You have no reading comprehension.
ban from != ban for
The first means you're not allowed to do something.
The second means you're punished for doing something.
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I've been wondering that, myself.
Either those people are really sitting there all day long, doing nothing but refreshing their browsers, or they do have some bots fot that. Either way, those keys rarely end up with someone who would truly appreciate them I think.
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Bots are everywhere where something is given away for free. Not only here but also twitch chat and stuff. Makes me saaad.
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some ppl use symbols insteal of '-' but most of them just throw keys as they are so bots take care of that and no chance for us.
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Lets go to the park and feed some ducks? Nah! Lets go to steamgifts and feed some bots! Yay! Or Ninjas. Seriously, with the high amount of registered users, no key will last long, I believe. I gave away keys that were on images and they were gone within 20 seconds I believe. I don't think that the bots are the problem.
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I can see humans taking a lot of them, but a good deal of them the humans never get a chance to take too.
Seeing a page with 5 keys posted on it where all 5 of them are gone within the first 4 seconds is a bit much. That would require players who literally just sit on here spamming refresh for hours on end with their key entry screen already open and ready for the code.
And even then, I could see that happening with players every so often, but that seems to happen way too much. Feels like it is a bot with multiple copies of steam going at once to achieve that so consistently.
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If you know they were taken after 4 seconds, it means you landed on the page 4 seconds after they were posted, right ?
Considering that, is that so hard to imagine that another dude landed on it just a second earlier ?
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Decided, if I ever post one on here. First I will have state it in the beginning so actual players know it and act around it. But first I will have about 20+ fake keys labelled for big, high budget games so the bots will jump at them, then after all of them are banned from entering codes for 30 minutes, then I will end up entering the actual code below it in a format the bots can't read.
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Then you point them to the top of the thread where you states the first keys were fake and why, then tell them to read better next time. Past that, not my problem. I have hit the 30 minute limit a few times with those keys where some of the digits were given as questions.
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Why not simply make these keys display after a quizz or something, say fo example in a itstoohard page ?
That way, you reward actual braininess and not f5 champions or bots.
Or, like a lot of people do, put the key like this :
YVGY4-ZGVIG-T(...)TPX
(...) = letter
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The only problem with that is that most people will run out of activation attempts and get locked out of future activations long before they hit Q. If there's more than one game involved, you're going to miss out on the rest of them and may only find a duplicate key for your trouble.
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I've never been "locked out", even in times when people do mass key drops. Does it still happen ? Is there a message or something ?
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that's why i only give away keys to users i add myself, so that i know who gets it. takes some time sometimes, but i think a good way to know where your game ends up
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Yeah I never directly drop the links/etc, that just invites the ninjas.
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Rly? Another one? There is no such bot. You need some fking brain peoples...
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Really? I mean, I could code one pretty easily if all I cared about was searching for the ?????-?????-????? pattern. Most of the effort would just be in sanity checking to ignore fake keys like IAMTR-OLLIN-GBOTS.
I'm sure there are at least a few people out there who would be motivated enough to actually do it.
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i used to think like that, but i got some games from key drops and realised it's just a lot of ppl being faster than me, which is not that hard.
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I've managed to get 2 or 3 key drops in my time on here, I agree with the "right time, right thread" theory.
Haven't dropped that many keys myself, when I did once I had someone on my friends list contact me on Steam to tell me they tried it after it had been up for a week or so and it had still worked for them. Ninjas missed that one!
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Pssst kid don't listen to these guys I'll sell you the bot you want for a low low price of 50 keys, and while I'm here, would you be interested in buying the bridge
(sorry people I been saving this joke sense I saw that game, really there is no bot)
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I think key scraping bots are a bit of a myth. I mean sure, it's definitely possible to code one up, but I think most codes actually get taken by people.
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What annoys me is when you post one or more legitimate keys and then get a load of "dupe" replies.
It wasn't a "dupe", you were too darn slow.
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I haven't seen that. People know what it means for a key to have already been used.
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I am positive that at least 95 of 100 "Dupe" posters do not intent to say that the key you posted was fake/already used by yourself. They're just telling people that that key is taken and there's no need to try it again (which hundreds of people probably would otherwise).
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i believe there are bots, if anything I hope they are bots. I would rather believe some automatic script picked up a key, then it being a real person picking up a key because at least the script has a reason for never saying thanks. out of the 2-10 key drops that happen on some days with about 20 keys in all only 3 of those keys get thanked for.
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One theory I had once was that there might be kids who don't have enough value in their Steam account to join the site that could be lurking the forum for key drops. The froum is also a good resource for finding about free games such as the XCOM EU thing through GMG or the upcoming Payday: The Heist freebie so maybe people read it who aren't even members.
I don't know if this happens in reality.
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oh.....valid point :o
never thought of forum lurkers outside of the members.....well it actually also raises the chance of bots, since any random scripter can make their own bot for this without having to make multiple qualified accounts on steamgifts.
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The "F5 giveaways" show us how 50 people hitting F5 can screw SG server up. I doubt there are entities doing the same thing all the time.
Do(of course they do) mods have statistics how many active users(log at least once a day) are here? And how many of them are online right now? Speaking of mods, they could actually get rid of so-called bots manually if it was a thing.
I "ninja'd" a few keys personally... So did hundreds of others. Proves nothing but at least we are not loosing the fight with machines.
But who knows?
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Or do something like this:
CQHJ2-YCJV?-G5R2T ? = S, X, R, Q, B
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The answer isn't putting out fake keys / dupes.
Real key
What you post
The exact same thing can be done with gift URLs, adding a specification of upper- or lower-case. Oh, and, remember to never use the same wording for any character, twice.
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When it comes to the codes people post online, are there people using bots to scrape them from the webpages or what? It seems weird to have a page with 10 keys posted with all of them used within 10 seconds every time about.
If so, one possible fix for this would be to put in the main section warning players who read it, but make sure you seed your results with your first 20 or so keys being duplicate or invalid as to force the bot into 30 minutes of not being able to enter keys before it even hits the real keys below it. And make sure to do this with some random number every post.
Or at the very least, ban the act of people from putting in keys directly into the threads, force them to be edited in some way as to be unreadable to the bots.
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