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Pinned ReplyAdmin (6 edits) (+4)

There are instances where an account can be restricted without notification from us. Examples include (but are not limited to): spammers (drugs, gambling, crypto, etc.), uploading malware, creating multiple accounts to create fake user activity.

Why do we do this? Notifying these types of accounts about their behavior will essentially allow them to reverse engineer how we detect their activity so that they can modify their actions to avoid detection. Part of keeping the platform secure and safe is being able to have ways to detect malicious activity and respond to it. As an end-user, you may not be aware of the volume of malicious actors we have to deal with on a daily basis. Keep in mind we allow anyone to freely create accounts and upload content, so we need a moderation strategy that can scale.

If you think your account may have been incorrectly limited in some way then we ask that you contact support. As mentioned in the rules here, we do not allow the discussion of account restrictions in this community. This community is for asking and answering questions so other’s may be able to find help. It is not to get account specific support.

However, itch does not have a private messaging system, so how is it anyway possible to politely seek out in private a community moderator?

We will never have a private messaging system. If you need to contact support then you can do so from here: https://itch.io/support

Otherwise, any issues for developer run communities is up to the discretion of the developers hosting the community. Private messages create an huge opportunity for abuse through spam, malware, and harassment. There are plenty of other chat apps you can use if you need to contact someone.

You can read more about our stance about communicating with developers here: https://itch.io/post/6115416

(12 edits)

Thanks for the info :)

The only thing I can think of is that maybe I accidentally triggered some automatic spam filter by giving ratings to too many games at once, however I suppose that should have been instead stopped by an automatic google captcha instead of instabanning. Of course I understand that you are probably in a hard fight with spammer bots and such, but I suggest you tune the autobanning algorithm a little bit lower in sensitivity, if it would turn out that it is related to my case, as I have done everything with using my normal human hand to manually click on stuff.

However, I'm still in the dark, as I have sent email to support a day ago, and still only got an automatic "Your request has been received and is being reviewed by our support staff." reply, so yeah, it's just a wild guess anyway. I understand that your support staff may be overburdened with requests, so I'm patiently waiting for a reply :)

And please excuse that I'm clueless, but I never meant to contact a developer, I didn't even know that there are "developer run communities" on the itch platform, somewhere else on this website. I was thinking about privately contacting a general community moderator like "No Time To Play", as I thought he/she would know what's going on with my account, and I didn't found any alternative ways of directly contacting a mod, because even though, as you said "there are plenty of chat apps", I didn't found any alternative contact info on his/her profile (besides twitter). But of course the whole "contact the mod" thing is useless anyway, as they technically don't have the permissions to provide account specific support, so maybe it would be wise to update the "community rule" to:

"If you have any disputes about any decision made inside of a developer run community, by a moderator of that community please politely seek them out in private to raise your concerns before contacting an administrator of that developer run community."

Or something like this, as otherwise it's confusing people to think that itch is only one big community and it's not some kind of gathering of many other "developer run" communities.

Also, maybe it would be nice to add with big letters to the community rules something like:

"Don't ask for any kind of account specific support in the itch community, contact support instead."

As it currently gives off the vibes that like as if community moderators can help with stuff that only the "support" is supposed to handle.

Of course the rules may already contain everything you informed me of, but as I'm not a native English speaker, I may misunderstood it or overlooked it, so I suggest simplifying of the community rules, so even people like me can easily understand them.

:)

Admin(+2)

Also, maybe it would be nice to add with big letters to the community rules something like:

That page you linked to are the global community rules for every community on itch.io, including https://itch.io/community and any game communities or comments.

The Questions & Support section has its own set of rules that are very visibly displayed to you when you go to create a new thread, including a checkbox you must click confirming that you have read and understand them.

(2 edits)

Do you mean these two parts of it?

"When you post here you are asking the community to help you, this is not a direct line of communication to site admins."

and

"If our moderator team has put a limitation on your account then it's a private matter and not up for discussion on our public community."

You are right, it's there. I only meant simplifying it to one very easy to understand single point:

"Don't ask for any kind of account specific support here."

Anyway, I understand it, okay, and I'm still waiting for a reply email from support.

But at the last line of the "Questions & Support" section rules there is also:

"For technical issues with the site we also have an issues tracker on GitHub, but feel free to make a topic here too."

So as I'm left in the dark about what's going on, I hope it was valid to think of my problem as a "technical issue with the site".

If my behavior, triggered some kind of strange self-defense mechanism of the site and have automatically given me an "account restriction" on ratings, then you can lock this thread, together with my "bug report" about being clueless about what's going on, as it doesn't belong here then:

https://itch.io/t/2190488/ratings-dont-register-on-game-pages

Thanks for taking your time for reading and replying to my writings here.

:)