Beginning next week, Valve is going to start moderating comments on Steam discussion boards.

The firm announced this via a blog post, saying that this was something its development community had been demanding for some time.

Valve insists that it already reviews content on these game hubs, including screenshots, guides, user profiles and so on, but has stopped short of moderating this as it didn't want to get in the way of its developers.

This comes into effect Tuesday, September 25th. Valve's involvement isn't compulsory, either. The firm says developers can opt out if they are okay handling their own moderation. 

"For quite a while now, our moderation team has been reviewing and taking appropriate action on many forms of reported community content across Steam, such as screenshots, artwork, guides, user profiles, community groups, and user reviews," the company wrote.

"In the past, we’ve been hesitant to get involved in the moderation of individual game discussions, as we didn’t want to step on the toes of game developers that want to have their own style of communication with players and their own set of guidelines for behaviour.

"But over time, we’ve been hearing from more and more game developers that would actually prefer for us to take a more active role in discussion boards, at least to the extent of handling posts that are reported by other players.

"Meanwhile, we’ve been expanding the Valve content moderation team to keep up with the increasing number of game communities and the amount of content added to the Steam community. At the beginning of the year, we also added features designed to improve community interactions in the Steam Discussions."

This follows Valve taking a less involved approach when it comes to content on its platform.