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Valve announce new Chat Filtering and a big change to Steam Wallet Codes

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Valve continue to roll out new experiments with their Steam Labs, one of which is now live which you can try out with special Chat Filtering.

As the name easily suggests, it will enable you to filter out commonly used strong profanity and slurs sent via chat all across Steam. If you choose to join the experiment and enable it, the filtering will be applied across Steam Chat, games that support it and eventually they may roll it out across "more forms of user-generated content". They said that it basically moves the filtering they built for games like CS:GO, Destiny 2, and Dota 2 and puts it directly into your Steam settings.

Why? Valve said it's all about empowering users to make their own choices. They do ban them already from being displayed in public places but they don't want to block all areas against users wishes.

We know marginalized groups can reclaim language for themselves, and we don’t want to stand in the way of enabling groups of Steam users from doing so when chatting with one another on Steam. So players have an option to see profanity and slurs from their Steam Friends, if they wish.

Valve

They make it clear it will be shipping to everyone, as requested by both Partners (publishers / developers) and Users, it being a Steam Lab experiment for now is just to fine tune the experience. For the full explanation, see here.

Additionally, it seems Valve rolled out one other major change in how the Steam store works. When it comes to redeeming Steam Wallet codes (the ones you buy in stores) you can no longer redeem them in a different currency to your main one. They say it's to prevent scams. It should not affect sending gifts directly through Steam, it only mentions redeeming the codes. More on that here.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Steam, Valve
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12 comments
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TheSHEEEP Aug 28, 2020
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This reminds me of how the word "salami" got filtered in C&C: Generals.
To this day, I don't understand why.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 28 August 2020 at 3:00 pm UTC
Comandante Ñoñardo Aug 28, 2020
Yankees and European Scammers can no longer pretend that they are buying from Argentina for to pay less.
fagnerln Aug 28, 2020
I like the idea of a system that filters words for those who feels embarrassed, but it's impossible to create a perfect system as it's multilingual.

My name is Fagner (which is a derivation of Wagner), is fairly common on Brazil, but because of the "Fag" it's censored in some services, so to workaround I used F4gnerln for years, but for this feature, it censored f4gnerln, because it identify 4 as A, so I changed my nickname to T1co, which is my dog's name.

It's embarrassing and a bit of discriminating, but I'm not that butthurt, I don't care
CatKiller Aug 28, 2020
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Quoting: fagnerlnI like the idea of a system that filters words for those who feels embarrassed, but it's impossible to create a perfect system as it's multilingual.

The general class of the issue you've experienced is known as the Scunthorpe Problem.
Eike Aug 28, 2020
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eBay used to filter ignoring even spaces. I wasn't allowed to write something like (German) "war schön" (was nice), because "Arsch" is the German word for "ass". Took me some time to figure why they didn't allow me to write that.
kneekoo Aug 28, 2020
Sure, filters, while the chat is so unstable. At least it is for me and a friend of mine. Every now and then we have to refresh because it stops sending/receiving messages. Their streaming service is also terrible (low res and fps), but I can understand that, considering it's not really economically viable to allow everyone to stream in high quality when they don't have subscriptions to offset the required infrastructure cost.
Phlebiac Aug 29, 2020
Do you get to learn fun new words by using the download option?
razing32 Aug 29, 2020
As long as it's optional so i can swear all i want when talking to friends i'm ok wtih it.
But then again , languages can cause issues.
Translate the word "how" from English to Romanian. No , it's not a mistake in google translate , we do use that word for "how". As in "how are you doing". But try to explain that to an algorithm.
Purple Library Guy Aug 29, 2020
Quoting: GuestIt seems to me that with that system, the censorship in on the side of the user. So, if a user X is shocked by bad words he or she turns on the filter without bothering the others. That sounds like a good compromise to me.
Yeah. Glad Liam put the UI right in the article here, so we can see exactly how it works. It really seems to put the power in the hands of the user in a pretty fine-grained way. So I'm sure, since everyone will look at that and think about how it would work before posting, we won't get a bunch of generalized inapplicable "censorship bad cuz snowflakes" posts.
Purple Library Guy Sep 1, 2020
Quoting: kibblesYay! I love the nanny state! Today it's "slurs", next "pronouns", next "misgendering". I'm so happy the mentally ill with their toddler mentally have invaded gaming! Quick! Someone call me a nazi!
Yer a moron. Just don't turn it on. Problem solved, duh.
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