Steam's History is Getting Pruned

Time to put away the tin foil hats, my friends. Steam automatically cleans up old and abandoned threads. Yes yes, I know what you're thinking. "But Matthew, you handsome devil you! Why do I still have some posts in my post history older than the ones that I believe were deleted?" Good question, metaphorical member! It has to do with what page the thread is on, not the date of the threads or posts themselves. So, for example, if you posted in a thread in May but the thread was seldom bumped back up then over time it would eventually fall way down the thread list. After a thread falls past page 20 or so, the Steam servers automatically delete the thread. If, however, a thread from January was bumped up regularly (or even occasionally) then that thread will naturally take longer to slip back past page 20. Because of that, it's entirely possible to have some posts missing that were removed during the automatic deletion of old threads while still having even older posts still visible in your post history because those posts were part of a thread that had been bumped up regularly.

I'm not sure what determines what the automatic deletion threshold is for each forum, as I've found that it varies from game to game. Ours seems to cut off at around 300 posts (or around page 20 for me). I've seen many other games that have their cut off point at 300 posts as well, though some I've seen around 600. So maybe it comes down to how many average active players a game has as to how many threads the Steam system will allow a game to have until they're automatically purged. Admittedly, I don't know exactly how Steam's thread purge system works as I couldn't find any official Steam information on it, but I do know that abandoned threads will eventually get removed and that the removal is irrespective of the thread's age. Anyhow, long story short, we're not going around deleting posts willy nilly. As long as the spirit of the forum rules are being followed you're fine to post anything you like whether it's a positive post, a critical post, or a post about how devilishly handsome I am.