Suggestion - Change Guidelines concerning private profiles

If you don't like private profiles, you could just make giveaways to closed groups that enforce always Public profiles... There are a lot of those, and with a lot of members, so you wouldn't be restricting too much if that is a concern with group giveaways.

People have many reasons to keep their profiles private. It can be for nefarious reasons, but a lot of the time it's just for privacy. I personally prefer keeping my game details Friends Only, and either temporarily add either temporarily set my profile Public if someone wants to check (eg. giveaway maker, group admin).

I however understand why people would be annoyed by the extra steps and/or be suspicious, hence my first paragraph. But, just because a winner has a Public profile doesn't mean you'll have to hunt the winner for 7 days and provide multiple evidence to Support to get a reroll... Just saying, you know.

Recently I've got permanently banned for hiding some games I've won @ SG many years ago (I'm here for around ~12 years)
(So not entire profile, but only some cheap games I've won here were hidden)

I've instantly contacted support and told me that I can get my account back only after activating all wins & resync.

The reason for ban was not stated in rules as "non-allowed action"- however they justified penalty as "currently we can't be sure that you've activated those wins". And they totally ignored the fact that those were activated in period of 2012-2019 (I hid multiple games) and I had thousands of successful synchronizations in a row.

I guess this needs to be stated in rules somehow as well.

I am torn on this.

There have been a couple of cases in the past that added a lot of work and time to some SG related task, due to a private profile. But there are good reasons to keep your profile private, that might impact your offline life. Thinking about this, makes me think, that if something on your Steam profile might have a major negative impact on your RL life, even setting your profile to public once a week for SG sync is kind of a great risk.

Making a private profile a reason for a re-roll might be something to test for a while. It might lead to a (major?) increase in support tickets, first by GA creators, then by disappointed winners.

I can understand, cause I also hate it when I face private profile and can't check if user has activated all wins. But enforcing it wpould piss a lot of people. I can't really imagine stuff that sensitive that it has to be hidden. So for me it is more like a red flag - can be friended multiaaccounts, hiddenn wins or completely fake steam profile.

If the Steam Profile is set to Private (or there is reasonable suspicion that parts of the library are hidden), the giveaway creator is allowed to re-roll for a new winner. No questions asked.

That would go against SG's previous point that people aren't required to have their profiles be public.
A only proposal that would work is having the requirement that profiles always be set to public (if users wish to win games).
Only IF that is a requirement, or that clause be put into place, and only then, I believe your proposal would be considered reasonable and valid/inarguable. You can't "compromise" to enforce a rule for gifters, while there is a statement in place that doesn't enforce a rule for users/winners. But as others, and even you yourself, have said, there are legit reasons for why some choose a private profile.

That you need to read the rules AND the FAQ to know all rules is bullshit.
But it is in this status since years, so better not expect that something changes.

If a winner have a privat profile, and i don't know him very good, i write a reroll ticket. Because the mods can check private profiles too.
Not my job to hunt the winner that he make his profil public.
Not my problem that cg don't offer the support members and us a better way.
If the mods aren't happy about the extra work, they need to talk with cg about it. They can, maybe, do there more as normal members.

Around 20 - 30% of the winners with private profiles get then suspended for unactivated wins.
So i would say a lot use the private profile to hide that they don't activate (some) wins.

i dont think this is the way to go, though i understand where youre coming from.
I'd suggest ... if the gifter cant check the profile of a winner due to it being private, the gifter can request on one of their GAs for their profile to be set to public so they can check. if the winner doesnt react within a week or denies the request, then the gifter can re-roll.
i know you would like to make it completely hassle-free for gifters, but as long as SG allows for private profiles, i'd say this suggestion is too extreme.

Lord, I'm just struggling with this issue
In my case it's mostly related to the fact that I've given away a bundle and Steamgifts thanks to Steam API can't handle recognizing ownership of packages and DLCs. So in those cases you have to manually check your winner!

TL;DR version To quote AiKirika above: "i dont think this is the way to go, though i understand where youre coming from.".
Also, read the last paragraph below.

If the Steam Profile is set to Private (or there is reasonable suspicion that parts of the library are hidden), the giveaway creator is allowed to re-roll for a new winner. No questions asked.

