Privacy Settings on Steam. Protect Your Loot

On Steam, you can not only purchase your favorite PC games, but also interact with other players. The program also allows players to add people to their friends list and supports text and voice chats. A public chat room also allows players to converse with any player who subscribes to the service. Such a platform is secure for everyone to use, however there are times when it will be necessary to adjust your privacy settings.

Since we are using real bucks and treasures in steam; it’s time to really buckle down about our safety and ensure we don’t get Captain-Philleped. With a flood of fake PNG downloads, external links and trollers stealing your loot; it’s time to bring in the big guns. We’ve gathered our wits together to protect your crew.

General privacy settings

Run the Steam client in order to change your privacy settings and keep those pirates out! The Steam client can be accessed from the Start menu or from the desktop shortcut to your Steam account. Automatically logged in users can access their Steam accounts from the start menu. For the profile name, you will need to enter your username and password. Choose View My Profile from the upper right corner of the screen. Next, select Edit Profile from the upper right section of the page.

This button is usually located on the upper right part of the profile page. It lets you change your privacy settings. There are several options available in the section of my privacy settings where you can edit my profile.

As part of your community profile, you can view your profile summary, friends list badges, steam level showcases, comments, and group memberships. This can either be set to show only to friends or kept private for everyone. You can view all of your Steam games, games on your wishlist, achievements, and playtime in this category. Furthermore, this setting controls whether you appear in the game title as an in-game character. Alternatively, you can set this to public or private friends lists so that you control who can view your friends list in the steam community. You can set this to public friends only or private inventory.

Items you have received in games that utilize steam trading are included in your inventory, as are any steam trading cards you have collected. It also includes any extra copies or steam gifts you have received. You can set this to public friends only or private can post comments on my profile. You can set this to public friends only or private.

Steam Guard

Want to stop your steam account from falling into the wrong hands? Avoid walking the plank.

The first layer of security for your account protection is your login details; your username and password. Steam Guard is an additional layer of security that you can activate; it makes it harder for those pirates to hop on your ship; and steal your loot. After you enable Steam Guard, your account will become more secure. For unrecognized devices, you must enter a special code. To activate Steam Guard, you will either receive an email with the special code or you can enter it on your smartphone via the Steam Mobile app.

You can check that your Steam Guard is enabled by heading over to your steam settings and entering the Account tab.

Additional guards; loopholes VPN

A VPN will hide your identity and make it difficult for doxers and spammers to access your account while helping you keep a safe internet connection. The Steam Subscriber Agreement (SSA) is ambiguous and unclear in its guidelines for the usage of a VPN for steam. Frankly, this SSA regulation is frustrating for users who want great protection.The SSA doesn’t allow the usage of IP proxies or other ways to bypass geoblocks or hide user location. The chief reason is probably so that users cannot take advantage of location-based pricing for games. In other words, they are able to buy a game much cheaper than in their own region.

This restriction of Steam is aggravating because most users wish to simply protect their steam accounts from trollers. In trying to protect their system, they too might end up being locked out of their steam accounts, in the process. So for Steam, a VPN must be used whereby it will protect you but not be able to be detected by steam itself; it must be able to enable a loophole and bypass the SSA. This method is called Obfuscation- to make the VPN obscure. But which VPN should you choose for steam? Not all VPNs have the same performance but ExpressVPN has been found to be obscure enough for Steam not to detect it while providing unlimited protection.

Anti bot spam in steam chat

Had enough random spam flooding  in your steam chats? You’re in luck. Recently a Youtube-gamer that goes by the alias Almatrass on the youtube community has made a bot to help you filter out annoying content flooding your chat. You can instruct the bot to filter out raids, certain words and phrases, emojis and external links. According to his instructions, there are two tools that you require. One is the actual programme and the other is a programme which acts as an interpreter for the programme solution to work. You can watch his tutorial video here to download and access this bot.

According to the instructions, the first step is to install the interpreter software NodeJS. You can install NodeJS here. It's an interpreter for the automated bot which filters out raids, comments etc and bans them from the chat.

The next step according to the instructions is to actually download the programme files for the automated bot which will help you filter out the actual content. It’s a simple Steam chat room bot which listens for certain phrases in messages, deletes the message then bans the user.

This is how to set up the programme using command prompt. Please be aware you must watch the video to fully understand the entire process. Once you install the files they will be downloaded as a RAR file. Right click on the RAR file and extract here.

Open up the command line prompt and enter CD. There is a shortcut key Windows key + X, followed by C to access the command prompt. Next, enter the path of where the files are into the repository. So we need to copy the file location of what we just installed into the command prompt (Usually starts with C:\users\). Next enter DIR into the command prompt which means directory to confirm. Press enter. Upon doing this, it means we are now in command of that directory of files.

If you already installed NodeJS, you then type in node -v here in CP. It will then show up with the version of the bot underneath.Then you will type in your first command which is npm i.That will install all the libraries that are needed for the project.

Now re-open the directory of files. Open the file in some kind of text editor and you will come to a screen that looks like this.

Here you can add your account name that you wish to use the bot for. You can type in banned phrases and the bot will ban those comments with those phrases from your feed. To understand this process more clearly we recommend, going to this video by Almatrass for a more thorough tutorial; here. These instructions are not stand-alone so you must visit the video to understand the entire process more clearly. We must stress this.

We hope that this guide for privacy settings on Steam has helped you keep out those pirates; to protect yourself from the scavengers you can learn to secure your privacy. Stay up to date, keep the hunters at bay.