There’s spam links posted in the comments all over itch.io. Every time I check I have new comments, it’s just spam.
I assume everyone is facing this. Do folks know if itch.io is trying to do anything about it?
This issue was posted 3 years ago on their issue tracker, but has no comments: Way to block spammer accounts · Issue #1401 · itchio/itch.io · GitHub
There’s a recent community post about it here too: Spam attacks - Questions & Support - itch.io
Unfortunately it’s something everyone’s dealing with, and itch doesn’t seem to be in any rush to do anything about it. The absolute lack of any basic auto-moderation is baffling, and the only surefire way to stop it at the moment is to disable comments and threads altogether.
Someone mentioned a CSS tweak that more or less works to at least hide the offending link (though not the comment itself), but the CSS editor isn’t enabled unless you get approval from itch first, which - surprise - is as much like pulling teeth as any other itch support request.
I thought this was about how people seem to be spamming half-done AI idle games on itch.io
It’s weird, every game I go to is flooded with these, but I haven’t received a single one on mine. (I’m not complaining) It’d be nice if Itch did something about it though.
Yeah, I mostly get them on my game jam project from this year rather than the one from last year, I don’t know if that’s recency bias or because the new one has a regular comment feed versus a topic-based forum on the older one.
Your case is a bit interesting as it’s an actively-updated game, but also I’m guessing it’s not being indexed by itch’s search or tag functions due to having payments enabled as an adult title. That limits how easily humans can organically find it, but it seems like the bots aren’t much better.
I mean that may be another problem, but yeah this is about comment spam/scams/links. I had put it in the project management topic but it got moved to general.
I’ll update the title to clarify.