Misuse of Giveaway Feedback - Suspension Length: Permanent
The correct response is to inform staff of the matter. They'll review and, even if they can't do anything right away, they'll "flag" the user. If the behavior persists, you'll find the matter resolved soon enough, and with finality.
On the other hand, if you're activating the keys yourself, then you're invalidating the claim you're making, which puts the responsibility on you.
If you're having trouble getting a hold of staff in a timely manner, then the real issue may be with cg's staff recruitment policies, and that should likely be the focus of your discussion.
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Tried it once with a key, not always ^^
Of course I contacted support, but I filed it under "Request received feedback". Ticket is open for nearly five weeks now...
Thank you for your answer :)
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Request Received Feedback would presumably be the most appropriate category within which to bring the matter up, so your approach should be fine. Unfortunately, after recent departures, staff seems pretty dead right now; that appears to be the real issue, rather than a weakness in site policy in properly addressing such matters.
Unfortunately, multi-accounting is a thing (as is general dickishness), and sometimes the only thing you can do there is hope that the site issuing the key will be willing to offer a revocation, so as to allow you a quicker and more reliable resolution to the matter. Gauging by your Not Receiveds, your issues don't seem to be related to risky low-level public giveaways, either, so there's unfortunately little way to resolve such issues by changing your giveaway habits.
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Again, thank you for your answer and those well-thought words :)
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Pretty much this. As the giveaway creator, your sole responsibility is to provide a working copy/key of the game you've given away to the winner. You cannot control whether or not the winner is breaking rules, which is why in this specific case you'll have to report the user and allow support to handle the case.
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Thank you for your answer. I always file a ticket in those cases. On a general scale, it irks me that it is always us giveaway creators who have to provide proof and the winner is able to claim anything what he/she wants: Not received, duplicate key, whatever
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Iām not sure if I have much to say about the matter, but as a suggestion on the practical side of things you can do, maybe you could blacklist after they mark as recieved.
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blacklist them after you know that they activated the key? or wait needed 7 days and report because they didn't yet activate even it's been a week? or reroll, if the key hasn't been viewed?
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Thank you for your answer. Please see my answer to Lupus
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You could try blacklisting them AFTER they have marked the game as received, they can't mark it as unreceived at least until some time after doing that. You could also take a screenshot of the steam account of your winner before (without the game) and after (with the game) as a proof in case someone gets the revenge instinct. I know it'd be more work for you, especially since you are very generous, but those are my thoughts about finding a solution :)
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Thank you for your answer. Hm, yes, I think that could work. With the number of giveaways I do lately, it will be a PITA, tho. I will have to take notes which users I will have to revisit in seven days to BL him. Because I sure as hell can tell you: If I don't take notes, I will have forgotten his/her name a week later :D
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You could resolve that if you maybe just go to your "Keys sent" page and look which GA is older than a month (so the feedback gets locked like Sundance said) and blacklist the winner afterwards.
If you just set yourself a time (e.g. every two weeks or smth) to check your keys sent and just BL the winners of those giveaways where the feedback is locked
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I might indeed do this. Have to give it some thoughts. Thank you
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It's pretty annoying because you have to wait a month until feedback gets locked in and can't be changed without Support anymore but yeah, that's pretty much what I thought.
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Well, that's new. But at least it does lock now- given how rare revocations are, having to contact support for a change when those do occur is definitely a more favorable design to it than the old, exploitation-encouraging setup.
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Yeah, I'm in favour of that change too. I was always a bit worried if I blacklist one of my winners (probably without even noticing they won one of my GAs ages ago) they might try to get back at me that way.
It also prevents people from unmarking their wins to pass SGTools filters.
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It's early and I'm still not really awake, but yup, this seems like a change for the better, I agree with you
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Thank you for your answer. I do WL giveaways. Also nearing 400 people on my WL. But I intentionally do public giveaways, also because I don't want to establish any kind of elitism or however it is spelled in english ^^
Regarding BLs: I thought about getting rid of them more than once. But whenever someone wins a big 30, 40, 50 CV giveaway from me and then I see that he broke multiple rules, man, I know that I do like my BLs :)
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I see that he broke multiple rules,
Then request a reroll. (Even if older than one month).
In the worst case you get the reply, that the suspension has already been served and nothing happens, but often people go unnoticed for a while.
Got multiple people suspended that way.
(And reroll requests do not take 5 weeks ^^)
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"I have to try everything in my power to contact the winner to get any kind of proof to send to support. Which is near impossible if the winner is mad at me for having him blacklisted."
You do realize that users can't message you once you have blacklisted them right? They are probably just being bad users, but if you are expecting a reply on SG you won't get anything.
