I actually read that before posting, and since it's been nearly a week, I thought maybe I could ask for a moderator's help.
Thank you for your response.
We submitted our game last Thursday, and as we approach this coming Thursday (though the publish day on the page appears to show one day less), it will have been a full week. Currently, we’ve received 830 views with 18 downloads, but it doesn’t seem like the views alone are contributing to the indexing queue.
If I may, I’d like to offer a suggestion. It might be helpful if games could be indexed prior to their official publication on the platform. From our experience with our previous game, the visibility and engagement during the initial phase on itch.io had a far more significant impact than any other marketing efforts we undertook.
I feel that this adjustment could make the process smoother for developers, and we’d greatly appreciate any improvements in this area.
Thank you for your time and support!
Currently, we’ve received 830 views with 18 downloads
Seems you are doing well for not being indexed.
The publishing process on Itch is a bit strange, yes. But essentially it is self publishing of unverified publishers. And this gets abused. A lot. What triggers manual inspection is secret. Might as well include rng. It is known to also happen on updates. So even if you pre-publish and get indexed, you might get temporarily get delisted for inspection for your release update.
There is a suggestion box in the feedback button. A feature request. Any suggestions might reach Itch better this way. This is community, so you are usually talking to other users here.
My advice is, to ignore the indexing and update, if you have updates. You would not even know about the indexing, if you hadn't looked.
The mod is community mod. There is a dedicated feedback button if people want to make suggestions to Itch.
People here can of course talk and discuss feature requests. And staff might read here. And other people reading here and agreeing might hit the feedback button and make the same suggestion.
It sure is a topic that is concerning for developers. Itch has to balance protecting users and supporting developers. There are sadly hacked user accounts on a daily basis. I have seen those in the hundreds. Also shovelware and scams. Plus of course the things that are not up to the standards in the faq about indexing. https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines