itch.io

Totally agreed! +1

And by the way I'm not a robot!

Oooh! You have a problem with ratings! I'm also having a similar problem recently, but only related to simple ratings on game pages, not ratings in game jams. Here are the results of my clueless guesswork about the problem:

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

https://itch.io/t/2194081/is-silently-restricting-users-a-common-practice-here

If your problem is related to mine, then maybe it's really a bug, or you may got a silent account restriction for doing whatever you may never find out. Try to contact support by email. lol

Here's what I say: throw here some screenshots about the problem if you can't explain it :)

Thanks, for the answer :)

And as I'm only a user, I'm not a developer, so I have never ever made any game, so I really should not have a problem with rating any games on itch. But then again it would be good to know where did I hit a nerve for itch, but as they are not answering, sadly I can not learn anything from this incident. Also, from the perspective of a user, the level of secrecy itch practices feels very strange, as there are bigger websites on the internet, which do not need to rely on obscurity as a security measure, and even have a private messaging system. Yeah I understand you can't do anything about it, but certainly I must say you have helped me here on this forum a lot more than the itch support staff, which still didn't replied to my email, so thanks really :)

So, it's been since almost a week that I wrote to support, and they didn't respond, and oh-noes, as it's against the rules to ask here "how long it will take for support to reply to you" and it's also against the rules to do here any kind of "discussion of account restrictions", and as I still don't even have a clue about whether I got an "account restriction" or whether some kind of odd website or browser bug is causing my problem, I'm naturally getting inpatient and annoyed, and also starting to look like a real fool as I have commented on games "Yay, Cool, I support you!" up rating them to 5-stars, then my ratings suddenly disappeared, and as time goes on developers roll out new versions of their games and notice my 5-star rating missing, they go to think they messed up something in the new release, and as I rated many (395) games, I really don't feel like explaining to every developer one-by-one, that "oh, don't mind my ratings missing, you are doing good", so I'm really starting to feel annoyed, and ... Sigh, okay...

So the title of this topic is whether itch has any rules against having a second account, as I'm starting to believe it isn't worth the time to wait for a reply from support, and if they are very much sure in their head about that I'm a spam-bot, then they may just ignore my emails anyway, so what about deleting my account and making a new one? Oh, wait itch doesn't have a delete account button, so I must somehow ask support through email to get my account deleted, and they may just ignore me anyway... So what about abandoning the whole parody ongoing about my account and just creating a new one?

So, I tried to read through the community rules again, and didn't found anything regarding this.

Does itch have any kind of rules about having multiple accounts from the same IP address?

Does itch have a spartan "1 person = 1 IP = 1 account" policy, or do they understand that multiple persons can live in a family using the same IP address? I may as well just really abandon following itch and instead ask my naughty grandpa to categorize, follow and download adult games for me. lol

With the amount of extreme content this site is hosting under the Adult and NSFW tags, I wouldn't be surprised, even if the whole website would be taken down anytime by now. lol

Keeping offline physical data backups is a good idea indeed.

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.

:)

I totally support this idea. As the number of games hosted on itch is continuously increasing, it's starting to get very hard to find the good stuff and ignore the bad stuff. (Unrelated to subjectively what may be considered bad and what may be considered good by the users perspective)

Okay, thanks :)

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.

:)

I still didn't, I was waiting for something, that maybe someway this could be solved without getting into a long and time-consuming email session with support.

Thanks, for checking it :)

Now, I'm writing to support.

Gladly done :)

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And please don't mind that my 5-star rating disappeared from your game, because I'm having a problem with either way the itch platform or the staff or with someone who disliked my ratings, so all of my ratings disappeared and I can not give rating to games currently. If you are interested in the story you can read about it here:

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

https://itch.io/t/2194081/is-silently-restricting-users-a-common-practice-here

Thanks for answering :)

And please, if you can spare some time on me, and it is also technically possible, would you be so kind to check whether I have any kind of account restriction applied on me?

I understand, that you may not have time to look carefully at everything, and every person asking for support may thinks his/her problem is the most important, so it must be hard for you to deal with everything.