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Yeah, that's been a long-running issue with blacklists on SG. I really wish cg'd add in an exception check, that'd allow bypassing of blacklists for giveaways that ended within the past two weeks, for those giveaways where the blacklistee is the listed winner. If the blacklistee adds anything overly offensive, they'd get in trouble anyway, and allowing the bypass would avoid a lot of regular issues that currently crop up. (Nevermind that most winners wouldn't even notice they'd been blacklisted under that arrangement, and thus the whole basis for petty misbehaviors would be mostly avoided.)
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They can still respond to your comments, can't they?
Trying to contact the winner includes adding on steam or e-mail (if available) as far as i know
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Not sure on the comments. I agree contacting on Steam or email is valid, and probably what OP is talking about, just wanted to be sure they knew about direct messages not working.
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Given that OP is more than 4years on SG now with nearly 1.3k Sent gifts I guess he does know that :P
Even tho finding a comment of someone can be hard (at least I don't know of any way..) I guess .. since you can not comment on any of their giveaways anymore
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Even tho finding a comment of someone can be hard (at least I don't know of any way..)
If they're active enough on the forums, doing a google search for [username] site:steamgifts.com works well enough. Unfortunately, you gotta filter out threads where making such a comment would count as necroing, as rude topic-tangenting, or as any other sort of behavior that'd earn you negativity from other users. In short, finding a functional comment to reply to would be hard.
On the other hand, the standard practice in situations where the GA creator (or winner) has you blacklisted is to simply poke support into contacting the user on your behalf to inform them of any issues, so there's actually no need whatsoever to make an attempt at such an elaborate workaround [though given how unresponsive staff is of late, that may not quite be true at the moment].
GA comments are the first place staff look to catching themselves up on a situation- but informing staff through support tickets (except by way of User Reports, as not all staff members can view those) works as a functional alternative where GA comments can't be used.
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Guess you're right.
I didn't know that you could limit googles search to a specific domain (never needed something like that so far but I'm sure it can come in handy one day). Thank you.
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They can still respond to your comments, can't they?
As long if they find a comment in a public GA or the forum... yes, they can. But thats a pain in the ass.
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Public comments, yes. But even if they are the winner and have commented on the giveaway earlier, as soon as a winner is blacklisted, I'm pretty sure he/she can no longer answer or ask a question
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I meant comments like this one. If they should find a comment in the forum in a public thread I am pretty sure he could still respond to your comment there.
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I even gave my GF some of the "duplicate" keys and they activated fine on her account.
I guess that should answer your "are you sure that the key is really working?" question :P
Even tho I personally think that kind of finding out if the key is duplicate or not is debatable :/
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Is there any other way to check if key is ok other than trying to activate it?
There was some time where trying to activate game on account that already had it gave different error, but steam changed it i think.
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I guess there's no other way - except asking the seller of the key for a new one and claiming that the old one didn't work.
I don't know how such a case would be labeled by the support, but practically you promised the key to the GA winner and gave it to someone else afterwards - which shouldn't cause any problems in this case though since the winner marked as not received...
There probably is no other way.
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Giveaway was marked as received, winner was blacklisted, winner insulted and blocked me on Steam, support said they couldn't do anything, a screenshot that winner saw the key was not enough, so I was out of ideas how to prove that the key was no duplicate. At this point I said "Eff it", deceided to live with the "Not received" and we tried the key for her account.
Afterwards I contacted support again (user report) and moved on.
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If this should happen maybe record the screen while activating it.
It can be quite a bit of work to do it all but it should work.. If you have screens of the screen that he saw the key/conversation AND a recording of how the key activated on a different account (preferable all in a single recording or incl. a reliable source of date/time when the video was recorded so they can't say you did it beforehand).
So they would SEE that the winner was definetely lying and trying to ruin your name + they would see that the key you provided was actually working.
That's the only way I could think of to make this method kinda bulletproof.
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P.S:As I wrote in one of your giveaway, you are very strange.
Because he excluded one country from the GAs? I'd assume bad experience with users from there. Of course, this might be still generalizing, but it's the right of a GA creator to restrict it.
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Hey, please have a look at my direct answer to BlackCat, maybe this will give a little bit more detail. Thank you for your answer
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As I already told you twice and now a third time: I won't get into how I set up my giveaways. I can tell you that I have put much thought into why I set them up the way they are set up. And since I did that, the number of my reroll tickets were reduced dramatically, by over 90%. And doing giveaways became fun again. So I am completely okay with you finding me strange :)
P.S.: It is not only one country, by the way.
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lol, u are funny. Making giveaways for all regions (except one), blacklist winners and making complain threads on forum.
