Last week, aSteamuser received a ban from Valve’s service following a name change to a long and peculiar word. The discovery quickly made the rounds on social media. Their ban lasted for several days before Valve noticed and took action to correct the problem withSteam’s word detection and restore the affected account.
Recently, Steam has had to deal with a few bans of not just users, but unreleased applications on their platform. A few days ago,the Dolphin Emulator was taken off of Steamat the request of Nintendo, who claimed that the emulator had violated the company’s rights via the DMCA’s clause on anti-circumvention. In its notice, Nintendo claimed that the emulator used unauthorized cryptogenic keys. However, the creators of the Dolphin Emulator stated that they were forced to postpone its Steam release indefinitely and were looking into a solution to the matter. However, as strange as it seemed for Nintendo to suddenly go after the Dolphin Emulator despite not doing so before, it may have a match in this peculiar ban.
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Several days ago, a user changed their username to one of the longest words in the English language, “antidisestablishmentarianism,” which resulted in a ban from the service shortly after. While the word antidisestablishmentarianism itself is a mouthful, it also has a definition. In short, the word is the opposition towards the government pulling funds or patronage from a state church or religion. The concept first came into being when the British government wanted to disestablish the Church of England in the 19th century. While disestablishing a religion sounds likea basis for aFinal Fantasygame, the actual efforts to disestablish the Church of England failed.
However, the word antidisestablishmentarianism itself was, according to a YouTube video on the subject by The Spiffing Brit, banned by a server hosting service called Akamai. The service itself playshost to web services for The Pokemon Company, Ubisoft, and other entities. However, the ban was overturned after Valve was somehow alerted to the problem. The affected users that changed their names had their accounts restored. Valve has not commented on the matter at the time of writing.
That stated, had the Steam bans not been overturned, affected users would not be able to play games such as the upcomingCounter-Strike 2, which has stated thatany bans would carry over fromCounter-Strike: Global Offensiveupon the game’s release this summer. While this strange situation is an anomaly, only time will tell what Valve will do to keep Steam safe for players.
