Your links have changed this from an SG Community event to a Steam Group plug.
Moved to "Group Recruitment" sub-thread.
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Honestly, this doesn't make much sense. The group helps to organize donations for the event and that's it, nobody has to consider joining the group otherwise.
Or in other words: The group only exists to improve the event. The event doesn't exist to lure people into a group, as your interpretation suggests. Imho you should reconsider your decision.
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When a user includes two links to his group and one to their Discord, he is, in effect, promoting his group. Users are allowed to do that in the Steam Group Recruitment sub-forum and/or giveaway descriptions. They are not allowed to do that in the general forum. You have been around long enough to know our policy regarding advertising (i.e. "advertising" is not generally permitted except as specified).
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I have removed the Discord invite link to satisfy your request/need. Hope you are satisfied now. I also don't understand how including two links to our group and the other to our Discord is promoting or advertising but ok, I don't want to argue with a mod.
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As per the Guidelines, section 4, line 3:
Group Recruitment
- In this category you are allowed to promote your Steam group, corresponding group giveaways and events, and relevant products or services (e.g. a website with group information or statistics). One of the primary aspects of your group needs to be SteamGifts or gifting using our platform.
(A group's Discord is considered a "service.")
Seeing as how the above describes your post, I moved the post to the appropriate sub-forum. If you want a post to be appropriate for the General forum, do not use it to promote your webpage/group. We have sub-fora set up for promotional purposes.
Moving the thread back to Group Recruitment until such time as it no longer promotes your group.
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Deleted the link. But please just keep what Golwar said in mind:
Honestly, this doesn't make much sense. The group helps to organize donations for the event and that's it, nobody has to consider joining the group otherwise.
Or in other words: The group only exists to improve the event. The event doesn't exist to lure people into a group, as your interpretation suggests. Imho you should reconsider your decision.
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The group only exists to improve the event. The event doesn't exist to lure people into a group, as your interpretation suggests.
If they are not needed, why are you so reluctant to leave them out of your post? Not only have you put up a fight to keep them in, you have also managed to leave a link after all of your editing.
Stay safe,
The Lonely Quarantine Days giveaway group, written by ABloodsteel
I gave you a choice of leaving everything as-is and having the post be in the Group sub-forum, or taking the links out and having the post in the General forum. Your response has been to choose neither of those options. That seems counter-productive to me, especially as the Guidelines are clear and compliance should be both simple and painless.
If you decide to make the post fit for the General forum, notify me and I will put it there. Switching it back to General before you have adapted it for General only serves to aggravate me as you are countermanding my administrative action. Do not do that.
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Hi, just a clarifying question please, as per guidelines:
"Our forum allows you to create discussions for engaging in conversation with our community. In these discussions you are able to promote your SteamGifts giveaways, but only when there is a greater reason for the discussion"
Would a series of GA's directly related to an ongoing global pandemic not directly count as a "greater reason" as opposed to the category specific element emphasised for the sub groups.
Furthermore for group recruitment to take place there needs to be a specific call to action to join the group; hence the term recruitment, which does not exist in the above statement and instead the group name is used as an author to appropriately and rightly assign ownership of the created giveaways to all those who contributed.
Whilst I appreciate your point of view I would encourage you to reconsider in light of the above points. this is of course not an attempt to undermine your administrative action more so a dialogue or discussion to air differing viewpoints.
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Would a series of GA's directly related to an ongoing global pandemic not directly count as a "greater reason" as opposed to the category specific element emphasised for the sub groups.
Giveaways are allowed both within the General forum and the Group Recruitment sub-forum. Their inclusion is not what was at issue, here. Rather, the inclusion of multiple redirects to the Steam group's page and Discord channel, as well as the encouragements to visit said page and Discord channel, constituted promotion of the Steam group itself in contrast to the communal nature of the original event and the included SG giveaways.
