Overview
Various parts of the Steam Community are moderated by a combination of official Valve staff, community moderators, and representatives of the game developers and publishers. You can promote community members or add members of your development team to moderate the comments, discussions, or user-generated content posted in your Community Hubs. Below are more details on how to add moderators and what they can control.
If your account has permissions to moderate content in the Steam Community, you will see an 'admin' tab to the far right when viewing a game or software's Steam Community Hub.
Adding moderators and setting permissions
You can promote trusted community members or add internal team members to help moderate your Steam Community Hub. Here's how to do either of those things.
After assigning permissions to a user, there may be up to an hour delay until those permissions are applied in the Steam Community. You should also point these new moderators to the
Community Moderation guide.
Community Moderators
You can promote a trusted community member to 'moderator' or 'officer' status in your application's community to help moderate your content. These two levels can be granted separate permission levels, by visiting your group permissions page at
http://steamcommunity.com/ogg/<appID>/permissionsEdit. Replacing <AppID> with your App ID.
To promote - The user will need to first join your official game hub
- Once they have joined, you can promote them to moderator or officer level by clicking on the star next to their name
- Depending on their level (moderator vs officer) they will have different capabilities in your Community Hub, based on what you set in the group permissions page (see above).
- If the user is promoted to 'officer' level, they can then ban items such as screenshots, videos, and Workshop entries.
Recognizing Community Moderators - Community members with "moderator" status in your hub appears with their name in orange followed by a silver star.
- Community members with "officer" status in your hub appears with their name in gold followed by a gold star.
Internal Moderators
Anyone from your development team can be added to your partner account in Steamworks and granted permissions to moderate content.
For basic comment moderation: - You will need to add the user to your partner account through the Users & Permissions admin and add them to a group that contains the application you wish them to be able to moderate. At a bare minimum, this user will need any one particular permission level (such as "Edit App Metadata" or "Edit App Marketing Data"). Any permission will grant the user "Officer" level permissions in the Community. The "Edit App Metadata" permission will additionally grant administrative access to the community group profile, member list, bans, and group permissions.
This can be done by any existing administrator under your Steamworks partner account. If you have administrative permissions, you will see a menu item labeled "Users & Permissions" in the navigation on the top of https://partner.steamgames.com/home. If you don't have permissions, you will see a list of administrators on the right-hand side of that page. See Managing Your Steamworks Account for more information.
- By default, the user will now have permission to comment in your Community Hub or delete comments made by others.
For banning shared files or Workshop entries: - Once a user is a member of your partner account, you can promote them to have "Economy/Workshop Support" permissions for an app or group of apps, by editing their permissions in the group admin.
- In addition to basic comment moderation, this level will allow the user to mark items such as screenshots, videos, artwork, or Workshop files as 'banned' or as 'incompatible'. These users will also be able to edit tags on those shared files.
Recognizing Internal Moderators - Developers will appear in discussions and comments in your hub with their name in Green followed by a yellow [developer] tag.
Global Moderators
From time to time, Valve will promote trusted community members to act as global moderators across the Steam Community.
Recognizing Global Moderators - Global moderators will appear in discussions and comments with their name in orange followed by a silver star.
Best Practices
Before you start deleting comments or banning users, please read this guide on
Community Moderation for tips on when and how to approach moderation of your community content.
Moderating Discussions & Comments
When viewing a Community Hub for a game or software title that your account has permissions to moderate, you will see an "Admin" tab on the right-hand side. There, you will find information and links to moderating community content for that game.
When viewing the discussions in your Community Hub, you should see a subforum listed on the right-hand side for 'reported posts'.
You can also click directly into specific threads or posts to take action such as pinning, deleting, locking, or moving to a different forum. Before you start deleting comments or banning users, please read this guide on
Community Moderation for tips on when and how to approach moderation of your community discussions.
Banning items
To ban items (such as screenshots, videos, or artwork) in your Community Hub, your account will need to necessary permissions as detailed above.
Then, when viewing any item in your Community Hub, you can take a variety of actions from either the modal (pop-up) view of the item or from the item's detail page.
Moderating Workshop
Community members promoted to 'officer' status can edit tags on Workshop items, ban items, or mark them as incompatible (see
Community Moderators above). Internal developers that have at least one permission set in the User & Permissions admin for that game can also edit tags and ban items.
Each detail page for Workshop items have 'admin' sections in the right-hand column. These give you a variety of utilities for managing that particular Workshop item (such as banning, viewing reports, updating tags, or viewing statistics).
