backpack.tf / stats.tf

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RECENT ANNOUNCEMENTS

Steamrep is shutting down

29 June, 2024 - Teeny Tiny Cat | 0 Comments

As you may have heard, the decision has been made to shut down Steamrep over the next year. This will be a process, with reports closed as of the public announcement, appeals remaining open for a period of time, and the eventual shutdown of the API next year. You can read about the shutdown plans and ask any questions you have for steamrep staff here: https://forums.steamrep.com/threads/steamrep-is-shutting-down.201641

This has some implications for backpack.tf and our rules, in particular the rules around trading with scammers. I have had a discussion thread up for a while to get some general user feedback on the rules for trading with scammers, with a good number of people arguing for the inclusion of backpack.tf bans in addition to steamrep tags. Without steamrep tags, our current rules place no restriction on trading and have no requirements for background checking. Due to this, we have decided for now to reintroduce that element of the old rules and ban for trading with backpack.tf-banned scammers or scammer fences in addition to steamrep-tagged accounts, with an eventual removal of steamrep-tagged accounts from the rules in the future. We will give a couple of days for the word to get out and bot owners to make any changes they need, so this rule change will be in effect from Monday 1st July and the full rules can be found here: https://forums.backpack.tf/topic/70966-rules-for-background-checks/

It's unfortunate that we weren't really able to get community feedback before making a change, but since we couldn't discuss the steamrep shutdown prior to the public announcement we had to make a decision without direct feedback. However, now that it is public, we're happy to continue discussing with the community and consider if the rules need any additional changes, so please give your input on that here: https://forums.backpack.tf/topic/85142-trading-with-scammers-rule-change-and-open-discussion-part-4/

As for the impact of the steamrep shutdown more generally, I'm sure people will have questions and comments. The API will remain in place until June 2025, and we will continue to use it for the forseeable future. When the API shuts down, steamrep will be providing a data dump of banned and caution tags, but all associated evidence will be discarded. The thinking as of now is that Jesse plans to integrate the steamrep data into rep.tf, but that backpack.tf will move to simply displaying a link to rep.tf for information only. We do not plan to continue to auto-ban accounts with previous steamrep tags or to ban for trading with them once the steamrep API has been shutdown, as we feel that a ban list that cannot be appealed is not justifiable. We have some time to consider other options and cement our decision here, though, so we welcome user input here too. To discuss this and to comment on the steamrep closure more generally, feel free to use this thread: https://forums.backpack.tf/topic/85141-steamrep-is-shutting-down/

Profiles are not updating (we know)!!

24 January, 2024 - fisk | 0 Comments

It seems that, at some point, Valve has clamped requests for the GetPlayerSummaries Web API. This has become a bit of a thorn.

Traditionally, backpack.tf would call this API on every profile refresh on a per-user basis, caching the results for a few minutes at a time. It was fine at first, but as demand grew, we now need to perform these calls several times a second. But alas, there's a lot of things we should have done differently ten years ago. We have been, for a while, exceeding the request limit on this endpoint, which seems to have been lowered.

Recently, we have begun batching these requests into fewer calls that run in the background. The caveat of this, is that profiles will not update immediately. Thus, completely new, unseen profiles were exempt from this behaviour -- this is so you can at least fetch a username for accounts we've never seen before.

However, we've still run into exhaustion problems. Exacerbating the problem are web spiders crawling pages that nobody cares about; typically, profiles of users who never use the website or play the game. We kind of want these pages to be crawled anyway, but the prior solution would likely add many extra GetPlayerSummaries calls we don't want. Today, I removed that exception so these, too, get pooled into the backend job.

And still, we're sitting here with a slowly incrementing backlog of profiles we'd like to parse.

Luckily, this information isn't too important -- the data we fetch from GetPlayerSummaries includes usernames, avatars and profile privacy statii. That's mostly it. However, we are aware some new users are having difficulty accessing the site. There's not much we can do about it, at the moment.

Hopefully, this problem will go away on its own. We'll update if there's any progress.

-- backpack.tf staff