Cloudflare now?

• Is there an official or recommended way (API, feed, etc.) to programmatically access featured or popular game jams?

• Has anyone else noticed changes in how the Featured Jams page behaves for non-browser clients?

I’m not trying to bypass security or abuse the site, the bot runs only once per day and is for personal use only. I mainly want to understand whether this behavior is expected now and if there’s a supported alternative.

Thanks in advance!

after inspecting the current HTML, it looks like the issue is likely on my side.

The Featured Jams section is now wrapped in a dedicated
<section class="featured_jams">, which my parser was not accounting for previously.

I’m updating the bot to target that section explicitly instead of relying on a generic jam_grid_widget lookup.