Someone clearly doesn't have their priorities straight. He's got two jobs and school, he can't afford to pay his rent and his bank balance is constantly in the red - and that's with the profit he's admitted he's making from referrals. There's much better ways he could be spending his time and that's before you even get to the immaturity, bullshit and disrespect.

Who cares about referral anyway, Hookups are providing a service to you and it does not cost you any more money to use their referral link. Might as well provide them with some money so they continue keeping track of game sales. Same thing goes for the ads on Steamgifts, some twitch Streamers have amazon referral links too and I'm glad to use their link when I have something to buy. Basically, hating referral links means you want all your money to go to the big companies and not the little guys.

Who the fuck cares about a shitty group.

Left ages ago. Cos I'm awesome like that.

But I would prefer if this be kept up given the content and issues at play.

Since this isn't your personal blog I doubt it'll be "kept up" as closed threads just get tossed into a pile from latest to oldest in the deeper bowels of the forum.

Thanks for letting me know, left the group ^^
P.S. for anyone else Discussions tab doesn't work?

Left the group not because of the referral issue but because of the way he handled it. Too much drama, I just want deals!

Crisis at Hookups!

Seems like FEZ II is going to be cancelled.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/02uuhc4lpk26dsm/by0dmnhoq4

Such a crisis happening here! The end of Steam is happening!

think I'll leave...

Its not right to edit other peoples posts to put his own referral links in, plus all of the lies in that announcement... I think that it was right of the admins to leave, I will be leaving too

I keep seeing people say that the admins left because the owner was using referral links - that is not correct, although referrals were the catalyst. While I do only speak for myself here, most (if not all) left because of:

• Continued lying about where the money was going and how much money was being brought in
• Disrespect towards staff and members by editing referral links into their posts
• Disrespect towards certain admins and mods by the way he treated them
• Disrespect towards all staff by trashing admin-only discussions so nobody else could peer-review.
• Removal of any admin discussion that started to deal with referrals (likely in the hopes the issue would "disappear")

Here are the screens of the admin threads that started this. There are some posts missing as these are the only tabs I still had open to take the screens, but you'll get the gist.

1) This thread: http://i.imgur.com/x0DaciB.png
turned into this: http://i.imgur.com/GQtNtyS.png & http://i.imgur.com/nFHYHoP.png

2) This thread was then posted: http://i.imgur.com/KTs5jNj.png

3) By morning, a few hours later, both threads had been moved to an owners-only forum not viewable by admins or mods

4) That is where the long monster thread started as already posted above: http://i1.minus.com/iucNoEPFkxv12.png

All we wanted was honesty and to be treated with respect. It was not about money or greed as most, if not all, admins did not want to use referral links anywhere. Discussing any of these issues in private never produced any lasting result, and all admin forum discussion about it was trashed and removed from view (this wasn't the first time.) As these issues were ongoing and had become a pattern, things finally came to a head and unfortunately that meant almost all admins and mods leaving the group.

c'est la vie
-DG

EDIT: A few of the admins who also left have given their explanations in the next few posts.
For completeness, here is the explanation that was posted in the group's discussion forums. It has since been removed: http://i.imgur.com/jlsVnCw.png

EDIT 2: The owner now appears to have deleted all of his posts from this thread. Here is a screen cap of page 2 where most of the posts were that I had in an open tab from a few hours before the deletions: http://i4.minus.com/ibljTZ0wJvACir.png

I speak alongside DG as a once loyal admin to Hookups. The referrals were never a huge issue for most of us and it was only when the lies surrounding them made us question how trustable the owner really was.

The money earned from referrals went from being only $5, to more than $5 but nothing to "brag" about to apparently paying his rent. The owner continued to shut off any discussion of the matter due to it being "pointless and uncontructive" and since the admin and moderators left we've actually taken more of a bad rep than the owner himself as he is still able to feed his lies to the members, twisting the truth as he goes.

It's a sad day as for many of the admin, Hookups was the only group we put real effort into, none of us ever wanted it to come to this. If you stick around in Hookups please just try to be aware of what links you are clicking on and try to view the evidence we will continue to provide carefuly to make up your own minds.

"I can't believe you alter the sliders on your humble bundles so that it all goes to only one category, that's IMMORAL and DUMB" / "It's immoral to use both keys in the Origin bundle! We don't know if it's an effective double license or single, BUT IMMORAL NO EXCEPTIONS!"

