Yes, it is against the rules to use that tool.

Your account is 6 months old...

If private settings is a minor for a trader, why should we allow it on a trading website?

Like I said, it breaks some of our tools, it hides item information and is frowned upon by the community. There is no valid reason to allow them on a trading website.

We will not change this rule.

Originally posted by Rox:

Have to mention though, no one from TF2Outpost's side has never told to people why private backpacks are not allowed. It is just written in to rules. There is usually a reason why someone has private backpack or a profile, but I'm not going further with that.

This is done by many trading websites, and should be public knowledge to anyone involved in the trading community. Besides breaking the site's tools/pages, it hides item information from the public and prevents account background checks for expensive item trades. No experienced trader will trade with someone with a private profile unless they don't care about the implications. Main Rule #10:

You are accountable for any trades you make with users that have a private profile. You should be taking as many measures as possible to prevent hijackers and scammers from profiting from their bad deeds, and private profiles are usually a red flag.

Originally posted by Rox:

My main question for now is that.. it is my first time getting officially banned because of a private backpack. I've changed everything to public like 1 month ago and appealed the ban about 3 weeks ago, should I get unbanned?
I'm little bit worried about my status actually, because TF2Outpost doesn't even seem to react to any of my ban appeals. Or there might be just some congestion.

The admin in charge of the appeal was away for a week. As this is voluntary work, individual hiccups may happen and we also have to deal with thousands of tickets every week.

First reason is API call limit. We have a daily cap that we can't exceed, and doing API calls just to check whether an inventory is public or not is a waste. We have +800k users.

Second, people would easily abuse this by changing their settings on and off.

Lastly, this is an offense that accumulates over time. If one does this multiple times then they won't get unbanned.

Your account is not even 1 year old, among other things.

Like I said, we don't disclose the criteria otherwise everyone would go for it, including people with bad intent. The rules state a basic criteria, that's as far as we can tell.

Talking about it will not change the verdict. And we don't disclose our decision making process as it would defeat its purpose.

If you were banned then it is because you did not match our criteria for this exception.

No cash or game trading with new accounts. Your account must be at least 2 years old and have at least 20 non-free games before you can start trading games for items or buying items for cash on the website. Exceptions will be made on a case-by-case basis at the discretion of staff.

http://www.tf2outpost.com/rules