Just gonna add on that “Private messaging feature. (Also suggested by HAL 9001)” is something I would really like. Specifically for hosting a game jam, it would let users share their personal contact info (usually a discord @ ) without fear of it being public. I’m finding that participants in my jam are expecting a discord server to supplement the forum capabilities on itch, and with just a few tweaks I think it would make a decent replacement, at least for finding a team and getting initial collaboration information figured out.
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I noticed the same thing on the jams I took part to. If devs are worried about too much DM spamming, we could make a conservative system where user A must whitelist user B to allow incoming DMs from user B (at which time B will automatically whitelist A to reply). It would have the drawback or making message exchanges slightly slower, as B would not be able to immediately DM A, but if A is really looking for people to recruit / teams to be recruited, they’ll probably check notifications, see B’s reply “hey, I’m interested, here is my portfolio, and I’ll send you my Discord ID in DM when you whitelist me” and whitelist B.
But a good anti-spam / trust system can also do the trick. Personally I was contacted my people on Reddit exactly when they had something to tell me about one of my posts, and was never annoyed by spammers (I think? If it happened I must have reported and blocked them in a breeze, so I don’t even remember).