But my problem is not just that I can't rate anymore, but also all of my old ratings disappeared. I's very embarrassing and hard to explain to those game creators, who only got a rating from me, and are counting on me for the encouragement with their project, that I didn't remove my rating from their games, even though it looks like that for them. I didn't only rate abandoned games. There are many unpopular and overlooked new projects, which, need encouragement to keep the spirit of the developers up. A single rating and a few nice words may mean the world for them if they just started game development.

Thanks for helping me, and I checked and even my new rating didn't show up on your game page. You can see your ratings under a small link, named "More information" on your game page, normally, that's the case, but as I see when a game is in a jam, even that may change.

Actually the "Rate This Game" button disappeared from your game page and got replaced by a "Rate For Mini Jam" button. It seem to be that giving ratings without a review, by simply throwing 5 stars on them is not allowed on games which are in jams . That's an interesting new thing I learned here!

It doesn't look scary at all. Maybe, turn down the lights and put some some evil gloving red colored eyes to shadowy places?

Don't forget to also think about people who have wheat allergy ;)

So, I wanna ask mostly from the community moderators, but also generally from anyone, who has a long experience with the itch platform, that whether is it a totally regular, common thing on itch, to silently, secretively, selectively restrict users from using certain features of the website?

If it is, then may I ask why? What benefit does itch have from not sending at least an automatic notification email to the users who get restrictions?

Does it not increase the work of community and staff members, that people not knowing what's going on send bug reports about broken website functionality?

Anyway, what's the point of secretively banning users from using the full functionality of the itch website?

If people don't get any notification, any warning, any explanation, any information about what bad they might have done, then how on earth could they even feel bad about their behavior?

Does itch hope that the people don't notice the restrictions, and continue using the platform and buying games here? It's just nonsense.

I made this as a new topic here, as I very much hope it is not associated with my "bug report" about ratings not registering on game pages.

The itch community rules also say that: "If you have any disputes about any decision made by a community moderator please politely seek them out in private to raise your concerns before contacting an administrator."

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

I must add that, I have seen horror movies with worse things inside, but what I really can't ignore, is that the person is advocating Satanism in the name of "The Czechoslovakian Secret Police".

If you dare to look at the devlog of his/her other game:

https://lokiskingdom.itch.io/harmony/devlog/341582/harmony-its-alive

You can find this phrase: "This game was created to capture human souls, and set their minds in service to me, it is full of hypnotic suggestion and demonic ritualism"

and at the end signed with:

"goodbye humans,

-Lord Lucifer the Devil

[The Czechoslovakian Secret Police]"

So, even if there is artistic freedom on itch about the right to maybe display anything offensive looking, is it also allowed to advocate satanism in the name of a government agency? Nuh, I say this isn't right.

Thanks for replying :) And good to hear your problem was solved. Yeah, web browsers work mysteriously.

And about the rating: Recently I can not give a rating to any game, even to those, which I downloaded before. And, free games being out in the open, people may just have already downloaded them without any itch account, and may just have registered only to throw a good rating at a game, so I don't really see the necessity of downloading free games logged-in, before giving them a rating, but I also see you have a very valid point. Now I have downloaded your game, removed my rating, than added it again, I can bet though, that it didn't register correctly again. I do very much hope it's just a bug, and I didn't get some account restriction for giving ratings to too many games xD

And what about my question about this:

https://itch.io/t/2192623/why-does-reporting-someone-require-me-to-input-my-emai...

I just don't feel like actually confident typing in my email address on a game page like that, and won't do it until at least a mod confirms that I shouldn't worry about it.

Comments has a delay, I already posted it for you, look above.

It's extremely shady, because his/her name doesn't even match the name in his/her creator page. If you have nerves from steel you can have a look at his/her games:

https://lokiskingdom.itch.io/

It's not the profile picture, it's the miniature preview picture one of his/her games, that shows up immediately without clicking if you browse amongst the "NSFW" tagged games on itch.

Nope, I never heard of any kind of incident related to my profile name, and nope, if you are curious about the person I have a problem with, it's not me asking an indirect question about account names.

The individual named himself/herself: "The Czechoslovakian Secret Police", and his/her game preview picture shows a girl eating a man's severed head on a plate.

