OPTION to purge friends you no longer interact with at a certain amount of time

[Waryth]

OPTION = OPTIONAL
It means TOGGLE-ABLE and is NOT a PERMANENT DEFAULT FEATURE.

I'd like to make it clear that there's already a way to unfriend ALL of your friends in your friends list if you get hacked or hijacked. Don't ever use that scapegoat to say no to this feature.

This feature is no different from that EXCEPT it will unfriend them if you haven't talked for certain amount of time:

• OPTION to unfriend people automatically I haven't talked for a day (24 HOURS)
  
• OPTION to unfriend people automatically I haven't talked for 3 DAYS
  
• OPTION to unfriend people automatically I haven't talked for 1 WEEK (7 DAYS)
  
• OPTION to unfriend people automatically I haven't talked for 1 YEAR (6 MONTHS)

There is an exception to the purging feature IF you have your friends categorized OR added to the Easy Access Chat. They'll be excluded from the purgatory.

Disabling it should reset the timer since you're adjusting the time-span.

Steam users adds you to talk to you for ANY reason. If someone wants to talk to you that's why they sent you an FR, I would accept it and enable OPTION to unfriend people automatically for a day (24 HOURS) or MORE depending to my taste.

HOW IS THIS HELPFUL?

Adding this feature is basically making some of your friends TEMPORARY on your list. You have temporary friends in real life so online would be no difference. Acquaintance are still considered as friends but they mostly fit in to the temporary friends class.

• If you're a Steam Forum Moderator:
  some game devs encourage you to accept Friend Request and entertain requests from players. You can't have everyone added to your lists. You have to level up your Steam account to increase friends limit. Why do that when you can just unfriend people? It's hassle to unfriend in bulk that's why this feature comes in.
  
  
• If you're a low level Steam user:
  Almost the same reason above but then your friends list are full. It'd make sense to unfriend some to free up slots. You can do it manually but there are some people who treat all friends as equal. It's best to just let Steam do it in terms of friend's activity/inactivity whom you haven't talked to or talked to.
  
  
• If you're looking for people to play with ONLINE:
  Games like Eternal Return: Black Survival requires you to ADD people from Steam on Discord or other groups. They use Steam API and requires to be friends with someone in order to play.
  
  If you play a lot of people in a day, in 3 days or in a month partying with people all over the world. Your friends list will end up becoming full eventually. It's Steam's restricting us from having unlimited friends so why don't Steam take responsible for freeing up slots for us too? Yes I can just unfriend a batch of friends but I wouldn't know who I played a day ago or a week ago so if I do it all in MANUALLY in my friends list. They'll be purged without knowing who is who since you've played with a lot of people.

Why I wanted this mostly is because I mostly get affected with my friend's issue or vice versa. I don't want things like that to happen. I've been hacked, they've been hacked. There's no such thing as an unhackable thing after all.

Friends whom I haven't talked to for weeks or years suddenly talks to me out of nowhere and turns out they're hacked. They've been friends before so there's a little trust factor for them to fall into the hijacker/hacker's trap since they don't know their real friend behind that account has been hijacked. This wouldn't have happened if I have this person unfriended for his or her activity for a long while but then Steam could just do that for me. In fact, a third party modder can implement it but then its against Steam TOS and even if we still persist, there's always a hidden reason behind those modification that takes up privacy for the risks of it.

Friends of friends hacking/hijacking/scamming attempts are what causes this scam infestation to succeed. Adding this feature is an additional safety net for me and others who find it useful.

[Zekiran]

And when your very active trading account with lots of skins and market stuff and an active friend group gets phished, POOF there goes that friends list.

No, it's really not necessary to make that more streamlined. People can be more picky about who they friend.

[MadBone12]

OP, your suggestions on the forum all seem to be aimed towards making users as lazy as possible. People need to take responsibility for managing themselves and their profiles. Automation also introduces all sorts of problems, and the forums would be awash with complaints about things that happened without users even knowing since it was some automated setting that they turned on ages ago. Get into the habit of managing your own life.

[Gwarsbane]

No thanks, I don't want to make it easy on someone who gets into my account somehow to delete all those people.

If you are doing trading a lot, get in the habit of removing people once a trade is done.

As for people you haven't talked to for years, well I've had that happen, and then they popped back up again and we kept on talking. They were in the military and just didn't have time for Steam. I would hate the thought of accidentally removing them because of a mistake.

[Tito Shivan]

Originally posted by Zekiran:

And when your very active trading account with lots of skins and market stuff and an active friend group gets phished, POOF there goes that friends list.

Hijackers already do that on many ocassions, nuking the friendlist of hijacked accounts.

[Waryth]

Okay so far, what I've noticed is that people here in suggestion forums only reads the title and couldn't care about what's written after it. I've decided to re-write everything from scratch.

ORIGINAL POST:

Originally posted by Waryth:

Add purge lists feature

Purging friends feature is simply an option in our friends settings to unfriend our friends who haven't been talked for a certain amount of time.

This feature should be added as we have limited amount of friends that can be added to friends list unless leveled up our Steam accounts. You have that friends you haven't talked long ago? Friends previously but now feels like strangers. That's just how life is. Majority of people manually remove friends list one by one instead of having it automatically done for them.

The thing about online friends is that one of them gets hijacked or hacked and then since you're friends with them, you think they're your friends but they're actually not. You believe every words they say because he or she is in your friends list. It mostly happens to friends who hasn't accessed their accounts for weeks and couldn't notice some changes to their account then just suddenly just come back active.

There should be options on when we can purge friends list such as purge friends you haven't talked to years, months or weeks or even a day. Most people just add you to get in contact with you since you can't chat publicly then they remain in your list and too busy to remove them. You get to have a lot of them in your friends list spamming your activity features if you haven't removed them or forgot to remove them:

Online Friend has achieved Achivement B
Online Friend 2 has purchased Cyberpunk 2078
Online Friend has achieved Achivement D
Online Friend 3 has purchased Cyberpunk 2079
Online Friend has achieved Achivement F
Online Friend 4 has purchased Cyberpunk 2080

It's for account security, convenience/preference and friends list management.