Unable to post a review

[blacker_]

Is anyone else experiencing issues with game feedback and reviews? I managed to successfully post a couple of reviews for Steam products in the last month, but I'm having troubles with a game in my library. Once I'm done filling up the text box, after making sure the thing is 'public' and in english, as soon as I hit the 'post review' button, well - said button disappears. Nothing happens, nothing moves. I thought it could be just a delay in publishing, but I've been trying all yesterday to no avail, and I see other people reviews being posted w/o a problem. Contacted support already, but I was wondering if there's a way around this I'm unaware of?

[lovinglife139]

I'm having the same problem today trying to post a review for Avernum: Escape from the Pit. No loading icon, nothing. The "Post Review" button disappears and the review is never posted. I've tried exiting and restarting Steam, waiting for hours (I started trying to post the review this morning), etc.

Since you posted this about a month ago, did you ever receive a response from support that told you how to fix it? Mind sharing if you did? :)

[blacker_]

Sure. Just for the record, I had to find a way around this myself since Steam support basically forgot about me on this one, lol. Joining a few discussions here on the forum, with other people having the same issues, we found out that since there's no stated 'character limit' anywhere for reviews, and since we cannot therefore suss out a maximum lenght for them, we have to go the old way:

1) write your review on some notepad wordpad or whatever, and save it
2) copy&paste it in the review box
3) try your luck by hitting 'post it', as you would do at the casino slot machine. if not lucky, then proceed to:
4) manually cut it down word-by-word, making sure you get rid of very funny but lenghty jokes first, then unnecessary grammar constructions, then basically dumb it down as long as it's readable - until the system deems it 'acceptable', as in lenght
5) curse your favourite god when you'll find yourself going back to no. 3 very often
6) stop cursing once it finally seems it got published.

I'm not even joking, this is exactly what I did and what worked for me, after many researches.
The longest review I've been able to post was one for Neverwinter (5954 characters), which seems to be higher than what another user was allowed (but still looks shorter than other reviews I've seen around here).

Maybe let us know your 'maximum' number, so that we can maybe make some sense out of this.

[lovinglife139]

Thanks for your response. I ended up posting the review yesterday after following the advice of another thread that suggested posting a review with a word or two and then going back to edit it. After trying to post my review probably 25+ times over two days (no joke), I posted a review that just said "Test: Review Not Posting" and it posted the first time. Then I clicked on "View Your Review", went to edit, posted the actual review, and it posted the first time. I was trying to avoid doing that, because every time I edit one of my reviews I post a reason as to why and it can get tedious, but that's what worked for me.

My review was a bit shorter than yours, at around 4100 characters, but I'm pretty sure my Euro Truck Simulator 2 review is about the length of the Bible. So I think Steam is able to post really long reviews, it just doesn't want to. It's odd, though, because I've never had this problem until the Avernum review, and that's not my lengthiest review.

I just checked my ETS2 review to make sure, and that is the longest one I've written. 6585 characters, and I had no problems posting that one.

[TheCinC]

I ran into the same problem today. Write a review, click post, post button disappears, but nothing shows up. Both times I thought it was weird and saved the review elsewhere. U then noticed the reviews didn't show up when I selected 'recent'. I thought, maybe they need to be approved first, or something? Then I did some googling and ended up checking my profile, where no reviews were listed. I did some more googling and found and used the workaround of creating a placeholder review, then editing it and pasting the full review.

At first glance the workaround does seem to work, I get a confirmation that I didn't get before and my reviews are counted both on the page of the store page and in my profile. Yet, even though both reviews are set to 'public' and 'English' they don't show up at all. In fact, I now seem to be missing other reviews from today, that were visible earlier. That is even more weird. EDIT: my first two reviews now do show up, and in full. A third one I just posted, is again invisible for now. Odd. Why were they not visible earlier? Will they remain visible? Is there a delay and will my third one also become visible? Inquiring minds want to know!

In any case, this shouldn't be working this way, you should be getting an error and the workaround shouldn't work at all. If they want us to stick to a certain length, then inform us of that requirement before we end up spending too much time on something that will be thrown out, without warning, anyway. There are scripts that will tell you exactly how many characters you still have left, so why not use one?

There are many topics on this subject, most of them pointing to a suspected maximum length and some pointing out the workaround, but I can't find any official response on this matter. Certainly they want the community to participate, to add reviews, so why not bother to tell us what limits there are, or respond to a common question like this one? Or do they actually want us to rebel against their cleverly hidden character limit and try to find hacks and workarounds that will allow us to post entire novels if we want to? Or is this a conspiracy to keep unwanted reviews from being published?

I all seriousness, I can't believe this is working as intended. Someone fix this, stat!

[blacker_]

Originally posted by TheCinC:

There are scripts that will tell you exactly how many characters you still have left, so why not use one?

exactly. now I'm just wondering if this 'placeholder trick' doesn't particularly care about characters count or if you've both been lucky by posting reviews below a certain number limit (which still doesn't explain the Euro Truck bible one - maybe that was last year and something has changed in the meanwhile?).

honestly tho, I don't know anymore, my brain hurts. for my next review I'll probably just keep it sweet&stoopid, until they fix this thing up.