Well, this is just my wild guess, but did you gave a version number to your project?

Because integer = normal number, so I think the problem must be something related to numbers somehow.

By the way, is your project called "Just Keep Swimmin"? I'm recently having problem with my ratings not registering on game pages. I gave a 5-star rating to your project. Did you get it? I see that your profile is registered since 2016, so you must have a lot more experience with itch than me. Is it not allowed to freely give ratings to projects?

If I look at the theoretical villain's creator's page, and at his/her community profile, then I don't find the small "report" link anywhere. It is by design of itch, that the "report" link is only shown on game pages and comments, but not on profiles? Is it even possible to report a person just because I find his/her nickname very offensive and disturbing? (Besides the strange profile name, I'm also rather sure about that the stuff he/she published may be a little bit too much extreme, even amongst the many wild games in itch's "Adult" category, just by looking at the screenshots at the game page. Thus, I don't even wanna download the game to check it, whether it contains a virus as an additional extra)

This may be a misunderstanding, because I'm not a native English speaker, so I got a little bit confused about how the reporting system of itch works. In detail, at the top of the "report page" section there is:

"Your report may be shared with the creator of the page if necessary."

And then at the bottom of the report there is:

"Your email — If your report needs a reply we'll use it to communicate with you"

Now, then, does this mean, that my email address may be shared with the villain I'm reporting?

I'm very sure of that I'm not comfortable with sharing my email address with any random crazy anonymous people on the internet, so I would rather not report anything, if itch is willing to give my private email address to the person I'm reporting.

Furthermore, why does itch even ask for my email address, if I'm already logged in? Itch must already know my email address, so asking for it again looks very odd. Thinking that the person may be some evil mastermind hacker, his/her whole profile may be something deliberately crafted for data-mining, fraud, identity theft and other similar mischief, so I may have just be thinking that I clicked on the report link at the bottom of the page, but actually something else popped up instead. So, yeah, if reporting a person needs my email address, then why does itch ask me to manually input it to a text field, while I'm already logged in?

Don't double-post man.

Can you not read? The problem is with the file size of the gif file, duh, compress it better or lower its resolution.

I totally agree with this, but not because of the horror stuff on itch, but rather because of the "alternative stuff" that could be found in the "Adult" category.

Of course censorship is evil and diversity is good.

But itch has reached a point of popularity, when it has just too many games, and too many different kinds of people posting totally random games on it, so for the shake of peace and happiness of every member of the community, there must be some kind of options to the users to optionally filter out content, or a decent age rating system, or at least some more well-defined principles and guidelines about what's (not) allowed on the site.

I see that people were repeatedly asking for tag exclusions, tag filters, filter options and similar functionality for at least five years long, and it just got continuously ignored. Really, at least people deserve to get an answer about what's going on in the head of itch management about the reason of ignoring the problem.

First of all: Why is this thread not in the "General Discussion" section?

Secondly: There are good visual novels for kids. Your thoughts are too naughty if you really think that all visual novels contain adult content.

Finally: There should be no kids on itch at all. Kids are not supposed to have a bank account, and are not supposed to be able to buy games. If you are a parent, then it's your responsibility to keep in check what your kids are doing on the internet. It's not the fault of itch if you let your children register with a fake account and download adult games from itch to a hidden folder on your computer :P

Here's mine: I only care about the story, and totally doesn't care about the game-play. Also, I'm playing adult visual novels, not for the lewd content, but rather for the story, which is in many cases much better than you may think. Furthermore, I prefer to use GNU/Linux as an operating system.

Cheese and mushrooms

You can also try gog.com. They recently opened up for lewd games. And of course they accept in-development, free games. The only downside is that they have a somehow mysteriously working curation system, so it's random, whether your game will pass or not. Oh, and also, at gog there is sadly no pay-what-you want option, itch is the only place I know of, that offers this feature.

Edit: Also, if your game is enough story-rich to be considered a visual novel, and you are just looking for a way to make its existence known, you can register it up to vndb.org. It's the main database of the internet for descriptions and info about visual novels.

I would show them some of the games which can be found on itch tagged as "Adult" or "NSFW" !