System is fine.
If u want to see mark "recieved", wait for winner say "Thank you" and mark it.
After that blacklist (āÆ Ā° ā” Ā°) āÆ (ā»āā»
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winner say "Thank you"
Wait. You have public giveaway winners who say "thank you"?
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.
That's so clearly not even a real thing. š
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ofc, why not? There are too many nice people around ä¹( ā ą±Ŗā)ć
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And imagine that you are the one who wants to say "thank you" and finds out that he is blacklisted :) Some people may have problem with accepting that :)
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It's the 999 other people out of 1000 that spam thanks with their auto-join scripts, not the winner.
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It's not "one country", but thanks for your thorough investigation into my thought process on how to set up my giveaways :)
This thread is not about blacklists. It is about that a blacklisted winner should mark the giveaway as received because the blacklist does not affect if a key is valid or not. And it is about what happens if a winner misuses the feedback to get back at the giveaway creator and that from then on it is only the giveaway creator who has to provide proof that he did nothing wrong.
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well, as ppl already suggested
wait 30 days so they can't change the feedback without contacting support.
i thing one week is enough )
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It is excluding at least three of the six countries with the highest rulebreaker density. Seems to be the most populous ones on SteamGifts.
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stop blacklisting them instantly.
wait 30 days so they can't change the feedback without contacting support.
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Id rather have them permabanned.
He will have to do more work true, but in the end it should be with benefit for our community no?
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It's not as easy as it sounds, getting someone banned for misuse of feedback.
They usually have to do it multiple times for there to be any concrete "proof" of it.
I managed it once because the fellow also unmarked someone else's giveaway at the same time - i encouraged him to file a report, we both filed reports, and he (the winner of both giveaways) was perma'd. TLDR: I got lucky with the timing.
EDIT: I still encourage people to file reports. Multiple reports will eventually get the person misusing feedback banned.
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Hey Tzaar, thank you for your answer.
I always file my tickets, but there has to be an infraction for this. If a user has won giveaways worth four times in real CV what he has sent, he broke no rule, but maybe I still want to blacklist him for not really giving back to the community.
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I have seen it happen. When they have undone it more than once... Still harder now with not being able to change it later yourself.
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funny, i say the same about sgtools, yet no one cares. ā(ć)ā
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Wha? I'm not the only one that don't like sgtools? :D
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Because people are too lazy to fill reports? But that shouldn't surprise anybody. Remember that people are too lazy to check their winners for breaking rules. After some of my reports people were suspended for 2-3 weeks for multiple infractions. Nobody checked them before me xD
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Getting someone permabanned - like Tzaar said - is really not as easy as it seems. But thank you for your answer
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so the winner did not activate the key?!!
maybe wait till he activate and mark received before blacklisting !!
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I see why people would be pissed.
They won the game, go to the giveaway page to say thanks, but instead they get a "you are blacklisted" message.
It gives the "here is your game. Now fuck off" kind of message.
They shouldn't misuse the feedback though.
Or if we assume that the keys are not activated, that they want to refuse the gift, but can't message you, because they are blacklisted?
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Or if we assume that the keys are not activated, that they want to refuse the gift, but can't message you, because they are blacklisted?
Yeah, that scenario occurred to me as well. Of course, the best thing to do in that scenario [as a winner] is to not leave feedback at all (to help avoid misunderstandings), and to contact support on the matter. Then again, given how unresponsive staff is of late, we don't really have grounds to assume that that they weren't contacted.
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If they wanted to refuse the gift they could contact support and file a ticket. Or leave a comment on Steam. Or send a FR on Steam to talk things through. Thank you for your answer
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As someone you immediately blacklisted, I thank you for your Earthtongue giveaway and will mark it as received.
At least allow people to comment if they win your giveaway. I always thank people.
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This.
I couldn't give a meh about the blacklist, but still thanked the creator of the gib.
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Let me get back to this "immediately".
I had 280ish giveaways ending on Saturday. It took me three days to check every winner and send the keys. I check every winners for any infractions right before sending the key. So I check for infractions, if they are any, I take action. If there are none, I check if the winner falls under my own selfmade reasons for BL. If so, I blacklist him/her, send the key, and move on to one of the other giveaways. I can't spend more time for one individual giveaway because I have also have a full-time job, a relationship and a real-life outside of SG.
So it might appear that "immediately" looks like "Eff off", but it is not.
BTW: You did not break any rules, the reason is your ratio
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Three days for less than 300 keys? o.0 That is an incredibly long time. I managed to do a 600-pack in about 8 hours once, and I checked every winner still.
