ya the link is what triggered the automated ass pain.
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As a person who is constantly spammed with "Congrats! You've won our drawing without even participating in it! Click this dubious link, here!" my sympathy is tempered with exasperation. If you are going to post a comment on someone's Steam wall, you want to avoid any confusion about why you are doing it. And you most certainly want to avoid any of the common phrases used by phishing bots.
By the way, you do not have to post a link to get the attention of your winner(s). Simply notify them that they won and that you will re-roll the giveaway if they do not respond within the Grace Period. After the week is up, file a ticket with Support and include the link/screenshot with your notification so we may process your re-roll.
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Looks like being mistreated by a crappy AI is the new normal...
I mean, with all the times Seamgifts has been used as a link in Steam discussions (and caught in Valve's crappy censorship bot), you'd think they'd have put it into some kind of whitelist by now. But no... Machine Learning Done Wrong 101, a proud course by Valve Corp.
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... you'd think they'd have [at least acknowledged there is a problem] by now. But no...
Sadly, that seems to be the "new normal," these days.
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If that is what you understood from my response, then you did not read it carefully.
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If you believe your response is not victim blaming then you did not thought it through carefully.
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He wasn't victim blaming. He was explaining why it happened and how to avoid it. I think Landhammer understood that by his response to Khalaq.
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Wrong, Landhammer included the reason in start post. And yes, it's victim blaming. Let me give you an example, maybe it will help:
What if someone will tell to the rape victim something like this:
If you are going to wear something when going out to the street, you want to avoid any confusion about why you are wearing it. And you most certainly want to avoid any of the common dresses worn by escort.
Will it be victim blaming or just "explaining why it happened" ?
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The difference between explaining and blaming is intent and tone.
Tone can't be easily conveyed in text, so you're making assumptions of intent based on the fact he said he wasn't 100% sympathetic? Just because someone's not a bleeding heart for the plight of another doesn't automatically mean they have ill intent towards them.
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The difference between explaining and blaming is intent and tone.
Yes, that's why it's victim blaming, and not explanation.
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So are you comparing rapists to some algorithm that just automatically rapes everyone dressed as a free won game? There is no crime or victim here, just Steam as usual aka random crap done by bots.
Calling sound advice based on what actually happens automatically blaming is the wrongdoing here. And yes it's advice unless you're the most insecure person on Earth and take everything anyone says as a personal attack.
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If you believe there is no victim - then I hope your account will get all possible bans permanently. Preferably, on all sites in the internet. Have a nice day.
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Aww, that's your clear victim mentality showing. Just either stop drinking or get drunk, whatever will help you get over whatever is troubling you.
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Don't forget to wipe your butt after going to the toilet. This is just an advice, and it's much more useful than Khalaq's one (because Khalaq knew well that Landhammer knows about reasons of the ban, and I have no idea if you wipe your butt or not).
Just either stop drinking or get drunk, whatever will help you get over whatever is troubling you.
You mean that all your troubles are only connected to alcohol? That explains a lot.
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Yes it's very annoying when every support everywhere does that, giving useless advice that you clearly already know, but that's just because 99% of people actually benefit from it and so the 1% has to suffer. But is it some kind of blaming? Not to anyone sane.
Yes I do wipe my butt dry after I wash it since I'm not some kind of barbarian. Who doesn't?
You mean that all your troubles are only connected to alcohol? That explains a lot.
No, but it sure helps to get drunk every now and then with friends and relax so that you're not so tense and negative that you see blaming and attacks everywhere where nobody else does. But on the other hand if your behavior was caused by too much drinking then it would be equally helpful to stop. That's why I suggested it to you.
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Wow. You are seriously going to compare someone making what is basically an innocent post on the forum over an account suspension, to rape? Seriously? Seriously? Please don't do that. Thank you! It's very insensitive toward any person who had been through such an ordeal.
I'd consider that to be worse than any perceived wrong doing on Khalaq's part. Just think about that for a second.
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We are talking about victim blaming. It does not matter what reason caused victim blaming, it's still victim blaming. Please, stop pretending that if it's about suspension and not about rape - then it's not victim blaming. Victim blaming is always wrong.
I'd consider that to be worse than any perceived wrong doing on Khalaq's part. Just think about that for a second.
That means you are inadequate. Nothing else, nothing more.
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To be fair, he was not comparing the two, he was giving you another example to make his point. I don't know why people always assume that just because someone gives you another example, those two somehow are linked together, or are elevated on the same moral level or anything like that. To avoid any confusion: he did not say that making a post like that is the same as rape. Why you would even think that is a mystery to me.
