A personal group for personal things.

My blog is at blog.lightwo.net, and is the place I have started updating my existing guides and writing new ones.

Due to many reasons, I decided that it's best to give up on managing my guides on Steam. An exclusion is made for the Steam Client Downgrades & Survival Kit guide, since it is expected to have the most traffic when Steam decides to stop working for everyone effected all at once. Edit: This guide is no exception, given that Steam decided to change the wording in the discontinuation announcement: the client will not artificially stop functioning, but only stop receiving updates for old OSes.

First of all, I got permanently banned on Steam for "spam", which was outrageous, as in the affected comment I posted, among other things, an external URL to my blog, but the comment itself was in the context of the conversation. The ban has since been lifted, but it demonstrates how low the bar for getting permanently banned has become.

Secondly, the permanent ban has resulted in many of my comments and posts being deleted, with no means of restoring them even after the ban was lifted. While only 14 days worth of forum posts has been lost, every single comment under any profile and UGC has also been lost. This screams incompetence since this oversight has been an issue for many years now.

Thirdly, Valve chose to fight spam by making everyone suffer, rather than only the spammers. Every single post and UGC that is made is checked by their half-assed "content check system" that, a lot of the time, either fails entirely, or gives false positives. In the case of guides, a false positive scan denies access to the author for, potentially, many hours, presumably waiting for a Support agent to manually verify it.

Lastly, the editor is buggy and rubbish, and the HTML it produces is a div-ridden unreadable mess. Considering it relies on BBCode (that is inconsistent as hell, by the way), I cannot easily mirror my guides to my blog, or anywhere else for that matter, without relying on the aforementioned HTML spaghetti.

Oh, and also, I lost count how many times Steam lost images I uploaded to guides. It is a royal pain in the ass to deal with. I am unwilling to use the common workaround since it is very hacky.