(This is similar to a question I asked in a game specific thread, but I want to ask it to the roguelike dev community in general).
So Chrome is marking my roguelike download as malware, or at least "This program is not commonly downloaded and could be dangerous." Doing a little research, it appears Google marks ANY downloadable exe as suspicious until they verify that it isn't and flag it in their database. According to their website, their only acceptable form of remediation is to add a tag to the page's html code so their scanners can flag the page as safe...except I don't own the domain - it's a free website builder program - and I don't have access to the underlying html. (per
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35179 and a bunch of other hits that echo the same thing.)
Obviously my program is not malware (obvious to me at least - who would spend years on a project and devote this much time to detailing the world simply to act as a trojan horse for some malware?)
How have you guys distributed your programs to work around this restriction? Do you purchase your url/domain? Is it acceptable to rename the exe to something else and ask the end user to name it back to exe after downloading it? (I'm guessing that's a bit much to ask.) Personally I hate installers and I think they deter people playing your game, but maybe this is a good route?
Any suggestions?