Blacklists, sgtools, lots of demands, oh my!

Each post had a limited size. So posting reserved in first comment. Makes sure additionel info is right after opening post when you run out of space

to reserve the post for for sometimes usefull Replys

i don't know, it seems it's the new meme on sg.
i rarely see anything useful posted after X time on this reserved replies.

I only did that once on a puzzle to bump the thread every few hours by replying to it. I think that was the original purpose of "reserved".

I forgot to do it in my current event but I sometimes reserve the first comment for keydrops or information I want prominantly displayed without cluttering the original post because many people skip reading if they see a wall of text.

I didn't tell that one person that I added for specific reasons, though I tried communicate with him/her and him (statistically most likely) wasn't interested in responding, even though he was online. For a pretty long time. I don't think I would go to someone and just be like: "you're on my blacklist, buddy", since I really don't feel like I'm using this too much. I don't write people that they're on my "whitelist" too, yet every single person that won my giveaway or that made a giveaway and I've won, who was friendly and didn't make any issues is on my whitelist.

Bans obviously aren't enough or people wouldn't be taking the time to develop alternatives. Blacklist aren't new, we had them in the past there just generally easier to use now.

IMO the admin bans are too short to really be punitive...so yeah, not enough.

can ppl tell when you blacklist?

If we had a working support who actually deals with tickets while they are hot I'd say you're having a point here. But we do not have this kind of support sadly. So using the tools of exclusion is an option to protect oneself from rulebreakers.
I agree with you tho that a working support would be the better solution.

and why would they. the contributor is the one paying his own money for the game he gives away. Who are you to tell him who he should and should not give it to, who he should and should not blacklist etc? Do you think that when you tell contributor "no, you cannot blacklist ppl A, B, C and D, you gotta send them games, give them chance to win your games - they will suddenly happily send their games to these people they clearly don't want to have anything to do with? No - more likely as they are forced to send games to such ppl they will quit giving altogether.

if someone comes and calls me an idiot or worse i can't report them, but i can blacklist that user.

besides, even if i could report them, i wouldn't want to have any kind of contact with that person, so blacklists are very handy. :3

If i buy from steam now i only got restricted gifts. :D. So...im so GG in that way...The better of the best gifts i did was because i sell knifes of cs:go :p.

"Trying to interact with people socially is hard!", you're saying? :P

Well, not sure anyone'd really argue that sentiment.

Learn to let go and focus on the people that you're able to get along with.
If you're unsatisfied with your circumstances, improve yourself as a person.
If doing that still leads to dominant negativity from those around you, find a new location that's more suitable for your mindset.

Approaching positive social interaction never struck me as being all that complicated. :)

Really, don't stress over what other people think, unless it directly affects you [which blacklisting is not, since it is not a present factor in your standard interactions].
It's arguably not even something you've a right to do :X

The "important things" are not happening on this website.

Sometimes it just seems like people are more interested in the miniscule power they can hold on some random internet site, than actually focusing on the important things.

They want to focus on the important things so they don't want some random person to ruin their day so blacklist it is.

The site was created as a venue to create giveaways for free and that is true, you don't pay for anything to enter any giveaway. Creators have the option to limit the entry to their giveaway though. People are mad about it? I don't get why. They're not paying for anything but entering and using the site but the giveaway creators are. They've just decided on who the ones they want their giveaways to go to. Even government handouts has some qualifications to qualify for. Hell, if you're going to argue for charity, even charitable institutions have qualifications they consider.

People that usually hold the same opinion "people are more interested in the miniscule power" as you, not saying you, are mad that they can't get access to great giveaways because they don't qualify. "OMG I CAN'T BUY A BUGATTI BECAUSE I DON'T HAVE THE MEANS? THIS INJUSTICE!! THE RICH ARE HOLDING US HOSTAGE. FREE BUGATTIS FOR EVERYONE." It sounds absurd doesn't it? Because it is. People aren't entitled to anything since they're not paying for anything. People can demand from the government because they pay taxes. What do the people here pay that they can demand from giveaway creators?

If it was an issue and went against the sites purpose that badly it wouldn't have be implemented in the first place. Some might claim it was implemented because users wanted it but a donation option has been repeatedly requested and refused so that doesn't really hold up.

Site is running so that people can create giveaways. How, what, when, to whom and the rest of the little details are up to the creator.

Trade for it and activate. It was bundled multiple time, should cost you peanuts.

You are not excluded for one mistake. You are for being in violation of the rule. It's like paying fine for parking on the emergency exit doesn't mean it's now ok to keep the car parked there.

No, setting level higher only filters out ppl that give most problems: non-activations, not marking received, invalid e-mails, blocking friend requests, not to mention lack of manners.

You can report someone for non activation/ multiple wins but if they've already served the suspension support favors them. That's why external tools are needed.

If you have a non activated win and you honestly want to fix it there's no reason you can't do so.

Restricting the giveaways to higher levels doesn't really work. I did a level 3 giveaway recently and the guy got permanently banned because he didn't activate 16 of his 19 wins and he won the same game twice. I am only level 4, I don't want to have to create giveaways above my level.

