So, the jam wasn’t showing up anywhere on Itch even though it had been over a day. I tried deleting and remaking it, so we’ll see if that works, but if you joined before, you’ll need to rejoin now. The URL is the same, though.
(It still isn’t showing up anywhere, which hopefully is just the normal lag time before Itch indexes it, but it’s possible it still won’t show up and I’ll have done all that for nothing. In which case I’ll reach out to Itch support and if they ignore me I guess it’ll just be a competition for people on this forum only this year. Which would make me a little sad, because I do enjoy seeing some of the stuff from outside the community that comes in, but on the other hand at least it would cut down on spam?)
Edit: Oh, I should also note, submissions are open now!
Update: Deleting and recreating the jam didn’t fix it; it can’t be seen in the public jams listing or even searched for by name, it can only be found with the direct link. I’ve reached out to Itch support but have heard that they are not very responsive, so I do not necessarily expect this issue to be fixed.
This being the case, I highly encourage anybody who has a connection to an IF community outside this forum or an IF-related presence on social media (neither of which I have) to advertise this event using the direct link! I’d appreciate that in any case, of course, but right now that seems to be the only way to try to make it so that this isn’t an insular little event for users of this forum only.
I tried Googling your issue, and in this link someone says that Itch staff have to approve jams before they get listed and you can only just wait: Game jam not showing up - Game Jams - itch.io
Yes, I’m aware. It used to take like an hour or two, but I have heard it now takes up to several weeks. Since I only run one jam a year, I was not aware that the time for approval had gone up astronomically since last year until someone in the Itch Discord kindly explained it to me (after the same moderator from the thread you linked gave me a condescending brush-off).
One week down, one month to go! Submissions are trickling in at a reasonable rate, but right now the “best puzzles” category is really thin on entries. If you have a short puzzle game lying around—or you feel like making one in the next month!—you could really have a chance to stand out in that category.
Thanks to everyone who’s been sharing this elsewhere!