Last week, a Steam user made a very curious discovery. We don't know just who that Steam user was because upon making this discovery they disappeared from the platform, but we know that it happened because of a particular YouTuber who decided to repeat the mistake and showcase it to the world.
The Spiffing Brit posted a video last week called "One Word Kills Your Steam Account." That word turned out to be one of the longest words in the English language. It wasn't THE longest word, which is "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis," but it was still the very long "antidisestablishmentarianism." Change your Steam profile name to "antidisestablishmentarianism," and you'd effectively have kissed your Steam account goodbye.
What actually happened is a glitch made your Steam Profile go dark. You wouldn't be able to access groups, friends, profiles, inventories, or anything related to the profiles page of Steam. You couldn't be searched by others looking for you to either trade items or invite to a game in progress, and you wouldn't be able to access your inventory of saved Steam items to trade or use. The glitch also crashed the Steam mobile app.
You could still access your game library, and you could still play games with other people, but you couldn't be invited to play with anyone else. People who tried to look at your profile would just see a blank page.
It turns out, this wasn't even necessarily a Steam glitch. Spiffing Brit discovered that searching for your profile on Google brought back an "Access Denied" error message, indicating it was the server itself that was blocking access. After a bit of digging, that server host was determined to be Akamai, which also hosts game profiles for Ubisoft, Riot, Roblox, and The Pokemon Company. For whatever reason, "antidisestablishmentarianism" was a banned word on Akamai's servers, leading to this Steam glitch.
The worst part, however, is that once you changed the Steam profile name to activate this glitch, you could never fix it because you lost all access to your Steam profile. Or at least, that’s how it seemed. In the five days since Spiffing Brit posted his video, his profile has become observable once again. This suggests Steam might have caught wind of this glitch and asked Akamai to remove "antidisestablishmentarianism" from its list of banned words.
Why was "antidisestablishmentarianism" banned in the first place? That we don’t know. The word refers to "opposition to the withdrawal of any state support or recognition from any established church," according to Wikipedia. Maybe Akamai was religious?
In other Steam news, stoneage farming simulator Roots of Pacha is back on the platform after parting ways amicably with publisher Crytivo. We're still not clear on the root cause of the dispute, but we're glad that it seems to have ended on good terms.