Valve Now Using Human Moderators to Prevent Steam Workshop Scams

Valve has received its fair share of heat for how they handle Steam submissions, either for games that developers and publishers want on the platform or even for those who create items to put in the workshop. For the latter, scams have certainly been a part of the process, but it looks like Valve will be putting the moderation of these submissions into the hands of actual humans. As noted on the Steam website, submissions must be verified via email and then will have to be approved before they appear in the workshops for CS:GO, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2.

Reddit user "TanookiSuit3" recently took to the CS:GO subreddit to point out the new process implemented by Valve and give praise for it. "I personally feel as though this is a really good change and will drastically reduce the amount of scam and spam maps on the workshop," they said. "The spammers will not be able to get around this by simply updating previous entries, as each update requires approval."

As for how the whole process will play out, here's what Steam Support has to offer:

As soon as an item is submitted, a Workshop verification email is sent to the email address registered to the respective Steam account. If you are not receiving your email:

• Make sure you are using the email address registered to the Steam account that submitted the item.
• Check your email spam filter to ensure the message was not flagged as spam.
• Add support@steampowered.com and noreply@steampowered.com to your contacts or trusted senders list within your email client.
• Wait up to 30 minutes for the email to be delivered. If you still haven't received the email, you can resend the email from the item page.

"For certain Workshops that have been the target of scams leading to hijacked accounts, newly submitted and updated items will be placed into a moderation queue. You'll be able view and edit the content during this process, but other players will not be able to view changes until they're approved.

"For updates to existing items, subscribers will have access to the previously approved version if there is one.

"The approval process should be completed in less than a day, with most items getting processed in less than an hour. If you have any questions on the process, please contact Steam Support."

This is surely a change that players and those creating said workshop items are happy about as it will hopefully prevent scams from making it through. Either way, we will have to wait to see how well it works moving forward.

What do you think about all of this? Glad to see this feature implemented on Steam? Sound off in the comment section below, or feel free to hit me up over on Twitter @anarkE7!

[H/t Rock Paper Shotgun]