This way, people can still have their private profiles in exchange for a reasonable risk of getting a win re-rolled. Again, it is unreasonable to expect the people making the site work, jumping through additional loops.

This logic only works if this is a hole in security, or an excessive effort.

Since there's plenty of ways to spoof ownership already- the only semi-secure way of giving a key is to give it through Steam, get confirmation of activation, and then imnmediately activate it yourself, and even then that only stops resale not activating on a secondary account- there's no benefit to security for having constant access to someone's library (especially since you'd need to jump through hoops for DLC content anyway, due to the limitations of Steam's API). As such, we can't say this improves reliability of avoiding exploitation in any way.

As far as excessive effort, there's already requirements for contacting the user (admittedly, a bit curtailed recently) and of a seven day grace period. One could argue that if it exceeds the seven day margin it's already covered by that margin's exclusion (ie, you'll get a reroll either way, since it's past seven days), while if it's within that margin you have plenty of time to check the winner or get staff to check them for you (which, yes, they can do, so long as it's not for DLCs). As such, we can say there's no excessive effort being required by the existing rule.


While I'm firmly in favor of a gifter-fixated mentality for what the rules should be favoring, you're neither establishing a concrete issue (especially as the rule of the site is that any special circumstances should be constrained to scripts and groups when possible, and if it can be constrained to those, then it's fine to just leave them at that, as that best lets people use the site in whichever way they're most comfortable with; meaning that your perspective directly conflicts with the core design mentality of the site to date) nor offering a meaningful solution (favoring one side would require the other side to have an unfair advantage to begin with, but private profile users are already required to provide access to their profile, or risk losing access to the site or their won giveaways. Unless one can establish that the implementation of privacy itself is wrong or that there's an actual additional stress caused by the use of privacy, then a solution'd need to improve circumstances without unfairly disadvantaging one side).


In short, this thread is more "I don't like this, I want it changed" than it is "This is a real issue, and here's how to fix it". I mean, I'm in favor of the change- in fact, I'm in favor of any change that lets me decide who does and doesn't get my games- but there's no reasonable justification in this thread for the change, nor even an explanation as to why groups (or SGT, etc) can't be used to cover this matter, just as they cover all other existing matters- including ones far more exploitative and frustrating and inherently problematic and legitimately concerning than what this topic covers.

It'd honestly be rather odd if you're more concerned about a lack-of-additional-effort bit of privacy finangling than checking through users for rule violations, massively one sided (eg, 2000:0) win ratios, absurd CV exploitation (there's quite a few users who made it all the way to level 10 just by spamming trashware or content they exploitated from developers under the guise of advertising for them, despite not doing such, and indeed acting so poorly themself that it even turned users off some games), toxic bigotry and harassment and stalking and bullying and so forth [officially, the only thing the site punishes is direct threats, though as an exception it is worth noting that you are allowed to freely reroll on a user if their behavior during the giveaway gifting process is harassing], and so many other major issues that groups succesfully cover.


Well, again, you really need to establish a good justification or foundation for it. I'm in favor of the change, but I just can't see any rational way to justify it, without making a broader change to some other policy (eg, establishing other restrictions in site usage- which, I mean, heavily in favor of that, if it restricts toxic and abusive users- or allowing other justifications for not delivering games based on personal preferences alone) or by establishing some reason why it's an unnecessary stress, despite the fact that it's currently fully covered by staff involvement and the seven day grace period.

Well, if staff isn't active enough to respond within seven days, you could probably use that, but all that'd do is push for cg to add more staff members as a response. ...actually, yes, please push that. >.>

But, anyway, here's one final, really notable consideration that really highlights the conceptual problem within this thread:
You need to put in a a reroll ticket to check private profiles anyway, the same thing you'd be putting in ANYWAY even if you could reroll on them by justification of private profile. So you're literally not putting in any additional work, in present circumstances, to begin with. :/
Thus, if you wanted to actually change something, you'd need to ban private profile users from entering entirely, or you'll just get the same outcome with or without the proposed change.

The site makes them un-private weekly right? That's what the faq implies.