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Yes, but I would never bring up rape to make a comparison in something like this. Being a victim of an account suspension is VERY different to being a victim of sexual assault. One of those things is life-changing, even life-ending. When I was 22, one of my uni friends committed suicide because she couldn't live with what happened to her. Therapy helps some, but it doesn't help everyone. Rape ended her life.
Having your account wrongly suspended is not the end of the world. We know the person in this case is going to get their account back and no harm done. If someone says "it was your own fault" on an account suspension, how is that the same as blaming someone for getting attacked. These two things are not the same and the overall affect is not the same.
Ryzhe can call me an inadequate person all he wants, but I still disagree with this kind of comparison. It is wrong. And I wish people wouldn't do it.
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If you want to discuss a certain concept, like victim blaming, you have to be able to define what it means and to describe it in an abstract way. Applying it to specific cases comes after that. So while you are right that being a target of an internet post and being a victim of rape is very, very different - the concept of victim blaming is seperate, even though it can be applied to both. Ryzhehvost wanted to show that in his mind that concept was applied here, and that we clearly condemn one application of it, but not the other, when actually the way it was used is the same (again, that doesn't mean rape and internet posts are the same, this is completely separate).
What I am trying to say is that we have to be able to discuss these concepts independent of the actual specifics. And trying to explain the concept with another example does not mean that this one has anything to do with the first example, or that they have the same quality in any way. I am very sorry for your friend. What happened to her is horrible, no doubt. But I am sure Ryzhehvost did not want to say that rape and internet posts are on the same level in any way.
That being said, I don't think he's right. Khalaq's posts doesn't sound to me like he is actually blaming the victim. I can see why some people understand it that way, but I am certain he did not mean it that way.
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Oh I understand completely what you're saying. I just think a different example would be more prudent. Taking one of the worst things that could happen to someone and using that as an example is a no no, no matter what the intent. You have to think about the possibility of someone who has been a rape victim reading that post and how they might feel about it. That's where my heart is on this.
Having said that, I agree with your last paragraph. That was my original argument and it's where this escalated from. =)
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I know what I think better than anyone else does, including Ryzhehvost. I know for a fact that I did not mean it that way. (Nor did I write it that way.) Victim blaming is when you blame the one harmed for the actions of the harmer. That is a false concept. These days, however, kids are being indoctrinated to believe that victims have no responsibility for their own actions, and that is also a false concept. The reality is that every person is responsible for his or her actions, and it is only when we acknowledge that and take control over our own lives that we truly become free and the agent of our own fate. Failure to do so relegates one to being a perpetual victim, relying upon the sympathy and aid of others for one's existence and, by extension, powerless.
When someone harms me, I am going to take whatever reasonable actions I can and make whatever reasonable behavioral changes I need to protect myself from the next such occurrence. I do not have a victim mentality, nor do I identify myself as a victim despite what I have suffered. Endless complaining about what happened to me does nothing to benefit my life in the present. It only keeps me stuck in my past instead of moving forward.
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If only more people had the sense it see it that way.
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If they did, the world would be a better place. In the end, however, each of us must make our own choices, and we all must deal with the consequences.
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The real victim in this discussion was common sense, it was assaulted brutally by made up feminist crap.
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Khalaq, could you just tell me to keep doing what I am doing? Any suggestions for me to avoid this scenario in the future would be wrong, since I was the victim here and that would involve me adjusting to their bad move. What did you do to make the bad actor (Valve) change their behavior? If nothing, then please shut up. /sarcasm
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Victim blaming? Are you for real? Maybe the words he wrote are actually above your level of comprehension.
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Maybe the words "Victim blaming" are actually above your level of comprehension.
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I see. You're simply stupid. No reason for me to keep arguing with an imbecile. Carry on, then. Bye.
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I see. You're simply stupid. No reason for me to keep arguing with an imbecile. Carry on, then. Bye.
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That's clear case of comprehension level blaming. Also word blaming. All this after all the helper blaming you did. What comes next, blame blaming or would that be too coherent?
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It's not victim blaming.
The mod is pointing out the obvious since OP did not think about something common in our digital age.
Why are you so triggered?
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Yeah, I don't have the exact wording I used but I did try to be clear about the fact that he had entered and won one of my steamgifts giveaways and that it would be nice if he activated and marked it before the week had elapsed. You know, the kind of thing you have to do before requesting a re-roll.
