Steam Community
Participate now - the Steam Community Beta!Soon, Steam will introduce The Steam Community - a suite of new features designed to make it easier to play games with friends. For now, this functionality is in beta. The beta is open to all users. Below are instructions on how to take part.
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How to take part in the beta
To take part in the Steam Community beta, you must first install Steam and create an account.
- Launch Steam and open the Settings window.
- Note the Beta Participation section, and click the Change. button.
- In the Beta Participation dialog, click on the list of available betas, and choose the one called The Steam Community.
1. Open the Settings window
2. Click 'Change'
3. Select The Steam Community
- You will then be prompted to restart Steam.
- When Steam restarts, the client will download the Beta to you automatically, and the next time you sign in to Steam you'll be experiencing The Steam Community.
We're glad you've chosen to get an early peek at these features. Please understand that by participating in the beta you've elected to use new functionality that is still being developed, and probably not everything will work exactly as it should. We hope that you'll want to help us iron out problems, and that you'll also want to contribute feedback and tell us what you think of the new features.
Thanks!
Beta News
Thursday, August 2nd
Well, we thought we would launch the beta today, but due to complications, we are postponing the beta until next week. Stay tuned for more info then.
Monday, August 6th
The Beta has been released on Steam. See the above instructions on how to activate the Beta.
Tuesday, August 7th
- Added additional overlay support in games
- Fixed chat names & avatars not always being displayed in clan avatars
- Fixed taskbar entry flashing for chat dialogs increasing in speed the more messages they've missed
- Fixed audio icons in multi-user chat not scrolling with the list of friends
- Changed online/ingame notifications to only appear for immediate friends, not group peers, chat members, or users in game
- Cleaned up spacing on multi-user chat title
- Fixed crash exiting game when chat dialogs were open
Wednesday, August 8th
The Steam Community Update Notes:
- Fixed an overlay bug using the filesize of a tga file in place of the size in bytes of the RGBA texture data
- Changed refreshing of friends list / chat users list to be significantly faster
- Changed shortcuts.dat to live in the config folder, along with the other user config files
- Fixed tooltips being broken in file open dialog
- Changed friends/chat lists to always rebuild on a relationship change
- Changed chat user list to not rebuild on voice use start/stop
- Changed removing a friend on the client to not force their persona state to offline, since the removed user may still be seen in a group
- Added maximize functionality to all resizable windows, currently only accessed as double-clicking on the titlebar
Thursday, August 9th
The Steam Community Update Notes:
- Fixed an overlay crash when DEP is enabled
- Fixed overlay mouse clicks not registering in some games
- Fixed installing service on non-English Vista systems