My best guess is that there are legal aspects to this whole thing about "Brand" and "Damage" and Steam/Valve are doing their best to minimise any potential problems while the 'providers' who used Mastercard's name in a libellous manner are investigated.
It is a shame but this is the damage that people trying to bypass regional laws set by elected governments do when left unchecked.
Hopefully everything will work out and the issue can be discussed candidly (As per normal).
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It is very common, we run into this issue on a semi-regular basis with our Steam group, and it's definitely not a bug, it is very much intentional that Steam's filters will "shadow-ban" an announcement if it is on a topic that is deemed inappropriate - usually anything related to adult content (even if only briefly mentioned), sometimes words that have violent connotations will also trigger the filter.
The only solution is to avoid the keywords that cause this flag, which can be extremely annoying if you want to touch on a topic like this one, and instead just write the announcement in a discussion post, and then create the announcement linking the thread.
Here's a recent example of Steam shadow-banning an announcement to the banished realm.
Original (shadow-banned): https://steamcommunity.com/groups/freegamesfinders/announcements/detail/510713456384541839
Follow-up announcement: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/freegamesfinders/announcements/detail/510713456384541915
There's really no way about it, it's been an issue for a few years so I'm sure it's intended. We've just learned to try our best to avoid "risky" keywords altogether.
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1st link leads to nothing, might be worth leaving a screenshot instead.
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Both links work on my end, even in a private window (not logged in). Strange.
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Girst one opens the announcements feed for me, the adult games post is not showing up - neither logged in, or in private browsing.
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Here's a screenshot nevertheless:
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Thanks, jbondguy! That's super helpful.
I don't suppose you're able to share any potential keywords you've come across that could trigger the shadow ban at all? Just because I'm thinking, surely Steam can't shadow ban the word "adult," given the numerous connotations it carries.
I also wonder if it's because in your announcement, you link to GOG, and in mine, I have a link to Itch.io?
Annoying that Steam doesn't have a list.
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GOG links are fine, we always post the GOG freebies. Don't know about Itch.io though.
I think it's not just words, but kewords together as well; "adult games" probably flagged ours, possible "mature content", "18+/AO" as well. There's no easy way to check, the only option would be to repeatedly post announcements with one of these keywords/key phrases in and see which one gets caught in the filter.
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Thanks a bunch for your help!
I've managed to get a sanitised version put up that removes all the NSFW, Adult games, Porn, rape, etc. mentions, and it's gone up all okay. I also need to remove some of my citations that had "NSFW" in the headline.
Steam support was much less helpful than you. They just told me that they couldn't see my announcement either, like, no shit :/
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Sentinels_of_the_Store/announcements/detail/543365188100817645
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lol, Steam support is useless. Valve is doing nothing to help support groups and group moderation, it's been an uphills struggle for 12 years on FGF, we just learned to adapt to the absolute nonsense system that has not changed for literally decades.
Glad you managed to get the announcement working!
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Hi all,
Came here mainly to look for advice and see if this has happened to anyone else before.
Earlier today, I posted a new article to my Steam community group. It was a post discussing the Steam, Visa, Mastercard, and adult games issues over the last couple of weeks.
However, usually when an announcement gets posted, I'm aware it doesn't post straight away, often taking a minute to clear a content filter check from Steam. However, what happened with the article is that it essentially got de-indexed, meaning it could for a while only be accessed via a direct link, and it couldn't be found via the group's page or the announcements tab. Later reports (about 1 hour later) from group members alerted me that the link no longer worked. I'm able to access it freely; however, my admins and mods have also had problems. It appears to be having waves of working and then not working.
Here's an archive of the announcement a member made before the problems: https://archive.is/WeZ4r
I then made a separate announcement talking about the de-index and linking the article to users (this was before the link stopped working for people), which then went up fine, no issues, and could be viewed on the group page.
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Sentinels_of_the_Store/announcements/detail/543365188100817492?tscn=1754607829
A little while later, I attempted to republish the original announcement about Visa, Steam, Mastercard, Adult games, etc. by just copying and pasting the text, thinking it could have been a Steam bug, but yet, lo and behold, the same thing happened, the announcement was inaccessible.
I confirmed that it wasn't published under a hidden announcement as well.
My main suspicion is that Steam's content checker bot is just having some problems, but I did find it weird that it coincidentally was only happening on my posts regarding the Visa/Mastercard problem.
I've written to Steam Support, but I'm curious to know if anyone has had this same thing happen to them and what the problem was. I've been posting announcements on Steam for almost 10 years, and this is the first time I've seen this happen.
Any help or guidance is appreciated!
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