The term "legal" means concerning the law of a country so it doesn't quite apply to rules of a site etc.
Which EggShen could have explained in the first place.
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Law & Order FTW! It's the best crime show in my book.
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Had "legal" been some technical or obscure term I would have explained it. As you said the site rules are the relevant point here and in this case have no relation to legality. One area where there is an overlap that commonly causes issues is the concept of free speech. On a private site such as this (private in that membership is required as opposed to say imgur where anyone can post) you have no such right but it's still common for people to claim that moderation is infringing on that right. Freedom of speech relates to governmental restrictions not private ones.
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When you delete a giveaway you lose a slot, you start with 3 slots, so it will be an episodic thing, do it 3 times and he won't be able to create any more giveaways.
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The user OP was complaining about would have had over 100 giveaway slots though.
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deleting GA is not against the rules. It may have been a dick move, but nothing illegal.
If he decides to use it in the future for CV fraud on the other hand it may be considered rulebreaking, but this you don't know. Maybe he simply wanted to BL people who farmed high level using region locked GAs only.
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I think it's been mentioned somewhere before, but... SG is a scam. O_o
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Just report them. Maybe similar things will happen often enough with this person that they'll ban him in future because of inappropiate behaviour but don't hold your breath.
As far as the blacklisting goes, they can bl whoever they want.
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Deleting a giveaway isn't against the rules, but creating a fake or misleading giveaway is, regardless of the reason it was created.
Report the user, explaining fully what happened, so that there's a ticket on file if it happens again.
I personally find it disgusting that people choose to discriminate based on region on this site. In this day and age, we should be trying to get past that asinine bullshit, not encouraging it.
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I think it's possible that what zelghadis said in his last sentence might be correct.
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Nothing against SG ToS - you're allowed to blacklist whoever you want, at anytime you want, for no reason. You're also allowed to delete giveaway before it finishes. The only actual incident I remember is when somebody intentionally put lots of ads and referals in one popular giveaway to lure people and then decided to delete giveaway prior to finish to avoid sending win, but that can be considered no actual willing of making giveaway in first place, and that equals to fake giveaways, which is against rules.
Thing is, you can't easily tell which case is accident, and which case is not willing to deliver gift, unless you have strong argument such as guy stating it himself. There is literally nothing stopping that guy from stating that the key turned out to be e.g. invalid, so he deleted the giveaway, and blacklists have nothing to do with that.
TL;DR - Unless he does that on usual basis, you can't really do anything. Of course you can report it and let support deal with it, but they also won't suspend that user only because he deleted the giveaway, unless he's doing that all the time.
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Thanks for the detailed answer.
But if you make a GA and later blacklist all the entries, would it be a sign for a fake GA?
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also giveaway creator from another region, but intentionally changed country flag in steam profile to RU.
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Nope, blacklisting user after he entered doesn't change anything in terms of giveaway - he's eligible for win. Creator is also free to delete giveaway and re-do it if he wishes that blacklisted entry to be invalid. That's not a sign of fake giveaway.
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ITSaTRAP.gif
Well, he did nothing punishable, maybe you should bookmark his profile and check in a month if something fishy happens :p
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I don't approve but that's pretty smart, actually. =P
If he found a similar way to blacklist all botters instead of being low-key racist, he'd get my respect.
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How do you know? Maybe just you ^^
proceeded to blacklist everyone
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Because he is in russian groups, and they spread the link there. Later they realized together they were all blacklisted.
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Creating a giveaway without the intention of delivering the game is against the site rules. Report the giveaway if you have concrete evidence. The key word here is evidence, however. Blacklisting by itself does not prove anything - users can blacklist anyone for any reason. Deleting the giveaway which was created by accident is not against the rules, as well.
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Do you have a tools to look inside GA and compere entries to his blacklist? If all of them matched, so he's got no intention to send gift in a first place.
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This is not concrete evidence and won't suffice for the admins to take actions against said user. However, you can still make a user report, stating your suspicion. If the same thing happens again, done by the same user - for example for another region - it would no longer look like this was a one-time accident, but instead done with intent. Maybe in this case the moderators would treat this case differently.
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Of course it is evidence when it happened to everyone in that giveaway. Single blacklists can happen for all kind of reasons. Blacklisting all (or almost all) entries from one trap GA should be evidence enough. I mean what other kind of evidence could there possibly be, besides a confession of guilt?
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As i said, it is not concrete evidence. It's suspicious (that's probably why this thread exists) but it's not concrete evidence to justify any measures taken against that user.
At this point, yes, only "a confession of guilt" would be sufficient.
