The Steam Community

Article ID: 8882-BMXL-0801 FAQ ID: 758

What is the Steam Community?

The Steam Community is comprised of people who play all sorts of PC games. Through the Steam Community, you may find someone to play a game with, meet up with friends, connect with groups that share similar interests. You can also host and join chats, matches, and tournaments. All of these features are offered completely free of charge.

Through the Steam Community, you can:

• Create your own individual user profile.
• See your friends online, chat or join servers where they are playing.
• Create and join groups of players with similar interests.
• Track gameplay statistics.
• Schedule group events.
• Access Steam from within any game using the Game Overlay system.
• Voice chat in-game or out.

Steam Community Features:

Control Panel

The Control Panel offers you a central overview of your personalized Steam Community. You can see invitations, events, group membership, gameplay stats, and a list of your friends, all at a glance from the Control Panel.

View my SteamID
This link will take you to your SteamID page. Your SteamID page shows how you appear to everyone else in the Steam Community, and includes your Profile, Groups, Gameplay stats, Friends, and Favorite Game.

Edit my SteamID
Not surprisingly, this link takes you to the page where you can edit how you appear to the Steam Community at large. You may also select a primary group, choose your favorite game, and soon will be able to add your own CSS scripts to customize the look and layout of your profile.

My Invites offers a quick view of any pending friends or group invitations you may have.

My Events comprises a list of upcoming events set in your group calendars.

My Groups allows you to quickly jump to any of your groups to see what’s happening in the community.

Gameplay Stats gives you a quick glance at what you’ve been doing with your time.

Friends shows you who is online, what games they are currently playing, and lets you quickly join them or start chatting, among other things.

Privacy and Security Recommendations

As with any large assembly of people, there are those who will attempt to trick you and take advantage of your decent and trusting nature. At Valve, we refer to these people using any number of colorful names, but for this purpose, let’s just call them hijackers. Never give your password to anyone over the Steam Community—even if you are sure they aren’t a hijacker, because almost inevitably, they are a hijacker.

While Valve employees are part of the community and it is possible that you may contact them, or they may contact you through the community, they will never request your account information. Only a hijacker will do that, and the unfortunate truth is that there are far fewer Steam employees than there are hijackers. In addition, the likelihood of a Steam employee just popping into your chat for a quick “Hello” is about as likely as a Hello Kitty mod for Counter-Strike, so save yourself some grief. Don’t give out your password.

Game Overlay and Notification System

The Game Overlay System lets you jump into the Steam Community directly while still in game and keeps you informed when your friends come online, join a game, or send you a message. The default shortcut to open the Steam Community while in game is Shift + Tab. You can change the shortcut from Steam’s File > Settings menu > In-Game tab.

Customizing, Troubleshooting and Disabling the Game Overlay

You may customize what types of notifications you receive using Game Overlay.

• From Steam’s File > Settings menu, select the Friends tab.
• Under Notifications & Sounds uncheck Display a notification for anything you wish not to get a popup for.

You may completely disable Game Overlay by going to Steam’s File >: Settings menu and selecting the In-Game tab. Then uncheck the Enable Steam Community In-Game checkbox.

Kaspersky Anti-Virus software may prevent the in-game overlay from functioning in some or all games. This may occur silently, or Kaspersky may warn you that Steam is acting as an Invader application trying to load itself in another process.

Workaround: In your Kaspersky settings, go the "Threads and Exclusions" option, then "Trusted Zone", and add Steam.exe as a trusted application. Make sure you check the settings to "Do not restrict application activity" as well as "Do not scan opened files for full compatibility" option.

We have unconfirmed reports that with Kaspersky 7.0 users must enable the Compatibility Mode for Programs Using Self-Protection Methods option - please see the Kaspersky Support Center for full instructions.

Reporting Offensive Content

The link to report offensive content is in the upper right-hand corner of each profile and group page. You can send a report on any group and any profile except your own profile.