Cities: Skylines mods banned for blocking users, potentially enabling malware

rockpapershotgun.com:

A handful of popular Cities: Skylines mods have been banned from the Steam Workshop by developers Colossal Order. One, "Network Extensions 3", violates the Steam Subscriber Agreement by "discriminating against specific Steam users" blocking them from using it, Colossal Order say. Another mod, "Update From Github", aimed to circumvent the Steam Workshop entirely by allowing updates to mods to be installed directly form Github while "making changes to existing Workshop subscriptions without the user's knowledge."

Complicating matters somewhat is a sea of rumours about what else the mods contained, and a series of counter-allegations about Colossal Order from the creator of the mods.

These mods were both created by a user who works under the name Chaos, or sometimes Holy Water. Allegations appeared a few days ago that some of this users mods contained "malicious code."

This code was apparently also included in "Harmony (Redesigned)", a framework mod that many other mods depend upon. Chaos reportedly forked a build of Harmony to create his own variant, called Harmony (Redesigned), which contained the new code. Rumours swirled around the allegations that this revision of Harmony, which was extremely popular, contained a keylogger and a secret automatic updater inside it that could have allowed malware to be installed on users' computers.

Colossal Order say this isn't the case, in a message posted on Steam. "No keyloggers, viruses, bitcoin mining software, or similar has been found in mods on the Steam Workshop," says the post.

Instead, the post explains that the mods banned were Network Extension 3 and Update From Github, for the reasons mentioned above.

"'Network Extensions 3', the mod alleged to contain malware, was