This is a general article explaining how Civitai models you can generate with are picked.
History
On Mar 24, 2025, Civitai attempted to allow people to generate with every model on the site, offsetting an earlier iteration of the auction system. For this, they introduced the "model temperature" gauge, which at the time actually functioned to prioritize GPU resources.
Four days later, this effort was reverted and the auction system returned in its current form.
The "temperature" feature serves now only to indicate model popularity, and has no effect on whether you can generate with it.
The Auction System
The auction system has two functions.
First, to determine what resources are promoted with greater visibility.
Second, more importantly, it determines which models have onsite generation enabled.
At the start of each week, users bid yellow buzz, the site's currency, on various models. The 150 models with the most buzz bid on them have onsite generation enabled. The models with the highest bids are also promoted on the front page.
This means there is an ongoing weekly cost on the shoulders of model authors if they want their models to be able to generate on the site. The last auction round required a minimum of 1,700 buzz to get enabled, which is about $1.70 in USD.
If someone asks you why a model has suddenly stopped allowing onsite generations, you can link them this article to quickly clear things up.