I'm sure that the aliens would either way run away crying or join us, but wouldn't dare to attack humans anymore xD

The best games on itch are definitely hidden under the "Adult" and "NSFW" tags!

lol I suppose you can guess from my name why I'm here anyway... looking around... for good games... like everyone else xD

This isn't good.

More effort must be made to clarify what must be considered "educational" and what should be considered "glorify".

If I correctly understood the intentions of the starter of this thread, the main goal of this thread is to "clarify the meaning" of the two above mentioned words, and that still didn't happen. We need here people who can do philosophy and lawyer-speak.

For example what about games, where the protagonist is the villain, but feels bad for the victims, and is actually forced to do evil in order to survive? And what about brainwashing, hypnotism, mind-control, multiple personality disorder and similar things, if they happen with the villain, and not with the victim? This is very complicated, as there are many games with very complicated stories.

Edit: Also, I must add that there are games, which doesn't have a story, or have a story that doesn't make any sense at all. What about those games? How could it be decided whether they can be considered educational???

I also stand against the implementation of a generic age rating system, and would be more happy with some kind of selective "in a category I may dislike" type of warnings system.

And of course there is a huge need for adding some way for users to personally blacklist or ignore games based on tags. At least I can say with confidence, that the "Adult" and "NSFW" section of the site is unpleasant to browse through without any options on content filtering.

My main point is that, people can be adults, with very different tastes in whatever. So a generic "you are 18+ so you are okay with anything" type of system wouldn't work well, and wouldn't improve itch website's current state in any way.

If itch decides to move to a generic, age-based rating system, then at least there should be a separate "For Adults Only" category besides the simple "18+" category, as it's possible to find things on itch with rather odd, uncommon, or extreme content, which surely doesn't pop-up in "simple" "18+" computer games. And here comes in the problem about defining what is allowed in the terms of service and the sensitive matter of artistic freedom and censorship, which I think that anyway can not be enforced without a sophisticated manually supervised curation system, which would at least be able to correctly recognize and tag all games on itch.

By the way, why is it not allowed for users to add tags to games? It would make it a lot more easier to search through the whole selection of games on itch, and more probable to find what people are looking for instead of totally random stuff, even without implementing a tag blacklist system.

It would be good, if there would be some way to browse for only free games, which are not demo versions, but pay-what-you-want supported games, furthermore additionally a way to browse for only free demo versions. Yelp, more search options would be nice.

Is this still in in development? Or is it abandoned?

The game was very short, but looked promising.

So, I just recently noticed, that after I rate a random game as a user (I'm not a developer), and then refresh the game page, the rating I gave to the game is not registered on the game page.

I'm recently especially looking for free hidden gems, and games which didn't got much attention, so when I give them a rating, that may be the very first rating the game ever got, or at least is amongst the first very few ratings the game got since years, so it must be noticeable on the game page, when for example I throw a 5-star rating on it.

I tried refreshing the page multiple times and waiting for a few minutes, to see some change on the game pages, but apparently my ratings don't register, even though if I check it in amongst my ratings https://itch.io/library/rated on my profile, they are properly listed as rated.

This may be a bug, or I may just have no clue about how much time it usually takes for itch to register a user rating on a game.

Is it not automated?

May I got silently banned because I was throwing too many 5-star ratings on random stuff recently?

Is there any way to find out the source of the problem?

Did this happen with anyone else?

Edit, update:

It seem to be that not only my new ratings don't register, but my old ones are also not having any effect. For example some long time ago, I rated a good game 5-stars that was rated 1-stars by one other person, so that way the game got a 3-star rating average, but now it is fallen back to the 1-star rating it got from some other random person.

So really, what's happening? Is this a platform bug, maybe a database inconsistency? Or does itch secretly practice some kind of odd selective silent banning on me without giving me any warnings, any notices, any info about it??? Duh, why not send me an email at least?

Yeah I read the rules of this section about "no discussion of account restrictions", so please spare me if this is actually some kind of an "account restriction" on me, as I got no notice about it, I thought it is a bug! And anyway I still hope to believe it is!

Please anyone, who may have an idea about what's going on, throw it here.

Did anyone try to check recently if anything happens, when you rate a game that was still not rated, or at least was not rated by many other persons?