I still strongly believe SG needs this.

I have a suggestion for winner-gifter communication:
In situation when GA has ended, there is winner(s) who didn't yet mark gift(s) as received/not received (and doesn't matter if gift was marked as sent because sometimes gifter needs to contact winner before sending the gift):

• When GA owner writes a message inside GA, and includes tag for example @winner, this will be just a usual comment visible to anyone having access to GA, but all winners of this GA who didn't at the moment mark gift as received/not received will get notification of this message as a new incoming comment (with white letter notification in top right corned as usual).
• Tag is needed to let gifter decide if message should be received by winner(s) or not, as in GA comments there could happen a lot of other talk, not relevant to gifter-winner communication.
• This means that these notifications could only be received by winner of your GA, thus not allowing for any user to contact any other user anytime.
• This means that these notifications can be received only by winners who didn't yet mark anything. Since gift is marked, they will never see such a notifications originating from that particular GA. This prevents a user from misusing the feature by sending in future such a notifications to another user who have been their winner at some point in history.
• This keeps matters cleaner for everybody (including mods), so that all demands and questions between gifter and winner(s) can be represented inside the topic of GA with no need of links to outside topics, besides some users don't have public GA in their 'sent' history or looking for one could be a nuisance.

Considering PM system: it would definitely need a way to authorize (and de-authorize) users for sending you messages for reason of existing of underdeveloped people, so it is pretty much the same as just FR in Steam.

Then about contacting through any public means(public comments/GAs), isn't being not private the greatest thing here? Users are at least protected by common SG rules from very sad occurrences (threatening etc), mods can see history of edited/deleted posts and apply punishments to the rule breakers. The fact that link to some discussion/GA can be shared to anyone also could play its role for aborted part of community to be abstinent. Again, no one wants to do extra job moderating behavior of creatures feeling even more safe and anonymous with PM system. And moderating the moderators etc etc

I don't know what situations of the past people above were mentioning - but if someone misused old GA spaces, existing of PMs couldn't prevent doing such things further. In any case bigger problem is a 'gray area' in human communication, when some person can contact another person and write anything unpleasant, while not formally breaking the rules. PM itself is not a bad idea - all the time the root of problems is in minds - a lot of people don't deserve anything fine, as they will misuse it. Being on as formal as possible terms with unknown persons is always a better choice. If they would be more polite and reasonable under the weight of punishment, that's fine.

I think it's a good idea, and would be useful, and I'd support it. But I suspect the amount of work it would take to implement it in a decent way with proper access controls/blocking/reporting/etc is probably not worth the effort when we already have Steam accounts and e-mail (for giveaway winners). Not that any problematic winners ever responds to e-mails... :)

I hope not

Yes, this would be a really nice feature!

Too much work/resources needed for a small improvement which comes with disagreements.
Also, putting a proper title and not a click-bait would be cool

Actually I need a way to message level 0 winners.

Bump