Hello,
I am here to tackle some issues that have arisen over the course of the launch.
Again, regarding the reviews being removed. This is up to the sole discretion of a Valve employee/Community Moderator. Developers simply lack the power to remove reviews. They can be flagged if a developer finds them unfitting -- however nothing will ever come of that flag unless Valve deems them unfititng as well. Some flags have been removed, and some reviews have been banned over the last few days. Valve does not see the flagging as an inherently positive or negative thing -- they simply review the flags and make the final decision on their own.
I have no official capacity to remove reviews or censor them in any way.
Onto the next topic,
People have been accusing the team of removing comments on reviews, when this also simply isn't possible. When you post a review, it's posted on your user page -- meaning it is your content. It is impossible for anyone other than the reviewer to remove comments on their own review.
So when someone who has posted a negative review, went on to accuse us of censorship -- that we were deleting comments on reviews, they were simply removing comments on their own review, and passing the blame onto the developers and community manager. Which is definitely unjust.
Next of all,
There have been pictures circulating of users being banned for no reason, etc... And I take full responsibility for this. I am new to moderating forums, and while I did ban those who were posting content that went against Steams Community Guidelines, I didn't realize that the ban was context specific.
Meaning when you click BAN USER, it uses that specific post as a reason. This is my fault because I did not know this, and some users have been posting images online that make it look like they were banned for no reason, and at first glance this is entirely true. Because I didn't click BAN USER on the actual post in question. I will make sure to do this going forward and that any user banned will have an official explanation from the developer or community manager.
I also may have been a little too vigorous with moderating the community forums. Some innocent comments and topics may have been removed and deleted in order to remove the large amount of attacks we initially received. I apologize deeply to anybody who had their content unjustly removed. The moderation of the forums is now in entirely different hands. I may have deleted innocent comments that were part of a larger troll thread -- which isn't fair to the people who were staying on topic.
In the future instead of closing a topic, we will simply delete any comments that go against the Community Guidelines and do our best to make sure the topic remains on course before making any decisions to lock or delete it.
In closing,
I have brought on a very talented Community Manager to address any comments and concerns and I will be taking a step back from moderation as simply put -- I am not too good at it. I'm just a developer, not a PR expert. But I thought it was important that everybody knew what was going on -- what actually happened -- and what will happen going forward.
Thanks!
Kyle "Klace" Lambert