I'm sure it was adding the link that doomed me. The auto mod stopped it for the link and then two hours later I'm guessing that someone at Valve who doesn't know what steamgifts is "reviewed" it and flagged me. It will work out, I just don't want others to make the same mistake I did and fall victim to the latest version of their artificial stupidity.
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We may never know exactly how things ended up as they did, but I hope they correct the mistake soon. I also hope that you manage to avoid it happening to you in the future, but we shall have to see. They obviously cannot make it public how to avoid being flagged or else every spam bot would be programmed to do so. In the end, it may have been human error that did you in.
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Sooooo, what parts of internet are you visiting constantlly that you are spammed all the time ? Or its just mail box you are talking about ?
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I have a public Steam wall, so I get a lot of phishing attempts on it.
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Omg this is serious... I hope you solved the problem D:
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Theyre clamping down on spammers and getting innocent people also.
You can post the link, just have to remove the "steamgifts.com" part.
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Post in one of their old giveaways if you want to get their attention.
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This ^ technique works well, but it does require the user to have created at least one giveaway (or posted a comment in your own).
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All this hassle for an ungrateful winner who refuses to use SG to see when they win.
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I dont usually post msg on Steam profiles. Thank you for the information, its very useful. I sympathize the situation though at the same time i am also glad Steam is taking the steps against scammers/phishing. Wish you a smooth account recovery. This is like a situation where you took an arrow for the rest of us. Rest well for now. :)
Sincere Regards, Cruse~
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24 hours and still no response from Steam support. Why am I not surprised? For those who are wondering, here's the description you get in the notification pop-up:
This account may have been accessed by someone else.
Steam Support suspects your account may have been accessed by someone else. We are temporarily restricting modifications to this account as a security precaution. Please contact Steam Support so we can assist you.
This account will have restricted functionality until the owner has regained access.
Purchasing, gifting, trading, cd-key activation, playing online on VAC enabled game servers, and Steam Community access have been disabled.
What they don't mention is that they also remove posts and comments you've made in public Steam groups dating back to the dawn of time. Presumably, they will be restored when this problem gets resolved. If not, there will be some volcanic fury on my part.
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Oh god that latter part is terrifying, please keep us updated on that. I'd be furious if I got caught up in something similar and everything gets removed. I understand doing it temp, and perhaps from a specific time back, but everything??
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Hopefully getting unbanned also results in restoring comments... comments on threads are never truly "deleted" and can be undeleted by a moderator, but I'm not sure about comments on announcements/screenshots since these are un-recoverable once deleted. Unless there's some recovery procedure in place on Steam's side... these might be permanently gone.
If so, it's such bullshit to know Valve employees are able to simply delete everything by a user over a stupid false-positive for scam attempt like this. Landhammer has been contributing thousands of insightful, useful, and necessary comments in the group where he is an admin - if these aren't recovered automatically when the ban is lifted, we'll have to manually recover EVERY individual comment ourselves. Hopefully it doesn't come to that. But the fact that a community ban results in deletion of comments even when the user is an admin of the group simply makes no sense to me regardless.
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Honestly this is why I hate putting this much trust into huge companies. They can just play with your data like this for not much reason. I hope the comments get restored, if not I hope you all start a public thing about this all. More people should be aware of it outside of steamgifts
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I would be down to help, I just got f* over by their AI too...
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If you need help provind proof or just making this known somewhere, tell me. I would love to help, just got targeted by the same system...
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Oh wow. Deleting your posts is a long step too far. I hope this will be resolved. As far as I know it is easy to mass delete content. One click of a button does it, but undeleting it... oh boy! That sounds like it was done by a human on a power trip. A bot would simply suspend you until a human could review it. (Unless posts of suspended accounts are simply hidden).
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All of this headache to people who have behaved well and avoided harming anyone insofar as that is humanly possible.... Why? Because a tiny percentage of the userbase will do whatever it can to steal, hurt, and otherwise troll the rest of us. It is a terrible shame that they will not allow the rest of us to simply live in peace.
Keep us posted, and if it turns out there is something SG Support can do to help, please let us know.
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Same thing happened to me yesterday. Got a community ban for reminding a winner to activate his win on Steamgifts.
Luckily support solved it fast for me and unlocked my account. Even if they said "It appeared that the account was indeed locked because it was being used to post scam comments in the Steam community."
I just want to give everyone a warning, never write "Steamgifts" anywhere on Steam. It will definitely block your account.
