Valve have outlined some key changes they are making to their forum moderation policy. Starting September 25th, Valve will start reviewing forum discussions that have been reported by other users.

In their own words, when a discussion thread or post in a game's community is reported by a player, it will be added to a queue that the moderation team will review. They will look at the reported posts and remove anything that violates Steam's Community Guidelines.

Developers can choose to opt out of this form of moderation if they wish to do their own forum moderation.

They say these changes mean they won't be actively looking through forum posts and threads. They'll only review things brought to their attention by reports. They also state that they will only directly communicate with players if strictly necessary.

Take a look at their explanation of why they're choosing to do this now.

"For quite a while now, our moderation team has been reviewing and taking appropriate action on many forms of reported community content across Steam, such as screenshots, artwork, guides, user profiles, community groups, and user reviews. In the past, we’ve been hesitant to get involved in the moderation of individual game discussions, as we didn’t want to step on the toes of game developers that want to have their own style of communication with players and their own set of guidelines for behavior. But over time, we’ve been hearing from more and more game developers that would actually prefer for us to take a more active role in discussion boards, at least to the extent of handling posts that are reported by other players."

Valve also said that they have been expanding their moderation team in order to keep up with the increasing number of game communities and the sheer volume of content in the Steam community.

What do you think about these changes? Will they help make the Steam forums a less toxic place? Let us know what you think!