Isn't this just kind of the worst

Well, if you are a horrible person, I am horrible-er (er...), since my first instinct was to reply to your post... with a very... specific.... single.... word.... :D :D :D

Anyway, I was able to control my horrible instincts -- this time.... Cheers! ;D

(But, yeah, nearly certainly autojoiners, but possibly not all of them are autojoiners.)

Thanks for the advice everyone! I think I will start to use the blacklist. It feels like such a mean thing to do, but I suppose the best option to save myself from some spam. 😛

While expressing gratitude to the person giving away a game is just normal behavior of a decent person in my opinion, using autojoin scripts, being used by bot farms or by an individual, deserves at least a blacklist (in fact, I wouldn't mind a permaban).

One of my pet peeves is when people write "thanks for the opportunity"...

Like you're offering them a job or something!

If I can't comment something witty or helpful, I don't comment on giveaway entries at all, because I don't want to annoy people by spamming them.
Though I think a simple "Thumbs up" button on each giveaway would suffice as passive-aggressive gratitude and (hopefully) not bother anyone.

Gratitude can be so annoying... ;-)

Seriously, though, the current site guidelines specifically state (under the "Entering" section, not "Winning"):

We encourage users to write comments thanking the giveaway creator for their generosity, although this is not required.

Blacklisting someone for following the site guidelines hardly seems fair.

I consider bots to be "not my problem". I'm not wasting my time trying to distinguish between bots and someone copying and pasting their thanks. If cg really wanted to do more to detect bots, he would have already written the code.

Personally, I only give thanks when I receive a gift, and usually with the exact same text each time (though I always type it out manually as a mark of respect, even if the gifter can't tell!). On occasions that warrant it (or I otherwise just feel like it), I'll customise the text (e.g. I just thanked a gifter both in English and, hopefully, in their own language, since their Steam profile indicated their home country).

No, it's called common sense. And those are probably autojoin bots.

say thanks : get called a bot and blacklisted
don't say thanks : get called a bot and blacklisted

same old bs