Automated bots spamming group invites to users have been a growing issue on Steam for some time now, with the groups being used as advertisements for shady betting sites at best, or filled with Steam account fishing links at worst.
Today, Valve released an announcement where it outlined the spamming problem, stating:
We see that more and more organized spammers are using bots to create groups on a huge scale. At some times, the number of new groups created explicitly for spamming outweigh the legitimate groups. Once a spammer has created a bunch of new groups, they then use bots to invite random players into the group. Even if only a small percentage of players that were invited end up joining any one of these groups, the spammer still can end up with a significant audience.
The solution Valve has implemented is a simple one: Users can now only send group invites to others in their friends list. This change is sure to cut down on a majority of the bot spam Steam users experience, with Valve saying that it will be "identifying and banning networks of groups that have been mass-created and exist for the sole purpose of spamming".
In addition to the invite system changes, Valve has introduced a new group type to the Steam Group ecosystem. Previously, the two available group types were public groups, where anyone can join and also invite others, and private groups (now known as closed groups), where only members with invite permissions can send invites to outside users.
Now, there exists a third group type, restricted, which outside users can request membership to, but only group members with permissions can allow them in, similar to closed groups. Keep in mind that all groups that were set to private previously, have now been changed to restricted groups, but this can be easily changed by the group owner.
All in all, these changes should help in sorting through and avoiding the numerous spam groups and finding ones that users may be interested in. Valve also added that improvements to the friend invite system are also under way, but didn't give any exact dates on when we can expect the updates.
Source: Steam
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