Hi folks,

It's not a happy day for the FVN creators nor the community. As you might have heard, Itch (and Steam as well) was forced by the payment providers to take measures against some of the content on their platform. The content in question likely includes incest, r*pe and other legally questionable content, but the extent of it remains unknown - we're yet to receive guidelines or a clarifications. You can read Itch's statement here: https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content

The course of action they chose to follow was to deindexed all NSFW projects immediately. That includes all projects tagged as having sensitive content, either self-tagged or tagged by Itch moderators - having 'nsfw' or 'adult' in tags is enough. Now they're proceeding with an internal review of all the available adult content. After the review is over, they plan to add compliance measures for all adult projects on their platform. 

In short, this means that affected projects:
- aren't searchable within Itch
- aren't discoverable and won't be shown in recommendations
- if found non-compliant with guidelines that weren't made public, get removed from the platform altogether - including from libraries of people who paid for them
The affected projects are still:
- accessible through links
- accessible through search engines like Google, at least at the moment
- visible in libraries and collections

From the wording of the post, it looks like the deindexing is temporary and will be reversed when the audit is over - but I might be wrong. While their communication could and should be clearer, Itch is a small team and it's absolutely a nightmare for them too. I have no reason to doubt they're doing what they think is in the best interest of the creators on their platform - while an inconvenience, it's far from a nuclear option like blocking access to all adult content on their platform temporarily

I believe that this is a reason to be very alarmed, but it's not a reason to panic - yet. Despite terrible communication, I believe Itch deserves a benefit of doubt regarding their intentions. The censorship is here, but the end of the world for all adult games has not yet come.

As for Dawn Chorus, fearing the current political climate, we've been working on a safe for work version of the visual novel to put on platforms like Itch and Steam that promote SFW content over anything NSFW. As you might've known, any projects tagged as adult weren't searchable or discoverable through Itch for not logged in users before deindexing, largely limiting their reach. I've contacted Itch support and I'm waiting for their reply on how to proceed with this and we'll determine the next course of action once we have an answer.

In the meantime, for period unknown, deindexing means no discoverability, less views and less downloads for adult Furry Visual Novels, even if they have SFW mode like Dawn Chorus. Spread the word about FVNs by mouth or text, support your artists, use collections to find new visual novels, like this one: https://itch.io/c/3324776/cool-furry-vn-ive-read or the FVN index here: https://fvn.li/