Why the user blacklisted everyone before they deleted the giveaway is unknown. Just because they blacklisted everbody doesn't mean their intention was to not deliver the giveaway initially.
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Even if every entry went into his blacklist, that still is not enough to warrant a suspension. Let me give a couple examples. Let's say, Alice creates a Bad Rats giveaway, Bob and Charlie enter the giveaway:
- Alice writes "This is Fallout 4" in the description. This is enough for us to delete the giveaway and issue a "Misleading giveaway" suspension.
- Bob leaves a comment: "Thank you for giving away Bad Rats, Alice." Alice replies to Bob: "Don't be stupid, I won't buy Bad Rats for anyone." This is enough for us to delete the giveaway and issue a "Fake giveaway" suspension.
- Alice posts on Facebook: "I've just created a fake Bad Rats giveaway on SG!" Again, enough to delete the giveaway and issue a "Fake giveaway" suspension.
- Alice gets upset for some reason, blacklists Bob and Charlie, and deletes the giveaway. This is not enough to prove malicious intent.
- Alice does the "blacklist and delete" move multiple times - this shows that it was not an accident and will warrant a suspension.
If the giveaway creator blacklisted you and deleted the giveaway, it might be a dick move, but I think you would not want to win games from someone like him anyway, so there's no loss here.
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Ну вам то, как модератору, не составит труда посмотреть происходит это на постоянной основе или это был единичный случай ;)
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Regionist or something? Technically all human are the same race, but different ethnicities, but the region itself is too big to classsify as one ethnicity :P I guess I'm overthinking this over the guy being a simple jerk
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i knew someone would say it's not racist because it's a country...
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This made me think of a way to prevent autojoiners.
Create a good gib, write down in description that you blacklist people who enter before GA reaches "x time remaining" and actually blacklist anyone who enters before that time. You get rid of accounts auto joining on your GAs and of a few people who don't bother reading your stuff you put effort in.
OR you create a giveaway with the description "this GA is for blacklisting autojoiners, it will be deleted in <time> and will be re-created to actually give away".
That would work SleepyCat wouldn't it?
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OR you create a giveaway with the description "this GA is for blacklisting autojoiners, it will be deleted in <time> and will be re-created to actually give away".
That will most certainly be treated as "Creating a giveaway without the intention of delivering the game" and would be against the siterules.
However something like this* was done by many users before with cheap game keys, that they then just delivered to whoever won the giveaway and then they went on to blacklist every entry.
But everybody who does this will run out of blacklistspots pretty quickly as only ~15% of the people read descriptions anyway.
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didn't think of the cheap game delivery and even though it's cheap a leecher is gonne get it probably :/
I meant like deleting the GA because it was "created by accident" since you intend to deliver the game anyway, just on the re-created GA. But the cheap GA method seems better :)
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Ha, no :D Recreating it and THEN delivering it in the next giveaway won't do the trick :) Especially when you already told everyone of your intention to not deliver for the first giveaway.
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you could avoid any trouble with rules and just make giveaways with $1 bundles, then deliver the game and blacklist everyone that fell into your trap.
most idiots using autojoin probably don't care which games they enter, they just leech to idle cards.
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Actually I do something like this. Sometimes I write "no bot-like thank messages" at description, then blacklist all who do that.
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If you create a honeypot giveaway and blacklist anyone who enters, but still deliver the game in the end, there's no rules violation here. If you make a giveaway and write "I will blacklist anyone who enters; you won't get the game!" - then this is fake giveaway and it might result in a suspension.
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Alright, I got it, thank you for pointing out the difference :)
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Most hostility related to Russians around here seems to be towards the low-level regifters and people who run away with keys to the nearest G2A store. (And, well, it would be hard to deny that Russia has an unhealthy overrepresentation in this segment on SG.) Targeting the highest-level user base with an obviously easy bait game seems like some unjustifiable childish hatred with no real reason though. (And I cannot even think of a reason of what beef would a Chinese guy have with Russians…)
Sadly it would be nigh impossible to find actual evidence that it was a trap with no intention of sending out the game. But this is really a new low for this site.
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For some unknown reason I got blacklisted by him :D, and I hadn't entered that ga
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Sup guys.
Long story short, one guy (don't gonna use finger pointing here) created public Mafia III GA for RU-CIS region and for 7+ lvl.
Then, he proceeded to blacklist everyone who enters, and after that he deleted GA because "accident".
Even changed country flag in steam profile to RU, I'm assuming, to lure more people in.
Is it legal activity? GA was not intended to carry on, it was a trap in the first place, to determinate and blacklist major part of active RU-CIS steamgifts users for, maybe, future frods with region locks?
What do admins think?
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