Thanks for the clarification, norby89. I do appreciate the amount of detail you provided.

I had not been on the site for roughly 1-2 months (where I wasn't banned previously), then I tried to access it from the Steam browser last night. I was automatically logged in to my account and the first thing I saw was the ban appeal page, so unfortunately there was no time to go back and change my settings.

In any case, you answered my question fully so I suppose there isn't much more that can be said about this.

Thanks again for your help.

I've read all of the forum rules* and my previous post didn't break any of those so I'm not sure why it was locked. I'd like to continue my discussion here.

* https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/groups/tf2outpost/discussions/0/558755530343215312/
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=4045-USHJ-3810

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Thanks for the reply Darkly, although I think you may have missed the point of my post. I should have probably explicitly asked then: why is it like this?

A more sensible solution would be to simply block them until the user's settings comply with the rules and then allow them to access the site. Why is a (permanent) ban necessary?

I understand that I can just submit an appeal, but I thought I would try to bring this to the attention of the admins because the way this is implemented makes no sense -- i.e. you shouldn’t have to appeal anything in the first place. The site could easily be changed to function in the way I described above, so I’m curious as to the reasoning behind this design choice.

Thanks

Note: My purpose in posting this discussion is to hopefully bring this situation to the attention of admins/developers and maybe improve the way this particular case is handled. If anything, it would reduce the number of simple appeals the moderators would have to deal with, and generally just improve the user experience.

I tried accessing the TF2 Outpost site from the in-game Steam web browser (and was therefore automatically logged in) and was greeted with a message that said I was banned "forever" because "Player's profile or inventory is set to private..." I used to always have my settings to public, but recently changed some to private when I stopped playing TF2. I've started playing again and forgot to change them back to public.

I suppose my question would be: is this intentional, or a bug?

Permanently banning someone before they have the chance to review the rules and change their settings doesn't make any sense.

Thanks

edit: Changed title.