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That's insane. But at least knowing that it's pretty much confirmed that SG links now trigger a ban is... informative.
Any chance you'd know if your comments on public group discussions were deleted and have now been restored?
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I didn't even post a SG link.
As to the comments. I don't comment that much, but my "Monthly Giveaways" comment from July 2019 in the TotalWar:Arena is still there. What's weird is if I search the topic by my username it shows that there is no post.
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Wow. Sounds like a massive fuck-up with some new filters to me, where the wrong keyword was added to the "this is definitely a scam" keywords list. The bad thing is that the moderators in charge of looking through those reports saw those and didn't even bother checking if it was legit.
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EXACTLY THIS, I DIDN'T EVEN POST A LINK. I just asked the guy to activate his win on Steamgifts and got a freaking ban lol. Well, I have sent a message to support, waiting for an answer. Hopefully I manage to unlock my account smoothly
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Luckily I always say "SG" but maybe this banning is a recent change, I can't imagine no one else has left the word "steamgift" in a comment before now.
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So, update: After 36 hours, Steam Support restored my access with a boilerplate "appeared to have been compromised..." message and a standard password reset procedure (15 day market ban, yay!). Unfortunately, this DID NOT restore the hundreds of deleted posts. I sent back a "my problem is not resolved" response in which I basically said that I needed the post issue fixed immediately and that after that, I wanted to clarify a few things about how this happened so that I and the Steamgifts community could understand what our new robot overlords expected of us. I didn't really use those words. This is why I'm waiting a bit to write up that part of my response.
I'll keep y'all posted on the next phase of my little adventure.
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Please do, I just got f* by their AI for also asking for activation (no links)...
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Seems like posting a link makes a huge difference.
I just had to tell them the email I used to create my account. And I got no market ban or anything else.
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I mean, I was told to send my email and any recent purchases. I did and I am waitng for their answer. But I want to play, trade and such. And I can't do shit while my account is on hold. I also didn't send any links, so I really wish they just had a better AI system or made all "yellow flags" go through manual analysis before doing anything.
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I know of several Steam groups where warning messages appeared at the beginning of the month asking to not share SteamGifts giveaway links in Steam discussions.
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Just managed to get access back to my account. Also received a 15 day market ban... Seriously, utter BS. Fuck that AI
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UPDATE: Still haven't heard back from Steam support on my deleted posts issue (incident +4 days, last ticket + 2 days).
In looking at the damage, it's hard to tell exactly what happened. Not ALL of my comments in every thread or forum were deleted. The purge seems to focus on my five year history of posting in the major threads of the Free Game Finders group (as an admin no less). The first response I received from Steam support was "This account appeared to be compromised and was being used to send malicious spam messages throughout the community". From all of this, I'm guessing that the AI may have tripped for my Steamgifts link but that it was an offshore English-marginal script jockey who "confirmed" it and removed my "malicious spam".
I'm glad to see that some of the other victims have had their accounts restored without additional problems. I'll keep providing updates here as my situation develops.
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UPDATE: After over a week and two more attempts to attract attention from Steam support, I finally received another response to my ticket. It completely ignored my deleted post issue and instead informed me that my account wasn't actually compromised. Really? Gee, thanks. This was the explanation:
"Advertisements and giveaways posted on profiles are more often than not associated with scams, phishing attempts, and illegal gambling. It's incredibly difficult to verify the validity and safety of links throughout the community. Does this site not have some type of notification system for users who have won content or entered these giveaways?"
I'm interpreting this as "We here at Steam support are completely unaware of Steamgifts and to us, it is just another scam site". Proceed accordingly and be careful.
Further updates as events warrant.
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Does this site not have some type of notification system for users who have won content or entered these giveaways?
This so very much. People who actually use the site get a notification on top. People who read their emails get a notification. So why on Earth is this retarded requirement to spam Steam profiles even in existence? If people enter giveaways and then leave SG for good, it should be their loss for not using the site. This is so simple even Steam support gets it...
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emails
Do they still get sent? I noticed I haven't received any since about a month. (option active of-course)
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I get emails whenever one of my giveaways end or I win something
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So why on Earth is this retarded requirement to spam Steam profiles even in existence?
It is not. SteamGifts has no such requirement. The closest thing we have to that is a requirement to provide some kind of evidence in your re-roll ticket that you attempted to contact your winner. I suppose some people could choose to spam a winner's Steam profile, but that would be counter-productive.
