Valve has been making some alterations to Steam recently, bringing changes to Steam community groups to simplify the process of being able to join them, whilst also cracking down on those who spam them. Its been a long time coming too, given how massive Steam has gotten over recent years, and Valve are making adjustments accordingly.
With there only being a choice of two groups, public and private, the latter has been troublesome and deemed “more compicated and messy than it needed to be.” Therefore, Valve has introduced a “Restricted” Steam group, in which users can request entry via an application that goes to group admins, who can either approve or deny the request. Public and Closed groups will still remain, its just that this group might help players to find the right group that they are looking for.
Groups that were previously under the ‘Private group’ tag will now be ‘Restricted group,’ which will require a request to join. Valve stated: “This can be changed any time by the group owner. If your group is currently set to ‘Restricted’ and you change the type to ‘Closed,’ we’ll go ahead and decline any pending requests to join your group. Subsequently, if you change your group from ‘Restricted’ to ‘Public’ we’ll approve all pending requests.”
