Edit - A common saying round here is 'ask a silly question and get a silly answer'. Clearly Brexit wasn't enough for me to learn that also applies to public votes, but here you go.

OK, obviously I know how to do that. But I'm going to have a bunch of games to giveaway soon and I find it stressful to decide the best way to do it (or at least the way that will get me into the least trouble). And I thought; "You know what, I'll just leave it up to other people. I'll have a poll and go along with what other people think is best for at least the next several months and then if anybody moans it'll be the fault of democracy." I'll add the train here in a few days if that is what is people voted for. The options are;

Public giveaways for level 2+ users

I started off doing public giveaways. I started trying other things because of the winners who didn't mark their games as received, the winners who complained they had won crap games, the winners who already owned the game, etc. But level 2+ isn't so bad, I guess because people at that level have had to run a bunch of giveaways of their own and understand what is involved, and I'd still be prepared to do that.

Pros

  • It's easy
  • It gets the best results if I feel like promoting my art
  • No blacklist drama
  • Fewer angry people abusing me in broken English for only making private giveaways and being a big leech

Cons

  • Most troublesome winners
  • I feel slightly bad for the hypothetical level 0-1 users who aren't complete dicks

Poorly hidden trains in discussions for users of all levels

This felt like an upgrade to me in terms of winners - it seems people who are paying enough attention to notice a train in discussions also generally pay enough attention to mark their games as received. And also meant I could have some fun with simple puzzles, choose-your-own adventure trains and themed trains. But did also come with a few drawbacks.

Pros

  • The most entertaining for me - especially when people get abusive without realising that something posted in 'puzzles' might be a puzzle
  • Most other people seem to like it also

Cons

  • Annoying blacklist drama from people who appear to have forgotten that they blacklisted me first
  • The worst leeches using alt accounts, leaked giveaway links, etc, to farm low entry giveaways
  • People complaining that It's an inefficient method of entering giveaways and I'm wasting their time
  • People complaining about elitist high level users flaunting their wealth and thinking low level users will be happy with bundle trash

SGTools protected train with lax rules

After a few bad experiences I recently experimented with an SGTools giveaway with rules of no unactivated wins and a minimum games given ratio of 0.2 - which I didn't think was unreasonable and overall seemed to work quite well.

Pros

  • Least troublesome winners

Cons

  • Many people appear to be of the opinion that SGTools is the elitist, exclusionary cancer that is killing Steam Gifts
7 years ago*

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What giveaways should I make in the future?

View Results
Public giveaways
Poorly hidden trains in discussions
SGTools protected train with lax rules
All of those ideas suck, let me tell you what you should be doing instead...
Are you mental? Just keep the games and farm the cards
If you have games then give them to me! I'll comment below so I can be blacklisted/suspended!

Thanks for the ride, mate. Bump! ;)

7 years ago
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These portraits of Audrey... Damn, man, you have a talent! ^_^

7 years ago
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Bump.

7 years ago
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Bumpitty-bumpbump!

7 years ago
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What's all this about fight club?

7 years ago
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bumo

7 years ago
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Thanks for the train! Have a bump. Also nice portraits.

7 years ago
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Do want you feel like doing...also, thanks & bump!

7 years ago
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Bump!

7 years ago
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Barumpah!

Great train, hop on people and take a gander!

7 years ago
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I like poorly hidden trains myself. I figure that alone must knock out a large portion of the troublesome bunch, unless the autojoiners have a script to grab forum links as well now. No matter which option you choose though, people are gonna complain about something.

7 years ago
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I get curious about certain things. It's why I made this topic and it's why I've tried different kinds of giveaways. From my experiments there are clearly scripts or bots of some kind crawling through discussions looking for giveaways - for instance you can quickly see huge spikes in traffic when 'hiding' a link in the text of a post while a far more obvious link in an image file will get a fraction of the hits.

For a while I thought using images as a 'captcha' was the best option but I felt there was a growing problem with leaked links. I'd started posting giveaways in discussions as I believed it gave an advantage to the 'human' users of the site rather than the bots - but it felt like low entry giveaways were starting to be targeted by the more professional game farmers to the extent that the opposite was becoming true.

7 years ago
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View attached image.
7 years ago
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I used to have public giveaways for level 0, then 2, then (with SGv2) I upped it to 4 because it become too easy to get to lv2. I filtered out most leechers, and troublesome users, but level 4 is not that hard to get to if you are willing to put a little effort, and it doesn't take a lot of money (you can get there with $15-20 worth of non-bundled giveaways in a decent sale, or a sizable bunch of bundle leftovers, it's far from being unreachable for almost anyone).

7 years ago
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Bump!

7 years ago
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Many thanks and a bump! <3 <3

7 years ago
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Whatever you do, bump! ^^

7 years ago
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Bump

7 years ago
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Thank you for the lax rules protected train! :)

7 years ago
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bump

7 years ago
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Bump!!!

7 years ago
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bump

7 years ago
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Would be cool if you could do a portrait of some from the SG community, perhaps as a prize or something I don't know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

7 years ago
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I have a facebook page and I had a competition there a while back. I also tried to 'promote' it here but there were no entries from here and very few overall. It was a bit embarrassing to be fair and it put me off trying that kind of thing again - maybe if I come up with a better idea!

7 years ago
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That's too bad, perhaps the people on SG didn't feel comfortable sharing their FB profile, or perhaps not many people knew about it. I hope you change your mind at some point, I think it would be really cool.

7 years ago
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People were clearly concerned about the social media element and other privacy issues - it was something I should have taken into account but it didn't occur to me. I'm probably a bit older than many people here and I've been a musician in bands and have maybe done embarrassing enough things on stage to be too worried about Facebook myself...

But I could probably still do something, recently I contributed some artworks to a charity auction at a gallery who specifically wanted non-celebrity portraits and in hindsight may have been an ideal thing to ask for volunteers for here.

7 years ago
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It kind of make sense that they wouldn't want to reveal that information, I can imagine that some of the lovely woman on this site wouldn't want a bunch of random friend invites or if some of the more malicious people start to harass you on Facebook for something they didn't like. I think some sort of anonymity would probably be beneficial. Perhaps it's something you can keep in mind for the next time, I fully support the idea :)

7 years ago
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thanks and bump :)

7 years ago
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I can't see "hidden" with an adjective without thinking of this holly bush: https://youtu.be/GAW1pLhHBcQ?t=134

7 years ago
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I might have to try and find that game, I'd never heard of it but it looks like fun!

7 years ago
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How make giveway free?

7 years ago
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