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So sending more emails since the one wasn't enough? Maybe send 999 more since you never know if they will just read every 1000th one they get. That required evidence is the root of the problem, getting flagged as a spammer is merely a by-product.
Also a guideline (or whatever) says wins must be activated within a week and win'n'runners aren't required to provide any evidence why they refused to accept a won game. They are at fault for the problem of not activating and they are the ones that should bear the burden of proof or forfeit wins.
There is a red number at top if you win, all notification anyone should ever need or want. You see it if you use the site and you need to use the site to enter giveaways.
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For reference, what method do you suggest people should elect for contacting their winners?
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- Post something in the comments section of your winner's giveaway.
- Respond to one of your winner's posts.
- Send an email to your winner. (You should see his or her address on your Created page.)
- Send a Steam friend invite to your winner. (Whether your winner responds or not, this is attempted contact.)
- Post a comment on your winner's Steam wall. (e.g. "Congrats on winning my SG giveaway.")
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Ummmm... number 5 there is kind of what started this mess. "Post a comment that does not use the word Steamgifts or include a link..." is probably a clearer way to say this.
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There is nothing wrong with mentioning SteamGifts in a comment, even if that comment is on someone's Steam wall. I have done precisely that, many times, and I have never had any issues related to it. Including a link might cause your post to be seen as spam, but, as I previously stated, there is no need to include a link. Your winner should know what SteamGifts is and how to check his or her wins.
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Both Escruidin and SebasR have posted in this thread that they were also locked for a profile comment without a link. Just the word Steamgifts appears to be toxic now. I have profile posted in the past both with and without links and never had any problem until now. Historical success is no longer a reliable indicator. This is the whole reason I started this thread in the first place, to warn people that something which was safe and common practice before could now result in an account lock and a community ban.
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I feel I should clarify what I stated, above.
As you point out, historical success is no longer a reliable indicator. I suspect this is due to the high volume of phishing which has afflicted the Steam community in the past few months. (Seriously, I was getting multiple messages like these on my Steam wall, every day.) Taking that into account, phrasing and vocabulary are most likely relevant. While I seriously doubt the word "SteamGifts" is any more "toxic" than the word "sushi," I am fairly confident I could trigger a flag by posting the following on a Steam wall:
Congratulations! You have won a free game at Sushi.com! Log in, now, to claim your gift!
It does not matter that there is no Sushi.com, nor would it matter if the site did exist and was harmless. Most Steam users would probably still report the message as "spam" and my account would be locked. Posting a link would only heighten the suspicion. Despite all of that, I am still able to post the word "SteamGifts" on my friend's Steam wall without having my account locked. To sum up, Steam users are currently hypersensitive about "unsolicited contact" on Steam, so give careful consideration to how you go about it.
P.S. (I will let you know if my friend decides to report me, anyway. Some people like their little jokes....)
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Steam users are currently hypersensitive about "unsolicited contact" on Steam
Yup, it's crazy how people are so scared of the Internet that they came to a point where they are afraid of friend requests ("oooh, if I accept, I might get hacked!")... Computer-illiteracy, eh...
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Interesting experiment, but it misses several key elements.
First and foremost is that we're not dealing with user reports here, this is the Steam automod intercepting posts before they even reach the user. As I mentioned in the original post, my comment was blocked immediately by the automatic system and then two hours later my account was locked. This is not a Steam user being hypersensitive and reporting me. This is AI triggering a false positive for [reasons] and then an under-trained script-jockey blasting my account. It should also stand to reason that a long time Steamgifts user would not report a "you won my Steamgifts giveaway" post as spam in the first place on account of them knowing what Steamgifts is.
Second, posting the word Steamgifts on your friend's wall doesn't exactly prove anything about it's toxicity. Even a deeply flawed AI will have different rules for posts to friends and posts to strangers. I'd guess that the checks on friend post are more likely to be "did he just send this to everyone on his list" whereas a post to a stranger will be more closely judged for "does this look fishy". As you say, phrasing and vocabulary are probably the deciding factor but without extensive testing of various examples ("good job in that game you won against me" vs. "you won a game from me") and the exact words used in the posts that got people banned, the only real information we have to go on is that accounts are being locked for sending non-friends messages about Steamgifts (with and without links).
