Any details on the reason of the ban ?

Because, when I read this :

"Depends how long it takes for him to get in the mood to print them out and wipe his ♥♥♥ with it."

http://forums.steampowered.com…..stcount=18

It might be possible that this post ended up being at bit too borderline for the Steam forum, nope ?

I mean, if you want to discuss the way Steam handle european pricing, it might be necessary to discuss it with more subtlety and politeness than usual

Same with :

"Does Valve gives interest for storing my money on their accounts? I mean my bank does. "

=> Ok, I admit I grinned slighty when I read it : it's short, it's funny, it has good punch line ("does." refers to the previous sentence, so there's a back-and-forth play in your mind), it's a funny way to say you don't really like the Steam wallet thing.

But for the moderators, who read hundreds of posts everyday, it's "yet another angry rant at valve from Dragoon1". Everytime something is added/modified on Steam, the rage/trolling rolls in, and they can get tired of that. And may ban for no real "reasons".

I know that is common and relatively "normal", after being banned (for few weeks or days, as educational bans) on 2 other forums few times when I was younger.

I was banned for these short periods of time, even if I wasn't violating any rules or annoying anyone : my posts, when compared with the posts of other users, were too long, negative and "bitchy" about details/things 99% users don't care about, it was making the moderators' job a long, boring and depressing work, for no real benefits => almost no users cared about what was discussed – and none of them wanted to spend 3 hours gathering informations, re-writing over and over again, to get a nice 2 or 3 pages post

it took me around 6 months to 1 year to better understand what "could fit" in a particular forum.

It's like arguing in the Youtube comments, it's a pointless, neverending, full of insults trollfest.

On Steam forums, you can't make witty remarks, use black comedy, double entendre, irony and other fine humor mecanism to say "what can not be said" (directly), any sophisticated way of expressing yourself is either ignored or banned.

Unfair ? yes. Stupid ? yes. Why ? because mosts users on Steam forums are too stupid : they will feed trolls, fuel flame wars and spam worthless content.

Why putting forums in the first place if you end up with "that" ? To give the (stupid) majority of Steam users a place to say what they want.

( And without the Steam forums, we would have much more stupid threads/posts in our unofficial gamer communities – SPUF are actually keeping a good part of the worthless users busy )

What these worthless users want ?

=> Talking about the european price policy ? digital distribution ? new business model ? The need of a dial-up/slow DSL "lite" Steam client version ? Any other Steam possible improvements ?

No, just look at 99% of the threads there – useless spam.

Take TF2 forum : "huuur class/weapons X is OP", "what is your favorite class ?", "saxton hale facts thread lolz", "I crafted 4 hats, all of them are the crappy bald-engy :'(", "I have low fps help me", "phising REPORT!", "VAC ban error !", "your best tf2 story" – and now "ITEMZ FOR SALE – SEE MY SHOP-THREAD – MP FOR OFFERS".

=> How can you seriously talk about complex gameplay mechanics in that environment ? it's impossible – too much noise around and inside every threads.

Moderators banning any intelligent and constructive discussions are only the consequences of the forum population.

If more than 30% of Steam forums users were interested in these discussions, a giant clash would have occured, "forum riot" (witnessed that a lot few years ago on many forums, big or small, any controversial moderating would ignite a total firestorm in all categories), and moderators would have become much more "tolerants" with polemical topics like Steam prices.

However, as usual, the vast majority of Steam users don't care about anything, they "just want to play" their games.

Blame the users, not the mods in charge of keeping the system running smoothly.

(ps : banning all worthless users is (sadly) not an option, they are still Steam customers first, then forum users)