Game News Be careful, this word can destroy your Steam account!
On all platforms there are restrictions in the names and words that can be used. From content to accounts to chats, certain terms are banned as offensive or illegal. We generally find the same from one platform to another, but it happens that some very specific situations give rise to major blockages.
A very long English word can destroy your Steam account
If you have a Steam account, you will surely have noticed that the latter is associated with a personalized URL which links to your page. All Steam users have one, and it’s created with the account. Certain words are obviously prohibited, it is therefore logically not possible to use them, and using devious means to use them can have serious consequences. But there is a word that can completely block an account and even make it disappear from the registers the Steam.
Spotted by The Spiffing Brit, English-speaking YouTuber, this word would also be so badly bugged that immediately after modifying the account, we would face a black screen. We therefore start on the basis of a word which triggers a very important and visibly irreversible bug. But what word can wipe an account off the map? Hang on, it’s long. This is the term “antidisestablishmentarianism”, one of the longest in the English language. It does not exist in French, because it designates very specifically opposition to the eventual dismantling of the Anglican Church.
For those who don’t know, it is a branch of Christianity founded by Henry VIII of England who takes advantage of the tensions with Rome to break away from the papacy in order to divorce Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn. The English king therefore broke with Rome in 1531, before officially founding the Church of England in 1534. It is therefore a word in connection with this schism that causes the problems. Yet, if the existence of the word is linked to religion, it is difficult to see how it is offensive and what Steam is doing in this story.
A problem related to the length of the word or the host?
If the word is not officially part of the prohibited terms and nothing in its meaning can explain a blockage, we must look elsewhere. We can therefore look at its length and a particular sequence of characters which could trigger the bug but again, difficult to be sure. The only thing we know is that it’s not directly Steam that triggers the blocking, but Akamai, the server host cache.
However, Akamai is an important actor which works with Smilegate, Roblox, Riot Games and Ubisoft, but also Facebook, TF1, Microsoft, Apple or even Reuters and AirBnB and various universities. In other words, the use of the word “antidisestablishmentarianism” could very well trigger big problems on a whole bunch of platforms. However, this bug has so far only occurred on Steam, and the reason is still unknown. Until then, be extremely careful and do not let yourself be influenced by someone who is aware of the situation and who might wish to play a very bad trick on you.
