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Oops! All games deleted.

A topic by GooseStranger created Sep 18, 2023 Views: 1,711 Replies: 21
Viewing posts 1 to 13
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If you check my profile you may notice that my past 30+ games have all been deleted from my account. Some silly goose (a maniac that belongs in an insane asylum) got into my account and deleted EVERY SINGLE game I have ever published to my account. Fortunately, I have all these games saved on a USB so I still have them. Unfortunately, it would be an incredibly grueling task to go through all 30+ games and reupload them with their screenshots, descriptions, etc. While it is nice I still have access to the games, it definitely sucks to see over 2 years of games, feedback, and videos stripped away so quickly.

This, however, does NOT mean I am going to give up. This is just a minor set back in my game dev career. In the future, when I'm telling people about my game dev journey, this will be one of those moments in the story where the character gets knocked down but keeps going. All I can ask from you guys is to continue to give me support and feedback as I rebuild everything. From the crazy success from Late Night TV, I'm sure I can come back swinging with games for you all to love. Thanks for everything and see you soon.

Update #1: I see many people saying to contact support. I have done so and am really hoping there have some sort of archive or backups of my games. Some good news: I have found a archive on the WAYBACK MACHINE that has archived some of my games. I may try to bring all my games back by copying the descriptions, page layouts, and screenshots through there if I am unable to get something worked out with Itch support. If you would like to check the archive yourself, the link is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20230703142040/https://goosestranger.itch.io/

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You should contact support and ask if they can reroll their backup of your account. Stuff does not just get deleted. It gets deleted for public eyes, but you can bet that they retain stuff for various reasons. Including what happened to you.

Also you should make sure your account is made secure and you do not use your pw / mail on other sites. Consider changing to 2fa. You do not need to use the google app, there are independant apps, it is an open standard.

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I have contacted support to see what can be fixed but I just wanted to quickly update people why my account is totally empty. I know the person who got into my account in real life, it wasn't that I gave away my password to another website or anything. I have of course changed the password now.

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Ohhhh, "facebook" hacking.

I'm sorry, that sucks : (

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I think that in itch.io, the servers that host certain games suffered some damage or failure, or algorithmically delete games that have been without traffic for at least a year (Leafo confirmed to me that the latter is not how it works on itch.io). It could be one of the two cases that happened to you.

No, someone I know in real life deleted all of them.

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Then it was be a hacker who delete.

It was not hacking, they just knew my password.

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You should have been more careful about hiding your password.

Was that stated somewhere, this deletion mechanism? The game counter is rising steadily. If they would delete old games that no one ever visits, the game counter would reach some sort of equilibrium.

If you encountered missing games, there are lots of games that dissappear for various reasons. The two main cases I encountered are either it was malware/pirated and staff finally got a report and acted upon it, or more common, the developer has a weird and dumb update scheme were they redo the game page, instead of updating it. I lost games from my collections this way and had no clue what was missing and why, till I encountered the game again - with a higher version number.

They do optimise their search algorithm and what you get as a result for a search term is rather random with a grain of secret algorithm magic. So one day your favorite game might show up and the next day it might not.

Admin(+1)

algorithmically delete games that have been without traffic for at least a year

This is not true, please don’t post made up things. Thanks

Hi Leafo. Sorry, but the GooseStranger case made me think of a theory that was outside of what the itch.io system really works.

I would have liked to have read one more sentence from you to support why what I said was false.

Sorry for this setback, good luck with your future.

Oh my gosh, that is horrible. I had no clue that such a thing could happen to someone, like I would've assumed that at least the site staff would still have something like a backup of each of your game's pages, sort of like what happens when a YouTuber is unfairly struck down and they get reinstated (then again, I don't know how these things work, I've only heard whisperings of such things among some YouTubers.)

Anyway, while I can't be much help, I do have one positive thing that can be taken away from this: Your post and this situation, while very sad, are also very relevant and important to me and several other people and because you posted about it, now we're all here. So like, keep us updated on how this goes, hopefully there can be a happy ending for it, and now you know we're all rooting for you.

I've contacted Itch support so there may be a sliver of hope for some backups. However, I did find that some of the games were archived on archive.org so if I want to I could rebuild some of the pages. They would still be missing all the comments and such, but they wouldn't be totally gone.

Deleted 1 year ago
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Oh brother

Popcorn anyone?

Deleted 1 year ago

just so yk you have a huge nasty wet mark on your khaki pants on the butt

Update #2: I was searching the community tab to see if someone else had their games deleted and was trying to get them reuploaded when I found this post: https://itch.io/t/1499512/ive-accidentally-deleted-my-itchio-game-and-page-i-nee...

In the post Leafo says "It’s actually possible to restore a deleted page. Deleted files are permanently gone the second you delete them though." This is the exact case I am in. I have all the files on the USB so I can reupload them, I am just looking to restore the pages and comments of the games. Hopefully I can get something worked out with support to get the pages back.

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Update #3: WE GOT THE GAMES BACK. Or at least some of them. Support only got about half the games back but that's better than none!

Oh my goodness that's so lame! Sorry to hear that.