Post by leafo in Games released well after page creation never get on "Most Recent"; it sorts by page publish date rather than "actually indexed" date

Viewing post in Games released well after page creation never get on "Most Recent"; it sorts by page publish date rather than "actually indexed" date

Unfortunately not, as it seemed to misunderstand my point and did not present any argument for why using time of indexing as the initial time is not superior to using time of page creation as the initial time.

Sorry you feel that way, I’m not trying to ignore your feedback, I’m trying to explain how our system works and how we have mechanisms for pages to re-surface after they’ve already been published for some time.

Can we change how things work? Sure, we regularly are tweaking aspects of indexing and sorting. Thank you for your feedback. But, for the sake of responding to this thread (specifically the title you wrote), I am explaining to you how it currently works so that you (and other readers) may best use that information. The information I am telling you will always be relevant as well: We want to encourage people to write a devlog when they change their page substantially (or even on project launch). We want to encourage people to promote their game their outside channels as soon as they’re ready.

itch.io lets people publish pages in all kinds of different states, and change things around at any time. There are a lot of edge cases that could influence when a page was actually “published”. (For example, in response to your own suggestion: a developer could easily accidentally “publish” their page, then take it down, leave it up for some time as unindexed, then publish it again later and wonder why it’s not showing up in most recent) At this time, the devlog is the “formal” way to acknowledge a substantial update to your page so that the system may consider it for resurfacing in certain sorting algorithms.

Just keep in mind that some stages may require a human review, so there may be a delay before the system processes your page.

For reference, here’s a comparison between my external promotion vs the effect of getting on those Itch lists when you applied the manual bump.

The “manual bump” was more than just an increment of the “date” of your project. I also tagged your game in a way that makes it eligible to appear on the homepage outside of direct recommendations/followers (The “fresh games” section). This is not something that happens automatically, regardless of releasing a page or posting a devlog. This is something that only human reviewer can trigger. The things I advised in my last post will help prioritize your project in our internal queues to enable a human reviewer to discover it.

If you view your referral information you can see a majority of the traffic is coming from itch.io/, which is the homepage. Being on the homepage may have an impact on your page’s global popularity rate which can impact how you appear on other pages as well. Looking at your own analytics in isolation, it’s hard to say exactly what a change in date only would do.

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runevision83 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

The “manual bump” was more than just an increment of the “date” of your project. I also tagged your game in a way that makes it eligible to appear on the homepage outside of direct recommendations/followers (The “fresh games” section).

I see, thanks for that clarification and for applying that tag.

I also appreciate that you are listening this far and trying to clarify things. With your latest reply I feel we are finally at least talking about the same things.

There are a lot of edge cases that could influence when a page was actually “published”. (For example, in response to your own suggestion: a developer could easily accidentally “publish” their page, then take it down, leave it up for some time as unindexed, then publish it again later and wonder why it’s not showing up in most recent)

Sure, with my suggestion such edge cases would still require a human review, so no worse than today.

But the more sensible case of first having a game not available (and thus not indexed) though it has a public page, and later make it available (so it's indexed) would work much better out of the box without any human review needed.

My point is that using the first time a game is indexed as its "initial time" is just the sensible baseline and has only advantages and no disadvantages compared to using an "initial time" that precedes the game being indexed at all. There is just no argument for using an "initial time" that is earlier than the first time of being indexed.

We want to encourage people to write a devlog when they change their page substantially (or even on project launch). (...) Just keep in mind that some stages may require a human review, so there may be a delay before the system processes your page.

Yes, the human reviews are slow and/or unreliable. Again, I did make a "major update" tagged devlog shortly after my game was available for download and indexed, but there was no effect from that in the three days between I posted it and you applied your bump, so either it was not picked up in human review, or it was still in queue after three days.

This is not a complaint over the human reviews not being more efficient - I know there are limited resources and a huge amount of games and so on. Rather, it just supports my argument that it's sensible to not rely on human reviews for things where the system could be improved in a way that would make some of those human reviews less critical. Anything that can work better in an automated way would both benefit developers and ease the load on human reviews.

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