An article on techraptor titled Valve Implementing New Steam Comment Moderation Bot published in June 2020 noted that the automatic "awaiting analysis" bot had been added to Steam. The process consistently took less than half a minute, but in September 2023 it occasionally appeared to get stuck, and around 3% of (innocent) discussion posts were then getting "automatically flagged for containing potentially harmful content and has been hidden as a result" which were marked by the icon of an orange flag.

This issue slowed down work on the Archives; Steam support was contacted regarding the issue, which involved the jammed posts being manually reviewed. The Steam agents explained that "It can sometimes take a day or two for our system to review your content due to the data load" but any jammed posts that weren't reported to Steam support remained stuck even if they were left for 100 days. A Steam agent noted that the issue had been forwarded to "members of Valve".

In Feb 2024 there was a case where an orange-flagged post was cleared manually, which had made it public, but then without any further edit it inexplicably became hidden again due to an orange flag, and Steam support wouldn't respond about the issue.

Later in Feb 2024 Steam support had reversed their position on the "day or two" waiting period, as I felt that they had implied a user should wait 2 days to see if the jam clears before messaging them about it, but now they had told me (in a case that had been jammed for 50 days) to message them in future "if the content check is not cleared within 48 hours" as if they now admitted that anything over the usual 20 second check was an indefinite jam.

Strangely, I did have a case that resolved itself after being jammed for multiple weeks, and also one that was jammed for a minute but then cleared. In April 2024 a post was observed spontaneously getting stuck "awaiting analysis". The issue had become a significant part of archive culture when the Gmod index itself was orange-flagged, which was a critical post because only the "most recent" 300 posts were visible in the interface.

When a link to a Steam group discussion post is clicked, then it will direct to the discussions section if the post itself is hidden.

The issue as noted in the Gmod Archive:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/groups/gca1/discussions/0/3881597253359831432/

The issue as noted in the Rust Archive:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/groups/rustarchive/discussions/0/3882724699528022146/

The issue as noted in the ZRL Archive:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/groups/zrla/discussions/0/7119694909423948667/

The issue as linked from the HL Mod Archive:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/groups/halflifearchive/discussions/0/4139437808179551870/

Orange flag list

Archive history
- Steam bugs

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