SPUF shut down - Valve gives us a lesson how to alienate your most loyal users

Newer users of the Steam platform might not have even heard of the old steampowered user forum (SPUF).  It was a daily meeting place for long time users of the service who were put off by the new forums for a variety of reasons.

Valve promised to keep the old forum online as kind of a 'legacy' forum.

Despite Valve declaring time and time again to become more open and communicative to Steam users the 'legacy' forum was shut down without prior notice. Loyal users of the Steam platform for more than a decade (old geezers) hadn't even time to say goodbye to their forum friends. That's how you make your most loyal customers happy.

How good the communication at Valve works shows this twitter page asking a Valve employee about the issue:

Although I had an account on the old forum I was no active contributor but valued the huge amount of knowledge about games which was available only there.

But all is not lost as archive.org makes the forum content available for future use.

https://steamcommunity.com/linkfilter/?url=https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://forums.steampowered.com/

https://archive.fo/forums.steampowered.com

"If you want to make sure something is archived, google it then click the cache thing.
Or just visit https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache: and enter the url after that url.
Save that URL with the cache on the services above."

Also you can just hit Ctrl+S in your browser and get your own archives.

"7 years and over 5000 posts gone. Well, time well spent." Steam user

Edit: Valve reacted now in getting the SPUF online again for a limited time according to this post on reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/6bcuaz/the_steam_user_forums_spuf_seem_to_be_dead/dhmwayh/?context=3

And it's up again:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/announcement.php?f=&a=1735