-> "Who cares if someone runs a steamgifts group for personal profit and lies to all its members and admin keep it that way? It's none of my business! Let's taunt and ignore people who object to it!"

Gotta love the way people are sometimes :P

Hello guys,

I really did not want to write anything but i guess since there is a lot of misinformation i should. I want to keep this short (i wont lol).

The issue in the group that lead to most admnins/mods leaving was never about the use of referral links as the head keeps thinking. Even though we kept telling him that, I believe he never understood or believed it. The issue was about respect and about being truthful to your friends (at least I hope he looked at us as such because I did). When he started using referrals links (as far back as december) he hid it from most users and admins by using short links. This is fine btw. It is his group and he has the right to do as he wants. But then he started editing other people post (admins and members) to add his links into them too. Still fine but some admins took offense and asked him to stop. When bit.ly was banned on steam, some admins started to tell him to stop editing their post with referral links which lead him to edit the whole thread with "blah blah blah" and trash the thread.

Every time he was confronted, he always said it was for the benefit of the group which "appeased" the admins. Our posts were still edited (members post too) and the promise we would start seeing giveaways in the group by him was always flinged around. But every giveaway campaign he launched he left members make the giveaways. He hardly made any in the group until he was pressed by the group (last month). The events that lead to yesterday's actions were brewing for months. To his benefit he did gift me a game back in march (Far Cry 3).

Did the argument with some admin start when they ask about referrals? yes. but it quickly devolved into something else when he edited all of their post (leaving just 123) to make sure no other admins could see them. At that point, another admin not involved first made a post asking him to stop editing people post (not in relation with ref links, just in general) and he agreed to do better. That same admin then made a thread to ask him to stop editing our threads or deleting them. That thread was then deleted when another admin came in and said something about referrals (along the lines of "seems like a lot of hard work editing everyones post for $5") there are pictures of it somewhere. (all of this happened 2 days ago and was just the culmination of months of issues rising not just since july 28th which was a meeting we had to address some of those issues)

When this happened, this is when I got involved and made my post. You can find everything I posted here. nothing is edited nor changed, i have nothing to hid. It shows what the sentiment of every admin was and what was the issue. You can also see him lying, proof being shown that he lied and him still playing the victim. There is a lot of other images circulating around (a lot in this thread) showing other pictures of his editing.Also you can see that him saying that every admin told him to go f himself is not true. My send off message is right there. That is all I have to say really.

Would I recommend you to leave the group? No i wouldn't. Most of you are there to get deals and that is exactly what you will get there. Ref links are used by anyone and I do not find them to be an issue. What transpired in the group was not about money or ref links, rather respect. Lying to your friends, abusing them and using them for your own profit is not ok. This is what it all boiled down too, friends asking another friend to be truthful and that friend lying to the end, then admitting he lied and still played the victim (continues to do so).

To mods of SG, if i crossed the line and called out, please let me know so that I can delete this. This is the only platform where I can express this since a lot of members of the group visits this site. Again sorry if I broke any rule.

Hello all (you may have seen me in some of the mod discussions).

I think another reason we decided to bring this to everyone's attention is not so that tons of members would leave. We knew that the majority would stay simply for the deals. Member can leave at their own free will if they feel that what hookups do is not doing the right thing.

If anything, we are warning any future mods of Hookups what goes on behind closed doors. Right now, Sammy is desperately trying to recruit more mods (just by simply asking random members in chat who wants to be a mod) although if you are considering this, then I do push you to read all that mods have discussed here. Sammy will make the mods and admins do 90% of the hard work for his personal gain. That is exactly the reason he is trying so hard to get more mods at the moment. Sammy knows that he cannot do it alone (even though he claims that hookups is all HIS hard work) and all the announcements posted to every member was the combined effort of ALL previous mods and admin. I am sure you will see the quality of Hookups announcements decreasing now that all loyal mods and admin have left his side after how they were treated with such disregard.

Some of the Admin who left the group on the day of the announcement were there since day one (DGman for example) and helped mold Hookups into what it had become. Without these hard working, loyal and respectful Admins, Hookups would be no where near what it had become. So when Sammy claims that Hookups is ALL HIS hard work, it disgusts me. These admin went through hell trying to talk sense into Sammy and wouldn't have just left over a pathetic little argument, they had come to the end of their tether and felt that leaving the group was their only option.

