Is this even allowed? Should it be?

One of the very first giveaways I won was supposed to be a key for Night Forest, but then it turned out to actually be a key for Heaven Forest Nights, which is a shovelware game that has been given out several times for free before. I talked with the giveaway created and they realized their mistake. I didn't think too much about it, so I marked the key as invalid and moved on.

The report system is there if you believe something unfair is happening; in this case, I didn't feel wronged in any way and I was willing to give someone the benefit of the doubt. It's up to you if you want to use it and if how you use it is consistent with current rules.

As long as it's a polite request and not a demand, I see no issue with such messages.

It's interesting to see how asking for clarification and opinions on how this should be handled immediately gets people accusing each other of being assholes, and doubled the number of blacklists I'm on overnight.

Such a healthy, friendly community this has become.

I think i've read someone once explain that such precision was allowed for private/group giveaways but not public giveaways ?

Once when i tried to help some devs to translate their game, they rewarded us with some keys that they generated. But as there can be confusion because they sent some to a lot of different people, after hesitating i finally decided to set the giveaway as whitelist asking possibility to delete giveaway if there would be a problem and if devs would be unable to provide another key. The possibility that the key was incorrect was very small but not non-existent.
Yes i could have thrown it away in the orphan keys thread, but honestly it was for a beautiful game that i hoped to be played (i didn't know about the specific group for that). Some decided to resell them and i had decided to give some to friends and to another website and some here. But i had spent maybe 80h translating this game and orphan keys thread i prefer to use it for things that are less important because it's full of bots or people not really interested so it's just a loss.
In the end, there has been no problem because i trust all my whitelist people to be nice people and because the key was correct.

Another time, i won a whitelist giveaway and the key was wrong. So to lighten the load for the gifter, i just wrote him immediately that if he wanted he could just delete the giveaway using my message for support. And so he did it and all has been well. I consider that it's the intention that counts, the person had the kind intention to give something away, if it doesn't work out, why be a pain for this kind person ? And i was already very happy to have won even nothing among many candidates because it's already cool in itself when fate chooses us in a big draw !

And... "if you join this giveaway you must agree not to complain when I don't give you the game you won." is not the same that "I've got this old key and I don't know if it still works" I disagree here. Because the first sentence is very rude. The second one can be from a very kind person who would like to share something with a nice intention but is just unsure that the key still works.

This will be a little tangential, but I thought I should mention it. There's an informal custom on this site where a giveaway creator faced with a bad key might ask the winner for a deletion, but at the same time offer them a key of equal value that the winner might like to have as a kind of 'consolation prize'. Of course, that could and should never be a rule, but it is a nice way to handle things and demonstrates good faith on the part of the giver and makes the winner a little happier too.
Personally, I shy away from putting disclaimers in giveaways. Where rules are concerned, actions have consequences and I'd rather deal with them as they come, and not preemptively - doesn't feel right to me. If I have reason to believe that a key is bad, I'll just drop it inside another giveaway.

Meh