Steam keeps making me appear offline in the Friends list

steam

Steam seems to be doing something rather strange. I am always online. I have no issues launching, updating, or playing any game. Every so often, though, it seems to kick me into Appear Offline on my Friends list, though. I don't ever tell it to do that; it just does it automatically. I usually only notice when someone yells at me to get online in Steam.

I checked the Settings page, and I'm not seeing any setting in the Friends tab that would allow me to turn off this option. If option it actually is. It's happened often enough that I'm suspecting it's some sort of "inactive" deal, kinda like how Messenger used to set you to Away, but I have no way of knowing for sure.

How can I tell Steam that I like being online and to stay that way?

Best Answer

Steam was offline a lot the last few days. It is completely normal for the Friend Lists Server to go offline, while the Rest of the Library is working. If you do not have further suspiccions it is highly likely, that it were just the Steam Servers spassing out.

Related Solutions

Steam – How to Start Steam in Offline Mode Without Logging In

I can confirm that creating/editing steam.cfg (in the same directory as the Steam executable) with the following lines works, as long as you've set Steam to remember your password (thanks DarkAnime):

BootStrapperInhibitAll=enable
ForceOfflineMode=enable

If you want to manage this with a command-line parameter, you could create a script to do something like the following (Windows .bat file):

IF "%1"=="offline" (
    IF EXIST steam.cfgx (
        rename steam.cfgx steam.cfg
    )
)
ELSE (
    IF EXIST steam.cfg (
        rename steam.cfg steam.cfgx
    )
)
start steam.exe

It used to be that you could hit "Cancel" while Steam was starting up and it would allow you to start offline mode from there, but that no longer works.

Steam – How to get Battlefield 3 to play nice as a Steam shortcut

I can get the overlay to show up in any Origin game, but having the name be proper is another story...

Here's what you have to do, I can confirm that this works for me (the overlay showed up in-game):

enter image description here

If you change "Origin" to "Battlefield 3" in the Steam Shortcut, it'll show up as such in your friends list. However, this means every Origin game will show up as Battlefield 3.

Credit to this reddit post.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Steam – How to Start Steam in Offline Mode Without Logging In

Steam – How to get Battlefield 3 to play nice as a Steam shortcut

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