Disclaimer in a GA

I guess only politeness.

Part of Steamgift TOS:

If you enter a giveaway, and are randomly generated by the Website as a Winner, you understand that:
SteamGifts is not responsible or liable for providing the Gift, and it is the sole responsibility of the giveaway creator to send the Gift;
SteamGifts cannot guarantee the accuracy of giveaways, and does not warrant you will receive a Gift, or if you do receive a Gift, that it will contain the game represented by the giveaway;

it's just a way to deflect responsibility to the winner if the key is invalid.
a pretty dirty trick by "generous" users. 👍

WTF? Even talking about "forcing them to deliver" will make some GA disappear. In my opinion no "dirty trick" (WTF again?) but a really nice way to give out keys to someone who will maybe have use of it. I also gave away keys of which was unclear if activated or not. As this is the second time I read this question within a few days, these will be group-only in the future ;)

I don't really have a problem with this if the user is upfront about it. You know ahead of time that you're entering for a key that may be used already. I don't see a good reason to be rude about it if the key turns out to be useless. You can always just skip the giveaway if you don't like the gamble. And if you don't want to see that type of giveaways, blacklists are reciprocal now, so you can just blacklist them and never have your time wasted again.

As far as an official comment goes, though? I notice that a certain staff member makes a ton of giveaways with "I would appreciate it if you let me delete this if something goes wrong" type wording. Since they haven't banned themselves yet, I can only assume that they're fine with it.

If you post giveaways to the Website, you will be entirely responsible for providing an unused Steam redeemable gift or unused Steam redeemable key (gift or key, further known as "Gift") to a user ("Winner"), who is randomly generated by the Website for each gift represented by your giveaway.

Not expecting people to deliver what they say they're going to deliver not only defeats the purpose of the site, but it also creates more work for support dealing with deletion tickets. IMHO this sort of thing should not be encouraged. The more common it becomes, the more problems it's going to cause. This all started because it was allowed in whitelist giveaways. It's moved well beyond that now.

If I even suspect a key may be compromised, I won't make a giveaway for it, because I feel it's my responsibility to deliver the win. Others may be okay with disappointing their winners. I am not.

By reading this comment you agree to never give me "Not Recieved" ticks. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There's a topic in the forum for orphan keys, to use exactly when you're not sure a key works. If you want to gamble with your key for CV, you should be ready to accept the risk - when I enter I giveaway, I expect to receive something; ideally something I really want, so winning and then not receiving anything... well, it's sad.
Tha said, if I enter a giveaway with this kind of disclaimer, in the end I accept the possible deletion, because I don't like arguments and stuff.

No official statements.
For private ga to limited of selected people it is ok. At least they know they risk spending point for null GA, so they can decide not to enter it.
If you make a public GA or to promote your youtube channel it is not... people likely won't read and can legitely report fake GA.

https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/lar0i/is-it-really-ok-to-do-this

Thanks at all for sharing their opinion. In my case I won a invite only GA with such a disclaimer, the key was duplicate/already used and I agreed on deletion. But I agreed on every deletion so far.

Makes sense to throw the key in the Orphan Keys Drop Thread if there is a chance it may have been activated previously. That way there is no risk of the winner marking the GA as not received. It also doesn't hurt to create a spreadsheet to keep track your keys.

EDIT: In the case of keys that expire (like the HB freebies for example), there should be should be an exception to the rule I would think. Thoughts?

Since Yirg has not left a comment yet, i´ll just post a link for the Ninja Retreat group. It´s for creating GAs when you´re not sure if your key is still valid. Be aware of the group rules, in the OP of the linked thread.