itch.io

Honestly, I don’t think it’s worth getting caught up in enforcement, punishment, etc. right now. At the end of the day, itch.io relies on user-provided tags for all the browse and discovery pages. The way I see it: if there’s misuse going on at a small scale, then we’ll likely receive reports and handle it in due time. It’s not the end of the world if a page is misclassified for some time; I think users of the site can use their judgment when reviewing projects on an individual level. The filters exist as a quick way to narrow down the result set to make looking through a list of projects more manageable.

If there is very widespread misuse of the tagging system, then at that point I would call it systematic and it probably needs to be addressed with how the feature is implemented. If it comes to that, then we will adjust the implementation of the feature to better model how people want to use it.

At this point, we’ve simply given developers the capability to use these tags to classify their pages. They exist plainly as tags; there’s no top-level filtering or penalizing going on with any pages. We’ll monitor how things go and make changes if necessary.