It would also be a very good Idea to clean out your Internet cache, this not only will help but will get rid of the previous garbage sitting there. If you don't have an application like CCleaner, you can download the Free version here:

http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner

Just make sure to remove any checkmarks asking you to download anything else. Although from the site above, I have never been asked to Download anything else.

OK, thank you. I will say it would be nice if Steam would notify it's customers of this stuff themselves!

Agh! Logged out and back in and still having the same problem anyway!

hardly use steam maybe I have a handful of games there but I am sure they will get it sorted soon.i have a reloadable card and that's what I always use dianne

Thanks for looking out for our GameBoomers Steam users, Ana. It's much appreciated.

Yes it is! That's why I said what I said above, because not everybody has an Ana watching out for them!

oldbroad, I had issues with Steam on the computer I was logged in on and it wouldn't let me do anything. I found that starting a steam game you may have installed on your computer will take care of that issue.

Alright. I'm sure it will work itself out. It's just a minor annoyance at the moment. Got 2 different games going now (not Steam) so not really ready to start another just yet.

Thanks Ana for protecting us with this info. I just logged on to Steam before I logged into GBs and found nothing wrong. I have quite a few games in my library and was going to buy another but changed my mind when I saw the price. I am glad that I did, it really makes you wary of stuff like this happening. Has it all been sorted out ? I wish Steam had come up to the plate and informed its customers.
Thanks again Ana
Regards
Margaret

Yes, it was sorted out in a short bit, but sure is scary logging in and accessing other profiles.

Ana

That's the world we live in now Ana isn't it. It took me a while just to start downloading games (I just liked the CDs) now its the norm LOL. I have a book case full of games I don't know what to do with, some of them are classics, remember when GBs trading post was pages long.
Happy days .
Thanks again for your diligence
Regards
Margaret

it could happen on big fish., it is not steam fault.

I'm sorry but it is Steam's fault -- or the fault of someone who works (or worked) for Steam.
It's a misconfiguration error.
The webpages people see after they log in are unique to the individual, and should not be cached.

Can you think of any other website where you've logged in and accessed other peoples' accounts instead of your own? This is not a common problem, and is unlikely to happen anywhere else (and hopefully unlikely to happen again at Steam after this).

i see what you are saying jenny and understand it now.

I am a developer of secure web systems not entirely unlike Steam, but in a completely different market. Whilst the Steam mistake was a nasty one in that some, incomplete information was displayed to the wrong users, it's not been a particularly dangerous one.

I hope Steam/Valve haven't fired the person that made the error (unless it can be shown they did it deliberately), because web systems like these are very complex, and spread over multiple layers of networking devices, web-servers, proxy servers, application servers and database servers. Any one of which could have been doing 'intelligent' caching, and got it wrong. My understanding is that the problem arose when they tried to switch on some functionality to mitigate a denial of service (DOS or DDOS) attack on the site. Those kinds of situations put enormous stress on people, and occasionally mistakes get made. (If you can guarantee you've never, ever made a configuration error under stress, then you can call for someone to be fired)

Caching is a tricky issue - we've seen similar problems arising in older systems - but one can't simply say pages unique to the individual shouldn't be cached. You just have to have a good implementation of caching that ties that cache to the user's login session accurately.

I can think of multiple, high profile, high volume, big sites that have suffered the same kind of issue. Just last month, Marks and Spencer (the major UK retailer) suffered just such a bug when they launched a new store card. The un-anticipated load caused their servers to get things wrong and show details to the wrong users.

You can find more by judicious use of Google.

Thanks for that, gremlin... I was having a hard time wrapping my head around how this could have happened. This helps explain a lot for me anyway.

Thanks from me too, gremlin.

Is it all fixed now? Thanks.

Yes, all fixed!

Yup! Even my browsing works right again!

Thanks, Ana.

That's good news, then. Thank you, BrownEyedTigre

I'll have to look again sometime but I didn't see any games for mac.

I found this page here. There may be more - I don't know for sure.

Thanks Marian, I'll have to look through the list for old games I loved and want to play again.

Another view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esmKdMDvSGI