Aug 20, 2012

Dear Steam,

Trying to report a bug to you is extremely difficult.  Trying to figure out the password recovery for steam forums is also really difficult. There is no password recovery link provided on the incorrect password screen, just a "if you continue to fail, we will ignore you" message.  There isn't a password recovery link from the forums pages.

It is intuitive to expect the main login page's password recovery link to lead to a password recovery system, not to be told where to go to for password recovery.  For this reason, each step's number one item should read "From the steam client's login dialog, select 'I [don't] know my account name.' option and click Next."  Yes the page list this as an important item. No one reads those.  It is sad but true.  I missed it for five minutes.

All of this to find out that this main steam login page doesn't log me into steam forums.  Which means that I still haven't found the password recovery for the forum's software.

This leads me to the support system.  Including support, is this really three different login systems?  Another system that I don't know my username and password to. The snarky remark on the support page about "Why bother?" from the shadow avatar really strikes home.  This is a pain in the ass to talk to you guys.

After signing up for an account on the suggest system for steam, after 15 minutes the message still hasn't been sent.  At this point I believe you guys are being dicks to 10 minute mail addresses.  You've already pissed off a customer at the point they are using 10 minute mail.  Continuing to ignore them is not a good solution.

Finally getting logged into a previous account--because the other account is being ignored--results in the redirection click to forget what I was previously asking for.  It's dickish to use a system to filter a person though several links, ask for them to log in, then push them to the front of that link tree system again.

Once inside the support system, there isn't a bugs or feedback category.

Original bug: When I view my own profile via the steam client, seeing my games list I am greeted with buttons along the right side to install these games.  All of the games that are already on my harddrive that steam doesn't know about yet (due to a previous install) read "Not enough space."  Most of these games are below 13gb to install, several in the sub 100mb range.  I have 1505gb of space left.  Games that are not installed read "Not installed 0.0 B" with a clickable link. After clicking on it and seeing it not go anywhere, I return to the all games screen again to see it now says "Not installed 304.1 MB" with the link clickable once more.  Clicking a second time starts it to installing. Also, all of the links that previously read not enough space now read as not installed.

This looks like a difficult bug to reproduce.  Trying to do anything with the page appears to allow the code to fix itself.  I didn't interact with the page for at least a week, and it remained visually broken.

Thank you for providing a quick install component.  Using the library screen to install items is frustratingly slow with way too many button presses.

Signed with an imaginary digital pen,
A disgruntled programmer


After submitting this to Steam's support system, I was presently surprised to find out that it kept my formatting instead of getting rid of all the enters that I placed to try and separate paragraphs. I've seen lots of systems remove all \n's.

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