Post by Capky Games in My games disappeared from search lists

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One of my followers sent me this screenshot when I asked them today if my games were still quarantined, which is why I said in my message that they were quarantined.

The way that message is written, it makes it seem like I might be a scammer, which obviously reflects badly on me. I understand that there are indeed people who create a fake page and post a file with a virus, which is why a review of the games is important. But a whole month of giving a warning on my innocent games that makes me look like a possible scammer is very damaging to me.

And one of my games was fine until I posted a new update for it, then it was quarantined as well, which is why I am afraid to update more games.

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redonihunter2 days ago

Sorry, my mistake. I thought the quarantine message appears earlier. It appears at the latest possible moment - after you decided how much money to give and when pressing the red download button on the actual file.

But if you were not formally notified about a quarantine, I would still just ignore it and operate the page normally. I have seen that happen to another established account some time ago. Half the games were suddenly quarantined. I believe in that case accessing the games with a vpn might have been the cause: Itch might have thought the account was hacked.

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Capky Games2 days ago

I've certainly never used a VPN and it's not my fault if someone tries to do so and I don't think I'm the only developer whose games someone tries to hack into with a VPN, wouldn't itch.io really have better measures in place for this?

Do you happen to know what that person did to fix their problem?

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redonihunter2 days ago

I do not know if something was done on publisher side. It cleared after a few days. Maybe a week. People were making jokes about it in the comments. I do not know how long it took. It was one of the bigger accounts. 10k+ followers. It is rumored that the indexing waiting lists might be prioritised by traffic.

I added something to my reply above. There are cases where there is a waiting time that is unholy. I do not know what is going wrong. But I reported actual malware two months ago and it is still indexed. So if that has either a waiting time of that length or the staff clicked the wrong button. I would assume that it does not look any better for false positives that got put on quarantine.

wouldn't itch.io really have better measures in place for this?

Disclaimer: I only see the cases that are not caught. So the caught cases might be 10x 100x 1000x times higher. I do not know.

But the cases I do see, the measures are not performing well. When I regularly was checking out games, I collected malware games. My collection grew over 500 in a few months. Most of them on hacked accounts. So the measures are unsufficient to detect a hack. And the scanners were unsufficient to detect the malware. Itch is under attack every day by evil people abusing the system. Long waiting times for indexing or false positives are a symptom of that fight, in my opinion.

Maybe it got better the last few months. I sure hope so.

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Capky Games2 days ago

Yes, as I said, I fully understand that itch.io faces many problems and bad people every day. But I've been like this for a month or almost a month now, I really need help. I hope the situation changes soon.

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redonihunter2 days ago

As a user, my advice:

Ignore the quarantine in regards to updates. Just do whatever you would normally do.

Put up a link from your patreon to your Itch. ( I mean, Itch even quarantines the link from Itch to Patreon. It is laughable)

Temporary put up some disclaimer, (or something in the comment section), how your games are currently quarantined and this should clear up shortly, and if people are suspicous they should google your games and follow the official links (which are patreon and itch).

As you might have noticed I saw a lot of bad things. So, how to recognise if something is bad? Do what I just wrote. Follow the official links. Your Patreon does not link to your Itch. This is very suspicous. I could not say, if it is an impostor account or not by that alone. I also saw no link to your public/demo versions on your patreon on the quick. If they are there, I did miss them. So I could also not check, if your archives look the same as on Itch. If I could verify that it is not a fake account, but the real deal, there is a only a small remaining risk that either your account was hacked or your development machine was infected by a virus, thus infecting the files you upload. And for your information, I saw malware that did not even trigger any scanners on virustotal. And lots of legit games that do trigger false positives there.

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Capky Games2 days ago

I've added a link to my itch.io from my patreon. As for the other steps, I'll see what I can do. Thanks for your advice.

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redonihunter2 days ago

It basically only was that step. From what I see there are already some discussions in your comments.

The reason for that specific advice is the report button. People do report suspicious games now and then. And from my experience, a missing reference where there could be one raises suspicion. Though I often see that link missing. Maybe Patreon had or has some policies against linking to other sites at some time? I do not know.

And one can assume that games can be put into quarantine after a report, after all, that's what that button is for.

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