Suggestion : not being able to enter GA if you still have a GA to redeem ?

What if the key you get doesn't work?
What if you don't get a key, but the other guy still marked it as sent?

You would be punished for something that isn't your fault.

You see the flaws in your suggestion?

This isn't a bad idea but whether or not a system like this should be implemented instead of, you know, targeting the big issue of autojoiners is a different thing entirely. I mean auto joiners would only lose some auto joining time (technically only lose out if there is enough of a delay they max out at 400P) every time they win a game (which isn't often if they are doing public only) so wouldn't impact the overall number of autojoiners per public giveaway. And there may be a lot of unintended consequences (and also time for implementation) for something that has not a lot of benefits. That's my $0.02.

Instead of punishing legit players for simple mistakes that don't hinder too much the autojoiners, there should be a way to check abnormal join rates. If someone is joining GAs 24/7 without showing signs of sleep or less than 1s delays then it should be a warning to report those accounts.
I think there's a team fortress raffle community called scrapTF that had this kind of problem and admins were really good at banning most autojoiners (They still plague the site, but they keep blocking scripts).

As for now, just stick to Invite-only, High-level or SGTools GAs to avoid bots.
This topic is not new and I'm not really active so surely there's been discussions where this has been talked throughout better than I did.

What if you win something and the gifter is on vacation, only returning five, six days after their giveaway has ended?! You wouldn't be able to enter anything, only because you didn't receive a key.
Or sometimes people do giveaways for games that are not released yet, and people wait months for their game. I had that once.
So it doesn't look like a good solution to me.

Excellent idea.

On the surface this is reasonable, but it becomes very problematic when the GA creator sends a non-working (or wrongly identified) key and the issue takes time to resolve. In these cases, the winner would be prevented from entering any GAs for an indeterminate period of time, which would be very annoying.

If clicking "Not Received" lets a bot keep joining giveaways until the bot owner returns home to activate their win, and then they just click Received, then this won't accomplish anything.

Also bots can autoactivate keys. They just don't because they don't have to. If we force them to add autoactivation to their scripts, they will.

That you thought about a solution and the solution itself is good.
But lext above show very well which result it would bring and in the end the real users would win nothing.

Besides the easy fact that cg could act against the autojoiners.

• Why ? autojoiners have a 3 strike rule, which means they can recieve multiple suspensions for it before it is a permanent one.
• Why cg don't activate 1x each, as example, 6 months the autojoiner detect script that he already used 7 years ago (for a few days) ? So the needed server power, bandwith, requests etc. aren't too high. That a constant check isn't possible is understandable.
• Why is the suspension time so low for autojoining ?
• Why is the thanks script, that is a part of the autojoiner program, allowed? It make it difficultier for the mods to catch the dumbest autjoiners that activate it and it spams + annoys the gifters (= real users!).
• Why ? very detailed autojoiner user reports aren't handled for 1 year+. Most of the ones that report them gave up because of this.
• Why ? are users with 300k entries not get a automatic check ? (Nearly?) all of them are, absolute easy to detect, autojoiners.
• Why are known autojoiners (if the tickets to them would be looked at) able to come back after 1 year of "perma suspension" ? And when they are able because they """only""" don't activated their wins 4 or 5x before the perma suspension, and the team discuss about letting that user back into sg when he activate all missing wins [that he traded or bought -most likely for a lower price years after the wins...-], why none check for user report tickets with that name? Or react when users claim that this user is a [known] autojoiner?

I see as reason only one thing.

Because in one go 40% of the "active users" would be suspended.

I get with each day more frustrated about the autojoiner situation and that cg invite them to cheat. From my point of view it is a active support of this behavior.