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I don't spend my whole weekend activating keys ;) So I stretched it
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Maybe put a note that you're going to blacklist the winner and a timeframe after which they'll be removed (which I assume you're doing) so there's no animosity on the winner's end. Or wait till after key is marked received, screenshot the evidence, then blacklist, so they can'y say "key can't be activated."
If you already do all that, then I got nothing.
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Thank you for your answer.
I'm not blacklisting every winner :) I'm even whitelisting a lot of winners. And yes, winners who are blacklisted due to their ratio will get removed once it nears 1:1
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I think the system has to be modified. But I don't know how. Maybe the winner who claims the key is a duplicate key also has to proof that the key is indeed a duplicate one? Although I am not too sure how he/she can proof it with a failsafe build into it.
As it is now, any winner always can claim that a won key is a duplicate key and all the trouble then starts for the giveaway creator while the winner - although his claim that the key is a duplicate key is wrong - can sit back and enjoy the experience.
Got me to think about this: https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/rWxp7/automatic-key-activation-by-linking-steam-account
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I always wondered... what stops someone from activating the key on an alternate account and claiming it was a duplicate?
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Only if the giveaway creator goes through the hassle of contacting the store :-/
Thank you for your answer
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Giveaway creators are put in a very uncomfortable and vulnerable position, in which they shouldn't be, since they're trying to give other people games, at least in theory...
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Out of all my giveaways, I've only had a handful report duplicate keys. And most of the ones with not working keys have agreed to delete the giveaway. I'm sure not all of them were dupes, but really what can you do.. the point is that the majority of winners I've encountered have been honest.
That said, I've encountered a lot less problems since I started making all my public giveaways Level 2+
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Yeah. I'm not saying they aren't generally honest, most people wouldn't want to harm you and will cooperate, only that there's a risk a few of them could intentionally harm giveaway creators.
I understand why we can't just delete our own giveaways on a whim, without winner approval, but we should be able to...
Some people could abuse that, sure, but you lose a giveaway slot every time you do it.
Maybe there can be a way to prevent these abuses in order to mitigate the current abuse risk. :)
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Nothing stops them. But they gained nothing by doing so anyway, except maybe to gamble for a rare chance that the GA creator have another spare key for the same game and decides to not go thru the hassle to get the original key revoked? (ie. to cheat 2 keys out of a GA win from the same GA creator?)
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I'm a little confused. You said your gf activated some of the keys that were claimed to be duplicate which means the winners didn't use the keys at all. But why wouldn't they use the keys? That seems strange. Normally they would activate the keys, then later find out they're blacklisted, then change the giveaway from received to not received as retaliation.
The only thing I can think of is you're blacklisting them IMMEDIATELY after the giveaways end. So when the winners go back and check which giveaway they won they find out they're blacklisted. But what I don't understand is they're so angry they've been blacklisted that they decide to not activate the key and lie and say it's duplicate.
Can you elaborate on what your method is for blacklisting?
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Thank you for your answer and please see my answer to Vecchia
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Well, maybe you actually should explain a bit how your blacklisting system actually works? Not sure, but it would eventually help in understanding the issue. Because as of right now, I don't think I really get it.
And see the comment above, if you activate a key, and the activation actually works, it was not used before. That means not used by the winner of the giveaway, which really seems a bit strange.
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Thank you for your answer.
I won't get into how and why I set up my giveaways the way I do. And I also don't want to talk about the reasons that I blacklist for in this thread. Maybe there is another thread at another time for this :) I don't want this thread to be about Blacklists in general or the reasons for blacklisting someone. I wanted this thread to be about that it is always the giveaway creator who has to prove that he did nothing wrong, even if a winner gives wrong feedback on purpose.
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We're not asking why you blacklist. We're asking how you do it. Do you blacklist winners immediately after the giveaways end? Because that's apparently not a good way to do it. You should blacklist after they've activated the keys so they can't claim the key is duplicate. Otherwise you're going to expect problems.
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I looked at the first page of your public giveaways. Why didn't you explain your "system" on the description?
I have my own personal "system", for a lack of a better word, and will hand out BLs relating to my own personal taste.
If they still marked it as "not received" because they're blacklisted, that's on them.
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I apologize if this is a dumb idea, but would waiting until the winners mark the keys as received before blacklisting them be a good idea?
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is still don*t get it, why they mark not received and the keys worked on your gfs account...maybe they got irritated that you blacklisted them..they couldnt access the giveaway page anymore etc.....but for me the solution is simple, blacklist later..wait a week or two after keys are marked received..
i do it the same way, when i see some "region lock only" creator won a game from me... ^^
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I think you really need to consider the scenario that Quex alluded to above. Let's break it down.
