Wrong banned data returned by the Steam API
Valve informed us that there was a bug in their Steam API which would sometimes return that an account is banned when it isn't. This bug has been there for about a year.
This means for us that some of the accounts shown as "unbanned" for the past year have really never been banned.
As we have no way to know which accounts were really banned, we have changed the status of all "Unbanned" SteamIDs since 01/07/13 to "Not banned".
TF2's new SteamID format is now supported
Yesterday, a TF2 update changed the SteamID format to [U:1:XXXXX]. Searches using this new format are now supported by our website.
'First seen as banned' now more accurate
Valve recently added the 'Number of days since last ban' field to the SteamCommunity profiles.
We're currently updating the 'First seen as banned' date on our pages to the last ban if it is older than the one we currently have.
More detailed SteamID information
We have added some more detailed SteamID information to our pages. It will now display the Steam3 ID (32bit)/Account ID. The Steam3 ID (64bit)/SteamCommunity ID is now shown in hexadecimal
as well, as this is the SteamID format that they use in some games.
Over 86 millions of SteamIDs checked!
We have recently made a new bot and checked all the SteamIDs created since Steam release. We have now over 86 millions of SteamIDs in our database.
1.74% of existing Steam accounts are currently VAC banned. There are at least 10 millions of deleted Steam accounts though as the latest SteamID is around the 100,000,000th SteamID.
Issues with checking SteamIDs are now fixed
About 1 month ago, Valve limited the number of queries that can be done to steamcommunity.com, which had a bad effect on our site. A lot of the queries to check SteamIDs failed. We have now fixed the problem by switching to their WebAPI.
Optimization
As more and more SteamIDs were being added to the database, the loading times of the site became much slower. We have now added a cache, so the SteamIDs listing won't show up in real time, they will be updated every 3 hours. No modifications for the search form, it's still in real time.
We have now reached 11,2 millions of SteamIDs, among them around 800 000 are VAC banned.
Checking all the possible SteamIDs
We have started to check all the possible SteamIDs to have a complete database of VAC banned ones a few days ago.
Currently, 20 millions of unique SteamIDs have been checked, and only 5,7 millions of them had existing Steam Accounts. Around 500 000 of these SteamIDs are VAC banned. In no more than a week we should have checked the full list of existing SteamIDs.
Happy new year
We wish you a happy new year 2011! Try to not be vac banned this year! ;)
If you have suggestions in order to improve VACBanned.com, send us an email!
Some bugs fixed
We fixed a bug that caused some of the unbanned Steam accounts to not show up at all in the unbanned list. It was affecting around 50 accounts.
By the way, we would like to wish you a merry christmas !
Steam Community was down
Today, for some hours, Steam Community was down. This mean that the VAC status check function was not working. Valve solved this issue and check function is working correctly again.
This was not a problem on our side, but a problem of Steam Community. A bug in our website did not display an error message when this problem happened but raised an ugly exception. We will fix this display bug so that you got an explicit error message when Steam Community is down.