Furthermore for group recruitment to take place there needs to be a specific call to action to join the group; hence the term recruitment, which does not exist in the above statement and instead the group name is used as an author to appropriately and rightly assign ownership of the created giveaways to all those who contributed.
As I noted above, promotion of the Steam group was included in the original draft of the OP. That put the post in either the Group Recruitment category or the User Projects category, and the former was a better fit. If you look at the post as it currently is, it still includes the group name for the purpose of authorship as well as links to relevant background information. The only thing missing right now is the promotion/advertising which prompted me get involved in the first place.
Example:
"This giveaway brought to you by the folks at Fanatical.com!" (good for General Forum)
"This giveaway brought to you by Fanatical.com! Come visit our website!" (not for General Forum)
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okay sure, thank you for the clarification, I think the misunderstanding here was we wanted people to know how they could contribute to the giveaways we should have maybe found a better way to phrase that or direct their attention. We will endeavour to ensure the understanding from this is taken across future posts.
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Oh, sorry I forgot about that one, I changed the link now.
If they are not needed, why are you so reluctant to leave them out of your post?
Well it's because it is needed (you even quoted the text above saying that it's needed to improve the event), so I'm going to move the link here now.
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Well it's because it is needed ...
No, the links I pointed out were not needed. They were superfluous. If you misunderstood what I typed previously, then perhaps I was not clear. (Just because I know what I meant does not mean others necessarily do.) It was entirely possible to share all relevant information without needing to redirect Net traffic via links. In most of these cases, the text is fine once the attached link is removed.
Additional explanation:
Under most circumstances, Support ignores links which are included in posts. When there are a number of them, however, then we pause to consider their purpose. If they seem incidental, we overlook them. If they seem included for promotional purposes, we will either ask for their removal or move the thread to the appropriate sub-forum. Support has limited time and energy, so we prefer "easy" solutions. In extreme cases, where the creator of the post simply refuses to comply with Guidelines and administrative action, the thread itself may be closed and/or its creator suspended.
If Support requests a particular action from you, it is because we feel that action is required. (Otherwise, we would ignore it and move on.) If you are unclear about what should be done, or how it should be accomplished, feel free to ask. If you are unclear about the reason for the action, comply, then ask for an explanation. If you have an alternate solution, let us know and we will consider it. We are neither perfect nor omniscient, but we are reasonable. If you treat us with respect, we will do what we can to ensure your time on this site is pleasant and enjoyable.
P.S. (As that link is incidental and buried in our conversation, I am choosing to ignore it. You still don't need it, however.)
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Thanks for the GAs! I can't believe how effective your simple anti-bot measure is.
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Heyo, so there's been a couple of controversies about how this simple anti-bot measure doesn't actually stop bots. How do you know if it actually stops bots or not? :P
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As a programmer of bots, and specifically web scrapers which are my specialty, he is right. But he's also slightly wrong. It's true that the method you've chosen is too simple by a hair to stop bots in their tracks. But it's also true that most bot writers won't bother parsing through such links because they're non-standard.
Why do I think it stops most bots? Because these are level 0 giveaways with a fraction of the entries I've seen on non-bot-protected giveaway links from similar postings on here.
Why is he very right though? Because it's easy enough to write a bot to parse normal mangled links. Here's an example parser that will breeze through 99% of the regular mangling. Go ahead and try mangling the url in the Text box in the center. It's going to parse it anyways almost every time. It will output the correct link in the bottom box.
You could vastly improve your anti-bot protection though with a simple trick:
| Giveaway | Link | Missing Last Letter |
|---|---|---|
| Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered | https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/G4RJ/ | letter after E |
Handling even a simple substitution is impossible for automated bots. They'd need to be custom written for every situation so bot writers would likely not bother automating this unless every single posting used the same method or same type of method.
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Wow, thank you for such a detailed explanation! I have seen giveaways which does that simple trick as well, but I felt like it was too much and too over.
