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Comment by tlarkworthy | Hacker News Reader

Why no directory? I uploaded a game to this when it was advertised on gamedev.net Only subsequently did I realised this site does no marketing, or even a directory on the front page. So you take 10% just to filehost and not even put up a link? 10% for 1 type of payment processing is not all that competitive without some game discovery. I could just put my game on my own random webpage for much the same effect. (http://t_larkworthy.itch.io/runesketch) OK my game is a free to play so I have no idea how you are supposed to charge me. You can gladly have 10% of subsequent revenue for any conversion originating at itch.io but there is not gonna be any unless you actually market the games on your site

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A directory is coming soon. I'm looking to get a collection of games before I build a showcase for them. The point of the service is to make it very simple to build a page/storefront for a game along with providing niceties like file hosting, image hosting, and analytics.

Maybe for desktop ppl that's hard. That's not a problem for me though. I need eyeballs. Any thoughts on free to play?

How does the underscore in the hostname work? I thought that they weren't allowed[1]. Just a non-compliant DNS server + a protocol that is flexible enough to allow it? Is it not disallowed in CNAMEs?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostname#Restrictions_on_valid_...

I encountered the same problem on a site I run where I provide custom subdomains. The RFCs technically prohibit underscores but they appeared to work fine in the major browsers, with the exception of cookies in older versions of IE (ie: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/794243/internet-explorer-...). I ended up munging underscores to dashes to make everyone happy.

I had to deal with this a while ago and I found out (sorry, but I don't have a reference handy) that underscores are prohibited in the second level domain (example.com), but are ok in any further levels (šķaudiens.example.com). Basically subdomain names can be anything that your DNS server allows them to be, just as email addresses can be whatever your SMTP server will handle.

In my reading, it looks like 'hostnames' are required to be compliant. The best I can get for the definition of 'hostnames' is A records, and MX records. So CNAMEs are fair game.

I am guessing that *.itch.io points to some IP and that subdomains are resolved on the app level. Many services do that (my god forgotten app does, Tumblr does, I am sure others must, too)

It's a CNAME for itch.io, but the application doesn't resolve DNS. DNS does. If the DNS spec says that underscore isn't valid, then presumably we would never even get to the application level because the hostname wouldn't resolve to itch.io.

I guess it depends on how the DNS server deals with the wildcard domain. I can tell you that djbdns doesn't care about the part covered by the wildcard, it will happily resolve _!test.domain (although it is an invalid name according to the RFC).

Read a little further, and it looks like A and MX records are required to be compliant, but other records are not, which apparently includes CNAMEs.

the username being the subdomain was a surprise to me too. I would rather the gamename be the subdomain.

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