A winner (who doesn't fear the consequences of GA feedback misuse) notices that they've been blacklisted by you before they activate the key. This isn't unlikely after you created this thread. The winner then activates the key using an alt account and marks your GA as not received. If they're asked by Support to provide proof that they key is a duplicate, they easily can, by just taking screenshot (or a video) of them trying to activate it against their main account. At this point you can either give them another key, or ask for a giveaway deletion (which they are likely to refuse). In both cases you end up on the losing side, and there's not much Support can do about it, even in theory.
I think there are probably better ways to achieve what you want than blacklisting winners.
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An honest question: Why do you explicitly write down a failsafe way to cheat me or other giveaway creators on this site? I honestly think in the future I will sell all my leftover keys at a grey market site. It is way less hassle than to give away keys for free on SG and to try to make someone happy.
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That's not failsafe. You could maybe do that once and get away with it. The second or third time, support's not going to believe that all these different people are sending you and only you keys that don't happen to activate... and misuse of feedback is a permaban, so the stakes are high.
Surely you're not just now learning about the fact that people can have alt accounts... or "friends" they send the keys to. Or any of the myriad other ways people have to cheat the system, which survives only by virtue of the fact that most people don't, in fact, cheat. The ones that do just disproportionally color our responses.
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I'm not just now learning about it, no. But believe me when I say that these things never crossed my mind before I found out on this site. I am a too honest person, I guess, with way not enough criminal energy to even invent stuff like this.
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You just have to think like a leecher. It's easy if you try!
Not that you're a bad person for not doing that.
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or "friends"
You forgot about brothers and other family members xD
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I didn't, that's why "friends" is in quotes. :-P
Also, my dog is on Steam, and she just got puppies, so those need CS:GO too so we can play together...
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Your dog is playing cs:go? That's so cute :3
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It's not fail safe, because if a user tries to pull something like this repeatedly they'll be banned eventually.
In addition, I don't believe in security through obscurity and neither should you. Instead of being oblivious to what may actually happen in this case, there are plenty of ways to give and be certain you're getting a good winner who will appreciate your gift. There are even ways to make sure your winner actually plays the game. If can provide more specific proposals if you describe the type of winners you prefer.
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It's not really failsafe. The GA creator can contact the original store and get the key revoked from the alt account. But this is usually too much a hassle for most people...
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I think "blacklist" is such a strong word, although I know everybody has its "system", I still feel bad when I get blacklisted.
As to your question, I don't think there is a good solution either, since there is no way to verify the key is valid or not. For the SG moderators it is not possible for them to tell who is correct.
I personally will suggest SG not to use "blacklist" to avoid negative feelings.
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This post has made me concerned.
Can people even trash another who are GIVING FREE things to them?
I even saw people describing methods for circumventing the system and marking something valid as not received. nor did it occur to me that donors had so many problems like that, or that people could be so mean.
That makes me lose a little more faith in people and makes me think that maybe it's not a good idea to donate games then .. I was really sad, I believed it here, =(
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The fact is, with such a large user-base, there will always be some rotten apples in the barrel, just a reflection of human nature, but it's no reason to give up on this place, the good ones outweigh the bad ones, otherwise steamgifts would have sunk to oblivion long time ago.
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Hello there.
In the last few months I recognized an annoying trend regarding my giveaways. Yes, I do blacklist winners due to various reasons. You can think that I'm stupid by doing so, and that's okay. I have my own personal "system", for a lack of a better word, and will hand out BLs relating to my own personal taste.
I can totally understand any winner who is not happy to find out he/she is blacklisted after winning a game, BUT I expect the winner to still be fair and play by the rules.
In the last few months I recognized that winners who I blacklist after their win(s) mark the giveaways as not received in revenge for being blacklisted. The keys are fine. I not only can vouch for that, I even gave my GF some of the "duplicate" keys and they activated fine on her account. So the winners definitely marked the giveaway(s) as "Not received" just out of revenge for being blacklisted.
With the way SG works, it is always up to me, the giveaway creator, to proof that I indeed did sent the key to the winner AND that it was not a duplicate key. I have to try everything in my power to contact the winner to get any kind of proof to send to support. Which is near impossible if the winner is mad at me for having him blacklisted.
I think the system has to be modified. But I don't know how. Maybe the winner who claims the key is a duplicate key also has to proof that the key is indeed a duplicate one? Although I am not too sure how he/she can proof it with a failsafe build into it.
As it is now, any winner always can claim that a won key is a duplicate key and all the trouble then starts for the giveaway creator while the winner - although his claim that the key is a duplicate key is wrong - can sit back and enjoy the experience.
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