Hi everyone,
I'm Mark, and I've been working on a TTRPG for a while now, but folks told me to start a design blog here. I've been waiting 18 days for my first post to be reviewed, which I find encouraging because that kind of suggests it's not AI doing it, but also worries me as it possibly means I've been quietly rejected. Is 18 days plus the norm for new contributors?
Also, here's the front cover design I've been working on.
Thanks
Hi,
I don't know all that much about the blogging functionality on itch.io, and had no idea there was an approval process in the first place, but it is, unfortunately, pretty normal for itch to take forever to manually review and approve certain things, so my first instinct is that this is likely part of the same pattern. Itch sits in a very weird place in terms of size and influence. As I understand things, it is still run by a handful of people, probably with little to no profit involved. At the same time, while it's still a comparatively fringe platform in some ways, there is no denying that the user base and reach have grown over the years.
Sometimes, it would appear, they take forever to approve bundles, get back on tech issues, or, most problematically, approve and clear creator payouts. It can get pretty unfortunate sometimes ... Last year, they literally took all summer to approve the Pride Month bundle, which basically made it miss the Pride Month window by a large margin and created ridiculous amounts of stress for the organizers, and some degree of stress for many of the participating creators, who were counting on the small but significant revenue this bundle was meant to afford them. It was a mess, and was not a good look overall.
I do have a lot of sympathy and appreciation for the administrators of this site, and it's not exactly the simplest or most straightforward problem to solve without turning this into yet another corpo distribution platform, capitulating to AI, or etc. It is, nevertheless, still a problem. One measure they could take, I imagine, would be to reduce the number of things that require approval (manual or otherwise) in the first place ... I know some instances are inevitable, but I kind of feel like your use case demonstrates this perfectly. I just can't think of a compelling reason to have to manually approve a blog on a platform where one can otherwise publish content (no matter how sloppy, problematic, or otherwise uncouth) without significant oversight (certain things might get flagged later, but there is no review process per game / product / etc.). Again, I had absolutely no idea that was even a thing until just now.
Sorry this ended up being more of a musing than a direct answer to your question. I hope it at least gave you an angle / perspective on the issue you're having.
Hey Aleks,
No problem and thanks for responding. It has certainly helped to put things in perspective and given me an idea of why the approval is taking so long (it's 23 days now). Personally, with indie stuff and especially TTRPG's I think community input and assistance is the preferred way to share content, and thanks to your post I appreciate the people at itch.io may be swamped with information and requests regarding their site. Ironically, I didn't respond to you earlier as I was at an event dealing with how companies can handle and analyse massive volumes of unstructured data, something that is important in the business world, but wouldn't be appreciated if it was used here.
With my data compliance hat on (kind of my job) I can see why a post might might need approval before it is published here (slander, copyright, links to illicit sites) but I feel that the poster should be responsibly for anything shared here, but certain regulations could hold itch.io responsible, arguing that they are a publisher (very debateable). Lawyers would certainly prefer to sue an independent content sharing platform than some anonymous user behind a VPN in an unknown country.
I greatly appreciate your response as often its people just 'saying it like it is' that give you the most insight into a new hobby/job/club that you've joined.
I hope my ability to document my project becomes available soon and I will certainly follow your future post and projects as well.
Many thanks
Mark
