"They get in trouble for mass inviting again"
If that were the cass then all giant groups on steam would be disabled. Because that's all they fucking do. lol
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One every couple of weeks perhaps. I don't keep random people on my friends list nor do I post very many places, so I don't get invited that often.
They don't have a button that says "Invite every Steam user" so they have to find you somehow.
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The ability to see people you have played with recently can be a double-edged sword. Nice to be able it identify that good player to friend, but it also lets giant groups join a bunch of games and suddenly have a full list of "fresh meat" to invite
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They can also write a script that scans each user's friends list they have the SteamID64 for in their database. Then it will loop through those people's friends as well and just keep going until it doesn't find any new SteamID64s.
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If I don't keep random friends and have very few people on my list, would that not reduce the amount of times I've been scraped from someone else's friend list?
It's not that complicated of a concept, fewer amount of backlinks results in less invites.
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Wrong. Usually, it will be a bot running a script that scrapes a user's friends list, and can even be programmed to scrape a random friend of their's friends list, then mass spams invites to all of those users. Or, it keeps spamming 1 users' friends list, then picks one of their friends' friends lists (if the user has more than a set number of friends, say, 50), and so on, and so on, until it is manually stopped.
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You're telling me that my personal experience is wrong?
Let's try to use a bit of logic here. If I don't keep random friends and have very few people on my list, would that not reduce the amount of times I've been scraped from someone else's friend list?
It's not that complicated of a concept, fewer amount of backlinks results in less invites.
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"They don't have a button that says "Invite every Steam user" so they have to find you somehow."
I was just saying that assertion / assumption sounded a bit off as like I said, it's all more of a random thing. As I said, these bots can be told to go on ad nauseum, and heck they can also get lists of users to spam from groups, so having been part of a random group at some point can also be a factor. Sure, if you have fewer friends on your friendslist, you have less of a "risk" of being part of such a scrape, but think further - if you have even 1 friend on your list that has maxed out his friends at 250 (or 300 with a linked FB account), that ups the chance you'll be also handed invites exponentially. Again, it's all a bit of a luck of the draw kinda thing.
These are the same kind of scripts that can make people able to cycle their nickname really fast, assuming the nicknames of all users on your friends list. I had a CS buddy who at some point did this during gameplay; he had the names of all my friends, one by one, cycling through em - hella annoying.
On topic: ain't that about a bitch? Hookups gone. Pfff right?
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http://store.steampowered.com/online_conduct/
You will not use any material or information, including images or photographs, via Steam in any manner that infringes any copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, or other proprietary right of any party.
They could be unaware that Tony is posting the deals on CAG and think it's an insider from Amazon leaking information, otherwise referral links are not allowed on the Steam forums so they may be extending that to the groups as well.
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We are well aware that those deals we posted in advance are from Tony on CAG. Several times he told members to post deals everywhere so that people can see them. I follow the thread daily and Tony was always happy when someone posted the deals either on slickdeals, Neogaf or their twitter account. He even asked people to post deals on Neogaf and Slickdeals for him. btw i am an admin in the group.
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I believe the problem is that they advertised several paypal traders.
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If only they actually cared about that, there are people running actual shops with Steam keys and gifts now. Would be pretty hypocritical of Steam to ban this group yet ignore the countless others.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/zerial2/
http://zerial.net/technote7/board.php?board=tnshopmain&command=shop
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Something tells me valve does not have has many korean speaking staff checking for stuff like that, they can easily translate pages of course but they can just as easily overlook things like that.
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zerial.net, this site selling Steam games for Koreans who hasn't credit card. And Valve already knew about some sites like this.
Many Korean students and children has no credit card or paypal account. So they using unofficial site like there.
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If you only understand polish ;) http://gry.you2.pl/
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I was wondering the same thing... to bad I liked finding out about all the discounts
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He complained to Valve about the 'imposter' group and then had his group disabled because of it.
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Over the past few days I had been contemplating creating a website that did essentially the same thing, other than the 'Hookups' to the Steam keys from different regions. This has given me a lot more incentive to do so.
Personally I'd prefer a website as you don't have to be logged into Steam to view it or maintain it. I would still have a Steam group to post announcements so no one misses any deals, I just wouldn't rely on Steam and end up in the same position as Hookups is now.
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Could it not have been them promoting stealing the keys Adobe posted for owners of one of the Photoshop programs? I remember reading an announcement claiming those were a giveaway, but it was actually for registered owners due to Adobe taking the license servers down.
I left the group upon seeing that though, so I could be wrong.
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links to all steam deals around the net. and some non steam deals.
it let me see all deals from sites on 1 page instead of jumping from site to site.
