Post by DaedalusMachina in Lets talk about a content/age rating system for itch.io

Viewing post in Lets talk about a content/age rating system for itch.io

DaedalusMachina6 years ago (1 edit) (+2)

Hello leafo. I'm the derp that complained about the 'claim' option on free games, lol. I appreciate your feedback/info on that last page and it allowed me to get in touch with many indie devs that weren't aware of how that claim system works.

I'm gonna do a few feedback bits here related to this rating system you posted about.

I would like to request clear & consistent 'content descriptors' and a simple '18+' descriptor in the title of any game that is marked as having mature sexual content and/or excessive violence. All this would be down to the devs marking their games as such.

In addition, you could get the itch io community to also help by giving 'itch points' to those who help by rating/marking games with accurate community-contributed content descriptors. Devs and the rest of the community would be able to look at them and upvote the good ones. Then itch points could be used in raffles for games contributed by devs (and the winner could choose which game they wanted).

I'd love for the removal of downvoting comments/stuff on itch.io in order to deter trolls who merely disagree with the post rather than having a valid reason for doing so.

I'm strongly AGAINST censorship of any kind. Allow the community to report the devs/games that break the itchio rules/ToS and to allow adults to purchase any (legal) lewd/violent content if they want to do so. All I'd want is that each game has the 18+ thing in the title so I can see at a glance if this is one of THOSE games or if there is more than sex in the game.

Like Reply

firecat6 years ago(+2)

no, voting system will always get abused. There is never a perfect way to make voting system, people will find a flaw and abuse it.

Like Reply

DaedalusMachina6 years ago(+1)

Those who abuse the system would have their itch accounts banned & an IP ban put in place to deter them from making new ones. Itch already has a system for Two-Factor Authentication so make that a mandatory requirement when making a new account. Even the most ardent trolls will find it cumbersome to go through the entire 'make a new account' process alongside creating new 2FA info & verifying it every single time.

If itch wants to go further to prevent abuse, they could require phone verification with a valid phone number via SMS. That would significantly cut down on a lot of potential abuse. However, that would also exclude a lot of people so I feel the 2FA requirement becoming mandatory would be a nice middle-ground, even for those without phones.

Like Reply

firecat6 years ago(+1)

Doesn't work, Steam has an even more annoying system and trolls as well as scammers go to the process. Newgrounds is not even inmunite to this either, trolls will make somewhere to 10 accounts, rise them up weekly and they would have something to affect voting. Not even Voat was able to come up with a better voting system, the best they can do is delay the abuse and try to find them.

Voting is always a bad idea.

Like Reply