Also, I don't want to have to restrict the giveaways to higher levels. I like the idea of being able to create giveaways for the lower levels while being able to weed out the people that have like 80 wins and 3 or 4 giveaways.

I had won a game twice, both ended about the same time, and I requested a reroll on the second. sgtools shows me as having no multiple wins now.

but people who have gotten multiple wins, and asked for reroll on the extra win, can still be seen as multiple wins on sgtools

You only get multiple wins when you mark as received. If you didn't get it and marked anyway, it's an infraction against you and possibly the GA creator.

Only a small minority of my Level 0 giveaways are limited to Level 0. The idea behind this is to reward specific group of users who wouldn't otherwise get very good odds at winning - users who bother to read (a tiny minority unfortunately), but don't have the means to give.

If you're aware of any bug with SGTools, you should report it. Knsys is very responsive to reports and usually fixes things very quickly.

People who have unactivated wins should buy or trade for these games, even if they have zero interest in them and even if the game is a dead MMO. The reason is that not doing so punishes giveaway creators and Support. You won about 20 games since your infraction. That means potentially 20 times that good contributors had to ask for a new winner, and 20 times Support had to handle their request. Have some respect to the people you won games from.

One always has a choice on SG if one doesn't want a game or doesn't like a game because of any reason the best thing to do then is to not enter that giveaway. And as Yirg said rule breakers do have the possibility and the choice, if they want it, for redemption by buying the game and activating it on said account and being in good stead again.

People on Steam that have a VAC, Game or trade ban don't have that possibility or choice. My point is for the worst of infractions on Steam there is no redemption possible but for the worst of infractions on SG there's redemption possible for those that choose so.

But if you couldn't play the game, then why did you enter for it in the first place. I don't really understand?

then it's his choice to do so. Honestly - if I was a gay or felt offended bu him I wouldn't like to have anything in common with this guy, yet alone try winning something from him.

You can exclude all the gays you want but it's unenforceable. If a gay wins he has to give the game or get a not received. That's all there is too it.

Blacklisting gay people = bigotry and homophobia.
Blacklisting bigots and homophobes = not wanting a dick to win.

there. even the show name matches the thread.

View attached image.

but people are not excluding everyone from everything. People are excluding small portion of people from small portion of avaiable overall activity. If your classmate said "hey, I don't like you, you cannot come to my bday party" would you go to principal demanding that he forces the guy to invite you? I guess not. Does this guy not inviting you to his party means you can no longer go to school and socialize with other kids? no.

But is it what we want in the community?
I want the individual, non-injurious outlooks of the community to be respected and not continuously whined or complained about.

Blacklisting is an action specifically to prevent someone from something. How is it not a penalty?
Your entitlement is pretty exceptional.

But is it what we want in the community?

the community i would like is an utopia where no one breaks rules and everyone is polite and nice to each other. :3
since people are greedy and some views are incompatible, the only way to make it bearable is to exclude individuals.

if being blacklisted is a penalty because someone can't enter a ga, then whitelists and groups are even worse since they allow a small portion of the user base to enter:

• 1000-user blacklist: 1000 users can't enter (from ~800k registered)
• 1000 whitelist: ONLY 1000 can enter

the only reason people keep whining about blacklists is because it feels like a personal attack.
id we had no blacklist, people would complain about whitelists and groups.
if we had no wl/group, people would complain about lvs.
etc.

each time people can't leech a ga, they will find a way to complain.

just to be clear, it might look like i'm attacking you but i'm just commenting on what you said, so don't take it personal :3

Community has been long made of sub-communities like puzzle makers, discussion giveaways, groups and such. If people like to improve certain part, they are free to do so. Instead of demanding others to change their behavior, why not lead by example? Valisorie did so when she wanted people to create more high level giveaways. Positive actions are likely to work better than negative oriented discussion. These topics keep popping up time after time and I consider it unlikely that they will change people's behavior.

there's no discussion about blacklists, only drama :3

To both of you: But isn't that strange behaviour none the less?
If the giveaway is public, blacklisting people would have very little consequence on win chance. But I guess it's personal preference.

Ha, when I encountered my first "you've been blacklisted" restriction today, I thought that might be the case (since I'm generally a well-behaved and magnanimous bunny, aside from the psychotic episodes).

But, turns out I'd never won anything from that user. So, I decided to justify my exclusion by being a dick and blacklisting that user back, pointless as it is...

It would be nice if I could have made an annotation to my (tiny) blacklist to note that I was just doing it out of spite, so I could review it when I came to my senses and put it right again (I'm not organised enough to keep a text file with this info without losing it).

Point is, the whole exclusion thing is basically just people wanting to scratch their own itch, all very normal, and there's room for different folks doing things their own way within the framework of this marvellous community.

