The Steam Summer sale is just around the corner! We're going to try something different with the event this year. While there will still be an event and rewards, we won't be featuring special trading cards, or any mysterious cards in the lead-up to the sale. Keep your eye out for more details when the sale launches, it should be a fun event.

We've made some changes to badge crafting and improvements to inventory page performance. Here's what's changed:

• Sale badges remain craftable after cards expire, provided you had enough cards in your inventory when the cards expired. If you forgot to craft at the end of a past sale, now's your chance!
  
• When crafting a badge, you can now craft multiple levels at once.
  
• The mobile view of the inventory page should load much faster.
  
• The find-as-you-type filter for inventory should perform better.

There are some more changes for viewing very large inventories (more than one thousand items):

• In general large inventories should load much faster when first visiting the inventory page.
  
• Results for the find-as-you-type filter should appear immediately with more results appearing as inventory items load in the background.
  
• When turning items into gems or selling items on the market, instead of automatically reloading, the used items will be grayed out. When you're done, there's a button to refresh the inventory with the results. This makes it a bit faster when turning multiple items in to gems.

Some other nitty-gritty details:

• Crafting badges from past sales won't drop coupons, sale cards for other sales, or any of the sale-specific items they dropped during the sale (like Salien items).
  
• Crafting multiple levels at a time is limited to 100 at a time. When crafting more than 5 levels at a time, the animation will only show 5 sets of cards. The results screen will still show all the items obtained.

All new games purchased as a gift and placed in the purchaser's inventory will be untradable for 30 days. The gift may still be gifted at any time. The only change is to trading.

We've made this change to make trading gifts a better experience for those receiving the gifts. We're hoping this lowers the number of people who trade for a game only to have the game revoked later due to issues with the purchaser's payment method.

We have several small changes today around trade offers, emoticons, and profile backgrounds:

• You can once again include a note with your trade offer, and these will display in a new style.
  
• Emoticons are now supported in profile descriptions and showcases.
  
• Emoticons are also supported in group announcements
  
• The emoticon popup is now sorted by game name, then by emoticon name.
  
• Emoticon item descriptions in inventory, trade, and market will now show a preview of the small size emoticon.
  
• Profile background item descriptions in inventory, trade, and market now have a link to preview the background full-size.

We've got some updates to Trade Offers to give you more options for receiving offers from users who aren't on your friends list, plus some improvements to the badge progress page.

On your trade offers page, there's a new "Who can send me trade offers?" link that provides an overview of who can send you trade offers based on your current privacy settings.

On the new "Who can send me trade offers?" page, you'll also find a "Trade URL", which is a personalized URL you can share with other users to let them send you trade offers. You can use this URL on third-party sites, in chat rooms, or in group forums like this group's Trading forum. You can also create a new Trade URL at any time, which will make the old link inactive.

In the "Cards left to collect" section of the badge progress page, there are a couple of new links providing quick access to that card's page on the market, and the game's trading forum.