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at least i still have the http://isthereanydeal.com/ for leading me on sales...
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Hey whats going on guys, I am xamon on of the admins of the group.
Valve has disabled the group right now and the only thing they told us is that we violated Steam online conduct rule. They did not say anything about which rule or how we violated the rule. We are currently waiting on them to answer our ticket.
Please be patient while we sort this out. In the meantime check my blog on my profile. I will be posting the same deals there as usual until the situation gets cleared.
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While I've never been a member of Hookups, I was about to join their group having heard about them recently.
In the meantime, another group I'm with, Trader's Guild posts recent deals for Steam games from various sites like Amazon, GMG etc, which naturally are decent for trading. Found the Sleeping Dog's misprice from there :)
It's updated fairly regularly with announcements too, so it should be good as a go-between until the group is resurrected.
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Hookups is a great group, his admin OldBoy is a nice person, I bought SKYRIM for 10 bucks from someone via paypal, it was insane!, also my cousin bought 2 borderlands 2 at 15 bucks each one; so I love that group, I hope theyll be back soon, that guy put a lot of effort in that and he doesnt deserve this. Best Deal Group EVER.
I hope the admin of that group to read this so he can actually say what happened and the future of the group.
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"I hope theyll be back soon, that guy put a lot of effort in that and he doesnt deserve this."
What. Do you understand, that they are doing this for money? Referrer links etc.
Somebody will say it's not true - let them delete refs and we will see, how long this group would survive. Also, as user above said - "The admin of the group has been suspended a few times for it already."
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Hey LiquidGykill, im xamon an admin on Hookups.Valve has disabled the group right now and the only thing they told us is that we violated Steam online conduct rule. They did not say anything about which rule or how we violated the rule. We are currently waiting on them to answer our ticket.
@Wojtek858 I have never received a penny from any of our post. We do this because we love finding deals and sharing with others. This is the same for me and the other admins.
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As other user said: Spaming invites to "help" people? If that's true, that's just money farming.
Why you didn't receive a penny? Other admin is taking all the money for himself or what?
Notifying people isn't bad, but when it comes to such abuse, there is no excuse before ban.
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@wojtek858 Everyone use referral links, its always a posibility in every deal group, I knew it, but that doesnt make it less valuable, I GOT SKYRIM FOR 10 FREAKING BUCKS, I dont care if he gains a dime for that or not, 10 FREAKING BUCKS!!!! FOR F*CK SAKE, I want that group back.
Again I dont care if he gains or not something, I think its an effort to find those deals, especially the ones with insane prices for worldwide unlocked games.
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I am not against referrer links, they are rather good, because collecting deals will be worth spending time, but you said they didn't deserve this, while other users reported they were spaming invites just to earn more money and couple bans didn't stop admin. That's totally well deserved ban if it's true.
Also, there are dozens of deal sites, starting from subreddits, forums, etc. where you can look for deals.
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I know those sites, they dont allow to post sellers with low quantities, no matter how good it seems to be the price.
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Hookups has been temporarily disabled due to an investigation into breach of conduct rules. I dont think their methods are not the problem unless Steam considers it advetising, but then people have the option of joining or not. Unfortunately I think they have been suspended because of the way they dealt with a copy-cat group stealing links. While understandably frustrating, they seems to have violated some of the following it there attempt to stop it.
Defame, abuse, harass, stalk, threaten or otherwise violate the legal rights (such as rights of privacy and publicity) of others.
Restrict or inhibit any other user from using and enjoying Steam services, software or other content.
Harvest or otherwise collect information about others, including e-mail addresses.
Create a false identity for the purpose of misleading others.
Note thought that it is under investigation, not definately disabled. Mitigating circumstances may be a factor plus the group as a whole can not be held accountable. In anycase regardless of the outcome, I am sure Hookups will be back even if it has to have a new name.
In the meantime, I am sure they would welcome everyone's support, maybe Steam will take notice if enough people stand up for them.
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Thinking about that post encouraging us to make a case against that "copycat" group could be the real problem, it could be misinterpreted like using a group to "spread hate" and that could give them a (valid?) reason... shit that sucks. THinking about it, that could be the only valid reason to actually make acase against hookups, imagine how many people actually made a complaint against that group because that post. It was posted by the admin tho. Damn...
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That is the problem I think that Steam has issues with. The thing is there is more than 1 admin plus numerous moderators not to mention over 12k members. Not that I am saying shit should come done on one guy, considering what was happening, but taking out the whole group is a bit extreme.
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This group has been administratively disabled.
They get in trouble for mass inviting again or does that message mean the admin of the group disabled it?
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