Normally, partner communities' BANNED tags link back to the website or community who issued the tag, but if that community's website no longer exists, the tag will point to this page. If you followed a link from someone's tag to this page, it probably means that community no longer exists.
Over time, Steam communities tend to come and go. Some may last many years and have existed with us since the beginning of trading, others may close down their websites or their owners may leave Steam for changes in their personal lives. SteamRep tracks fraud-based bans from many trading communities in Steam, who have established themselves as SteamRep partners, with a certain burden of proof. When a community dies, they can no longer be a partner with SteamRep, so their admins' access in our database and forums gets revoked, their admins' tags dropped, and their existing BANNED or CAUTION tags subject to a new form of appeal. By default, defunct partner community tags will remain as is, until contested (CAUTION tags may be wiped). Unfortunately, when partner communities die, evidence supporting their tags may disappear along with the community. Under the new appeal process, defunct community tags may be converted to LEGACY status.
What are LEGACY tags?
In addition to BANNED and CAUTION reputations, you may run across a LEGACY status. Legacy Bans are issued in place of regular BANNED tags after a BANNED tag from a defunct community is contested, but the evidence supporting that tag is lost because of the community's disappearance. As of today, LEGACY bans may exist from any of the following now defunct communities:
- AF2 (Ace Fortress 2)
- ASBO
- DGN (Darkly Gaming Network)
- D2T (DotA2Traders.com)
- MCT (Mann Co Trading, commonly known as Pink Taco's unusual trade server)
- RAWR
- TF2T (TF2-Trader.com)
- UTC (Unusual Trade Club)
- UHC (Unusual Hat Club)
- SOP (SourceOP)
- FoG (Fortress of Gammers)
![[IMG]](http://files.steamrep.com/010/img/defunct-legacy-appeal-granted-noborder.png)
What does this mean?
If you see a profile with this reputation status, it means they were reported, investigated, and marked as a scammer by one of SteamRep's partner communities, but that community has disappeared so evidence may no longer exist. As of September 2016, SteamRep began a new streamlined appeal process just for tags issued by dead communities, in which a case will be quickly reviewed to determine if a tag needs to be discarded (no information about why tag was issued to begin with) or kept intact permanently (very solid evidence person is a scammer, continued risk to community). If an appeal through this system concludes that evidence is gone, which will be the case for most defunct communities' tags, then the reputation will be converted to a "Legacy" ban. Legacy bans are permanent, and cannot be appealed. If no action is taken by the person tagged, a regular BANNED tag will by default be kept as is until such time they submit an appeal.
Why make the distinction?
The principle behind this reputation status is that the person tagged has been marked as a scammer, and determined to pose a substantial risk to the trading community by a community admin, who was themself vetted by SteamRep admins to make this call. However, the community is long since dead, the admin(s) unaccounted for, and evidence lost to time. This means there is no way for anyone from SteamRep or any other community to properly handle the appeal. At SteamRep, we require substantial evidence of fraud and risk to the community to be kept on file in support of every BANNED BY tag, but for communities which have disappeared this is not possible. Because these tags were not issued lightly, it seemed dangerous to drop these thousands of tags altogether. Hence, a new reputation status is provided as an FYI, for your reference, to make your own informed decision about whether or not you should trust these scammers, when evidence may no longer exist.
How are LEGACY tags treated as opposed to BANNED or CAUTION tags?
LEGACY is a different status from BANNED or CAUTION, and will be differentiated in future versions of the SteamRep API or plugin. Older versions without functionality to recognize LEGACY status will treat this as a CAUTION. This means any website or server which does not explicitly code in functionality to ban for LEGACY tags, in addition to other tags, will no longer automatically ban on sight.
