How to play safely on CS:GO Community Servers

Here's how you can play on community servers, without having to allow downloads, motd or anything. It doesn't circumvent any restrictions the servers place and it allows you to get the maps from them without having to run them unintentionally, exposing yourself to malware.

Console setup

First of all, you should never allow motd on servers. The good ones don't need it and the bad ones will try to force you to use it. Simply put, it's dangerous. It can even run Flash applets, which can do all sorts of ♥♥♥♥ through your client.

cl_disablehtmlmotd 1

Some servers use it for radio, but you don't need that ♥♥♥♥ anyway. Others use it for ads, which would be fine if it was safe, but security is more important than watching ads. If you want to give back, donate to whatever link they provide. If they don't provide a donation link, ask for one.

cl_allowdownload 0
cl_allowupload 0
cl_downloadfilter none

These will prevent your CS:GO client from downloading anything from servers. You don't need anything more than the maps most of the time and the rest you'll be able to figure out through this guide.

This has no effect on regular matchmaking, casual, dm or anything else outside of community servers, so don't worry about it interfering with those.

Make sure you've configured the above. Chances are you already have since you're reading this, but I'm putting it here so you can forward people to this so they can get their variables straight.

Downloading the maps

If you now try to join a community server you'll notice you can't and the game will tell you the map file is missing.

Go to the console and type:

sv_downloadurl

The server will set this to the location you can get the map and other files from. The directories on servers mirror the directory structure of the game files under the `csgo` directory. Copy this url and copy the map name CS:GO previously said was missing.

Lets say `sv_downloadurl` is "http://fastdl.example.com/csgo/" (not an actual link, steam keeps parsing it as one though) and the map name is "amazingmap.bsp". Go to your browser (not the in-game one) and path to this url:

http://fastdl.example.com/csgo/maps/amazingmap.bsp.bz2

This should start a download. Once the file has been downloaded, go to virustotal[www.virustotal.com] and upload it for checking. If it's already been checked then you won't have to upload. Feel free to reanalyze if you want to be sure.

If the map passes without any detections (which it should, so far I haven't found any map that doesn't), copy it to your `csgo/maps` directory.

Joining the server should now work normally.