Valve announce new Chat Filtering and a big change to Steam Wallet Codes

Valve continue to roll out new experiments with their Steam Labs, one of which is now live which you can try out with special Chat Filtering.

As the name easily suggests, it will enable you to filter out commonly used strong profanity and slurs sent via chat all across Steam. If you choose to join the experiment and enable it, the filtering will be applied across Steam Chat, games that support it and eventually they may roll it out across "more forms of user-generated content". They said that it basically moves the filtering they built for games like CS:GO, Destiny 2, and Dota 2 and puts it directly into your Steam settings.

Why? Valve said it's all about empowering users to make their own choices. They do ban them already from being displayed in public places but they don't want to block all areas against users wishes.

We know marginalized groups can reclaim language for themselves, and we don’t want to stand in the way of enabling groups of Steam users from doing so when chatting with one another on Steam. So players have an option to see profanity and slurs from their Steam Friends, if they wish.

Valve

They make it clear it will be shipping to everyone, as requested by both Partners (publishers / developers) and Users, it being a Steam Lab experiment for now is just to fine tune the experience. For the full explanation, see here.

Additionally, it seems Valve rolled out one other major change in how the Steam store works. When it comes to redeeming Steam Wallet codes (the ones you buy in stores) you can no longer redeem them in a different currency to your main one. They say it's to prevent scams. It should not affect sending gifts directly through Steam, it only mentions redeeming the codes. More on that here.