Having a Honeypot Give-Away to catch bot accounts

They may become annoying like those thread-like ads on reddit, and it will be easy to tweak the bot around them unless they do something special with the programming, but I'd be interested to see how many they'd catch initially. I remember there was a necro thread about a large number of accounts being suspended for botting. I don't know how they caught them, but maybe they could do another similar raid.

I don't think this will work because bots will always find a way to bypass such check giveaways.

Enhanced SG offers a button to enter GAs straight from the list, so that's a really risky way to filter out bots.
I would rather suggest one of the following:

• adding hidden GAs[simple display=none, or other css magic]. Bots generally rely on parsing the page source
• same but with a hidden fake entry button
• Changing API and capturing all requests to the old one.. Yet this approach is also prone to mistaking scripts for bots
• Perform data analysis and look for accounts active 24/7[In a meaningful way, not a tab left open and refreshing hourly, like it can be configured even in some vanilla browsers]

Edit Or just make a fake announcement and see which users stop using the site waiting for an updated bot ;)

I feel like it's pretty easy to tell on the backend who's using a script due to the speed of entering, uniform times between entries, and other patterns of entering. Having a honeypot might just catch people who didn't read or couldn't understand (like if English isn't their first language) the description. You can easily see someone comment multiple times on newly created giveaways within milliseconds of each other.

No, fake giveaways are clearly against the rules, I would expect admins/mods to abide by the same rules they are expected to enforce :P

AFAIK, currently for the first offense botters get just a temporary suspension, not a perma ban. If this is still the case, then the policy seems to me more like an invitation "feel free to use bots until we catch you for the 1st time (and that will most likely take a long time)", than an attempt to catch bots or to get us to investigate and report suspected bots. Correct me, if I'm wrong, please.

EDIT: Then still the problem is, that using some sites you can get to a high level for just a few bucks, buying newly released games with keys dumped there at 1% or less of their nominal price. Even if those are eventually added to the no-CV list, this usually takes a long time, and still makes maintaining a high level account incredibly cheap. What we would really need as the 1st step, so the people would even care about loosing their accounts, is adopting the same approach as Steam, and not giving CVs for GAs which are not giving +1 on Steam until they possibly reach the +1 status.

Sounds like a poorly thought out witch hunt to me

Maybe SG secretly does this already...!

View attached image.

This suggestion sounds eerily familiar. I could've sworn Fitz10000, Fitz10001, Fitz10002, Fitz10003, Fitz10004, Fitz10005, Fitz10006, Fitz10007, Fitz10008, Fitz10009, Fitz10010, Fitz10011, Fitz10012, Fitz10013, Fitz10014, Fitz10015, Fitz10016, Fitz10017, Fitz10018, Fitz10019, Fitz10020, Fitz10021, Fitz10022, and Fitz10023 have all suggested this in the past.

Sounds like a good idea, the giveaway itself doesn't have to be fake even. Tho other commenters are right, it would punish people who don't care to read or can't read, then it will become hard to differentiate between them and bots.