Hey all, I'm an itch.io admin and responsible for coding everything to do with jams. Firstly, I'd like to apologize for the slowness issues during the submission process last Sunday. It took me a lot of thinking but I eventually identified that all the slowdown was due to a single page, the submissions page. (It had nothing to do with the number of games being submitted, rather everyone trying to view the submissions as they came in). This is all fixed now and we're ready to handle any jam of any size!
I've been making a few enhancements to itch.io for GMTK:
New submissions page
Sine I was spending bunch of time optimizing the submissions page, and I figured I might as well rewrite the UI as well. If you're logged into your account you'll see the new (fast loading) submissions page with a lot more sorting options. Keep in mind that this page caches data about submissions for a few minutes, so wait a few minutes for rating counts to update.
If you have any feature requests for this page please leave a comment. Now that the code is fresh in my mind I'd be happy to consider any ideas to make it better for sorting through the large amount of games.
Updated "In need of ratings page"
If you didn't know, there's a page that lists 100 projects in need of ratings: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/unrated
There was a bug with the query that caused the list to be empty due to a large number of empty submission pages. The bug was fixed so you can continue to browse the 100 least rated games.
Disqualifying empty & broken pages
I spoke with our host, Mark Brown, and he agreed that broken and empty submission pages should be disqualified. Disqualifying entries will help clean up the submission list so people can focus on rating projects that actually work. To help enable this, I've added a Report submission button on all submission pages. Please use this to report anything you think be disqualified or removed. We'll going through the reports one at a time and taking any action if necessary.
Thanks to everyone who participated, you were part of the largest jam on itch.io to date!