I have changed the links from (adding a "/") to (replace the "#" with a " / " on the end of the link) a couple days ago because I found a 'feature' on the ESGST script that 'fixes broken links' which automatically fixes all the links above before, but now it doesn't. If things get really out of control (bots everywhere or entries suddenly bumps up) I'll look at changing to that 'simple trick' but for now I think everything works fine. Thanks again! ^^
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Great thread, thanks for doing it. It's sad that I've not seen it before.
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This needs some bump ^
and a whole heap of slashes /////////////
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bump because 20 people from the latest giveaway forgot
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REBOOT
A community-ran event:
As countries continue to wait for lockdowns to ease up and find Covid-19 to come back around a lot of us have found ourselves (hopefully) staying/stuck at home, hopefully not too bored, and more importantly, staying safe. (And a special thanks to those who can't stay home during this time, such as medical, food, and emergency services workers, etc!). This community-ran event is dedicated to letting people know that we're here for one another and helping those who are staying at home by giving away a game (for free) everyday in light of Covid-19!
This thread is a continuation of this event, giving away a game every day in light of the current situation. All these keys come from fellow community members, who've dedicated not only Steam keys, but also their time and effort to bring the community a spot of sunshine and merriment. The giveaways will be open to all viewing this thread; you simply need to follow the link (and replace the "#" with a " / " on the end of the link (this is to (hopefully) prevent bots)).
For those ever-curious souls, always inquiring into what's coming next: we have got a little fun trivia for you! Puzzles and hints will be available to give you some insights into what the games will be, or at the least narrow it down. Feel free to discuss what the games are down below! Thank you for reading this far, now you deserve to know that there's a train hidden somewhere in here...(which have now ended.) With that said, we hope you enjoy the event and wish you all the best of luck with the giveaways!
Stay safe,
The Lonely Quarantine Days giveaway group, written by ABloodsteel
P.S. WEAR YOUR MASKS. Please. Thank you.
Day 100 announcement update:
We have finally reached day 100 of the Lonely Quarantine Days giveaway event! A hundred days ago, this event was started to let people know we're here for one another in light of the current situation, and still continuing to do so today. Unfortunately, Covid19 still doesn’t want to leave us be yet, so we're going to change how this event works a bit; in the past, the helper/host needs to join in a discord server, then put the game in a spreadsheet, then make a giveaway for the assigned date. Now, you can simply create a giveaway and post a link of it in the comments in this format:
Example:
Please note that there are still guidelines in place for the games to be featured in this event. For the day assignment, you just have to look in the comments or the thread and see which days have been taken already.
We would like to thank everyone for the support, and to you, for being a responsible person who respects social distancing and always wears a mask in public. Together, we can make the world a safer place tomorrow. ^^ I would also like to personally thank the team who have helped with and contributed to this event in every step of the way, without these amazing people this event wouldn't have gone anywhere near as far as this.
It has been one long hell of a ride, thank you, and as always, stay safe,
The Lonely Quarantine giveaway group, written by Lon3r
Giveaways:
Active & upcoming:
Games that are "coming soon" might change/is not confirmed, and "starting soon" being confirmed.Ended:
HorseDonkey on the blues(These tables are manually edited and updated by me so it might contain some outdated info)
Extra information:
The giveaways above have all been carefully curated under these guidelines of ours to keep this event in high standards and you happy!
All giveaways will be open for apporximately 5 days to ensure that everyone have a chance to enter, and starts at approximately 12pm GMT+-0/UTC, ending at the same time.
Thanking the giveaway creators would also be nice, especially if you win one of their giveaway. C'mon guys, these are basic manners.
Bumping would also be appreciated :D
Thank you to all these amazing people who have helped with this event:
ABloodsteel - Moderator
WorstShot
lockcjwen
Runeriot
JustDucky
jlobo912 (JLöbo)
ihcnab
CountryFried
Oppenh4imer
SkeetSurfer
nodham
shuvam09
josgba2002
myronarth
Zareh
AuraleeFae
Do you want to help out? You can find us on our Steam group, and more information on helping which can be found here.
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