Hopefully some time soon, Sammy will realize what he has lost by treating the mods and admin like he did and pushing them away from the group. At the end of it all, he has lost admin and mods who worked their *&#@ off for the group for no gain what so ever, and HE was the only one who expected a financial reward.

I understand a lot of you are upset right now, but after reading the very last post in this, I couldn't help but laugh.

I remember getting spammed invites into that group.. never joined it though due to the random invites with no one saying anything to me other than just the invite. Never liked it when people randomly invited me to groups in MMOs, don't like it on steam either. ( Same with random friend requests lol. )

Sorry that things went the way it did for you guys.

I've thought about this and decided I'll let this stay up, if only for clarity. While this is a technical violation of the no-calling out rule (probably), this affects a very large number of people who may not appreciate lining someone's pockets, deal or not. I'll talk with the rest of the SG mods when more of them are online about what, if anything, should be done regarding this here, as we have a habit of banning scammers on sight. Is this a scam? In my mind, yes, because he was untruthful about where the money was going and how much he was making, not to mention the really sleazy practice of editing links in to benefit him and the deletion of evidence. However, this case is unique enough that I will simply sit back for now and watch it unfold, bringing it up with the mods later. Thank you to all the admins of Hookups who contributed to this discussion, your input is appreciated.

Edit: For further clarity, I've been told that Sammy came to the SG chat a while back and asked for this thread to be deleted as well. Straight pastebin.

Hi there former Hookups admin here. I first want to thank you all for getting the full picture. This chat would have never been allowed in Hookups because the owner constantly deleted or edited things that pissed him off. He was told multiple times by myself and other staff that his approach to deleting stuff when it wasn't what he wanted to hear was disrespectful to the staff as not everything one person says will be agreed on. That's simply a fact of life.

Instead of speaking to us like adults more often that not the Owner (Sammy) would shrug it off, say sorry and just provide lip service to those he disrespected without ever changing. To be curt this past instance we got tired of the bullshit and dismissive attitude he had towards us. Again, I myself made a separate thread in regards to not deleting our posts and editing members posts, which was discovered he was doing that too and it was shortly deleted and moved to an Owner's forum, where the rest of us could not see or access.

http://i.imgur.com/KTs5jNj.png

This led to the much larger confrontation thread made by Xamon ( http://i1.minus.com/iucNoEPFkxv12.png )because he purposely kept dodging our requests to not do that and instead just did it again because he was pissed. The problem is Sammy is often ruled by his emotions and lashes out at staff when we speak opinions that don't agree with his view point. This strongarm tactic could no longer be ignored. If you are working with people as a team things aren't going to work out if the people you are working with are constantly disrespected. Unfortunately Sammy refuses to take any criticism as he deletes posts all the time when someone says something bad, even if someone posted on his Greenlight page for his game he'd delete the comments.

I could not continue helping a person like that. I took absolutely NOTHING from Hookups. I never got any free games, never used any of the sellers deals and only participated to help the group. I never even asked that my work be recognized or praised. I did it for the members. The only thing I asked was that the owner respected us and he couldn't even do that. Therefore it was time for me to leave.

I would like to thank the staff at Steamgifts for allowing this thread and I respect that they would allow us to tell our side of the situation.

I want to clarify two things to the users who contribute to this thread.

1. This is indeed calling out. While I understand that this event has caused unrest for a large amount of users who also use SteamGifts, please understand that the group owner is also a SteamGifts user, and as you know, calling out other users are not allowed no matter what they've done. Please know and understand this.
   The only reason (for me) I haven't closed this thread is because most of the stuff being discussed here does not involve SteamGifts or SteamTrades in any way. Not knowing and not caring about Hookups has some part in it too, no offense to those that use(d) Hookups.

2. As I said, so far nothing in this thread involves SteamGifts, thus, the group owner's account here will not be affected over the actions he has taken in his group. It's his group, his business, not ours (yet).

So yeah, considering the censorship there, feel free to continue using this thread as a place of discussion.

Weird .. "No forum found" :-S

Left that group anyway. You could see it was run for profit when it started looking like an expensive steam trades thread. Not suprised referral links were used and that he is earning from it. His attitude and actions are the worst part. Were other mods using referral links too and thats why they didnt like their posts being edited ?