I hear of folks being unhappy with leechers, but my experience has been fairly positive; all of my giveaways (even though they're mostly bundle leftovers - I acknowledge things may get testier with higher value or more popular giveaways...) are unrestricted quickies, yet I've hardly ever had problems with level zeros forgetting to mark as received, or people re-gifting and claiming not received (in fact almost everyone is very quick to mark as received), and the couple of times it's happened it's just taken a little effort to sort it out, either with a polite reminder or via the support folks.

Maybe the sky isn't falling just yet...

Hmm, that sort of makes sense. I am on steamgifts very, very often though, and literally as soon as space cat popped up I couldn't view the GA. I like to thank the people who I win from, and now that SG lets you put keys on the win page, I've found the best way to thank them for the game is just the GA itself, when they don't add you on steam etc. Ah well, like I said I'm not going to let it get to me.

I'm the first to admit that it sometimes feels like things are getting out of hand. But I'm not sure if that is actually the case. I've spotted at least one person in this thread complaining about being blacklisted repeatedly for a certain thing that seems quite minor when I know I have them blacklisted for a thing that is far worse (and I'm assuming that is what other people have them blacklisted for also). And I've seen someone else complaining about people blacklisting people for 'just anything' who has heavily criticised me for that - even though I felt unable to defend myself because of the rules on 'calling out' (I didn't feel I could mention the trade scamming without getting suspended).

Although I do know for a fact that at least a few people are blacklisting folks for spurious reasons, are things really getting out of hand or is a lot of the blacklist drama simply extremely disingenuous? It is easy to for someone to say they have been blacklisted for no reason and the sites rules defend them even if they have scammed a hundred people out of a GTA V gift and a dozen TF2 keys. That would be my first point of discussion.

The point of a public giveaway should be that anyone can join which would be lovely and is how I would like to do things. But my practical experience was pretty bad (up to and including people complaining that they didn't want games they had won because they were 'shit'). So I moved to trains in discussions which initially worked a lot better as people at least had to be paying attention to enter giveaways - but that just led to blacklist drama which included people wading in on behalf of the blacklisted without even knowing the whole story...

I'm not defending exclusion - I'm just saying that there are two sides to the coin, and people shouldn't consider the problem of exclusion without considering the reasons for exclusion. If people are 'going ballistic' with requirements for giveaways then there may well be reasons for that. And personally I know I'd like to blacklist a lot less people and have them clearly see why I don't want them to enter a giveaway via an automated system than the inefficiency of having a dozen people add me on Steam to ask me why and then call me and my mother rude words.

its a cat !

but suspicion/fear of what? That not all GAs are avaiable to everyone? Like I said - it's always been like that, but there is NOTHING BAD with that. People buy games to make GAs for different reasons - if there were no reasons for them they could as well stop buying and gifting altogether.

Correction: custom rules had to be posted on description to be valid reason for reroll (and BL was a custom rule). I could however silently blacklist anybody for anything and never tell what the reason was.

actually you could not directly said why someone got BLed - even on your BL which you were keeping on pastebin or google docs or wherever - it was considered calling out. And you could BL for any reason same as you can now. But yeah - less people used it, because it was pain in the arse to do ;p Using your BlackList required not only approvakl from support but tghen rerolling (aka waiting smetimes days for ticket reply) each time someone BLed won. A lot of ppl were not using BLs because it was taking a lot of time to use.

As for WL usage - I wouldn't be soi sure - I was getting links to private GAs almost every day or everry two days. Now I see new WL GA every day so I don't see a big difference.

Old system had it's....perks....

But that sounds like specific people for specific reasons. Not just arbitrarily blacklisting people or setting up a plethora of requirements. I get that point. And if it's just a few people being awful, then I get it. That is not the issue I describe in the OP though.

I complety agree. I even wouldn't reply to those "ask to be whitelisted" if you're interested in the game I'm currently giving away in a WL-GA threads because it would feel like begging to me. If I didn't have contact with somebody and thus they had no opportunity to see my inherent awesomeness ;) (some might even have had the opportunity but disagree anyway) I don't have to be on their whitelist. Maybe I get to know them later, maybe I don't. My backlog is big enough as it is so I don't need to participate in every single GA.

I used to blacklist people for giving away free games from promotions because I don't appreciate people trying to cheat CV but I realized that's a fight I'm not going to win because there are just too many of them and most of them will never be able to enter any of my nicer GAs anyway because they don't contribute to this site unless it was something they got for free. After I decided blacklisting all those people isn't worth my time I figured it would be unfair to punish previous offenders while all the future ones go unpunished and unblacklisted everybody who was on my BL for that reason.

I also realized I had one user on my Blacklist who started out by giving away 3 copies of a free game but has since then given over 1000 legit gifts in less than a year. So I thought if some people actutally CAN change (and if it's just 1 in 100) the others might deserve the benefit of the doubt as well.

More reading especially concerning entitled people like the person has consistently proven to be in threads like this.

I doubt that's a real term, I've just tried to translate how this situation jokingly called in Russian language :) You know, like when you have some business in some building, but there's sitting a porter, who is jumping out of his pants trying to reject you, and utterly enjoying his power.

That's it. The seduction of power.