Third, of course it will be easy to deliberately trigger the AI with sushi.com and then get locked by a first tier response drone who has no motivation to do a real investigation. That's not the point. This generation of Valve anti-spam AI is significantly more pro-active about intercepting posts for review and significantly more likely to block your account because of it. As a result, the practice of contacting a winner by posting on their Steam page is now significantly more dangerous. Advocating that (even as a fifth resort) needs to come with a serious disclaimer. Mine was about the toxic word Steamgifts, yours was about phrasing and vocabulary. Either way, there is now too much risk involved for me to even want to try something like "Congrats on winning my SG giveaway."
I don't ever expect to get any real answers to the questions I asked Steam support about whether or not their AI targets Steamgifts (don't worry, I phrased it much more delicately than that) but if I do, I'll pass them along here in hopes that we can prevent this all from happening to others.
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First and foremost is that we're not dealing with user reports here, this is the Steam automod intercepting posts before they even reach the user.
So, you are saying that your post was intercepted before it was even posted? That would, indeed, be new. I was under the impression that the account lock was prompt, not that it was preemptive.
Despite all of the things we do not know, there are some things that are clear. Posting on someone's Steam wall is significantly more risky, Valve is cracking down on those pesky, "unsolicited spam" flies buzzing about, and Valve appears to be hunting them with a 12 gauge shotgun. (Par for the course, unfortunately.)
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"... The Steam automod held up my comment and a few hours later, locked my account." - OP
I posted the comment and went to screenshot it. What I saw instead was one of the new messages from Steam support saying that my post was being held for further review. I kept checking it and about two hours later, bang! I was dead.
The new iteration of the automod is extremely dangerous. This is why everyone is getting banned. This is the new normal.
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Steamgift is what steam offer as a gifting option, so this word is NOT disallowed. OP was blocked for reports probably or smthng, not for just mentioning word
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Thank you. To be fair, I'm not sure how useful the requirement really is, considering 1-3 is effectively redundant with site functionality, but if I can bypass our bot overlords over in Volvo's domain, I'm not complaining. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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And I still say that the only way to contact a winner ever should be them actually using the site to check their wins, not just enter giveaways. You do realize that the red notification number on top makes 1 and 2 pointless and SG already offering email notification makes 3. Then we have 4 and 5 which are just useless spam with potential bans.
Why do you still think the system should favor bots, leechers and people who intentionally leave the internet for a month after entering all the giveaways they can instead of the people who actually make the site work by giving? Shouldn't the system instead reward people for checking the site at least 1-2 times a week by them not losing won games?
My solution rewards givers and active users while causing less work for support. Which one of these benefits you think is so bad that we need this current useless system of extra hassle to avoid it?
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If I understand you correctly, your solution is as follows:
... the only way to contact a winner, ever, should be them actually using the site to check their wins... (sic)
While that may be both feasible and efficient in some situations, it lacks flexibility and, in some instances, would probably lead to additional work on the part of Support Staff. Not all gifts are "ready" when their respective giveaways end, and not all users visit the site regularly. Additionally, human error on the part of the creator and/or winner of a giveaway creates complications which must be addressed.
I still think there are a few situations which can be automated, however.
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And and all of those user problems are handled by the users taking the 10 seconds a week to check SG twice. If they refuse to do this they simply forfeit all wins. If they know that they will not even log on to Steam for 2 months they can simply not enter giveaways before that.
Problems with keys etc are still handled like currently but just with less useless re-roll tickets taking the time and effort of support so that can only improve. Any and all cases where the winner refuses to check SG or view the key should be automated since it's trivial to check if they have seen the key for the site but not mods.
Or then we could allow givers the same leeway, they can forget to log in to give the key for couple months and the winner should prove that they have spammed them in all possible ways to get the key before being able to mark it not received. It would reward the people who deserve it but still be equally stupid if that is somehow a requirement for rules.
Why must bad behavior from useless leechers be rewarded by causing extra hassle to givers? Can you answer this in some way that makes sense? Not your personal opinion that adding everyone on Steam is great fun or anything, just simple reasoning behind why it should be so. It makes negative sense to me.
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honestly, i don't even see why we need to notify them at all. they already get a notification any time they are on sg, and it doesn't go away until they deal with it. how is leaving a message in an old giveaway any different? it's just another notification next to the existing one they are already ignoring. if they don't activate their free game within a week (after key is shared of course), i think the gifter should be able to re-roll, no questions asked.
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Nobody has been able to give a single legit reason why it should be so that givers are punished and leechers rewarded in 2 years. Just that spamming as much as possible and getting banned is sooo much fun. Most sites reward people for using the site but here it's punish you for other people not using the site.
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I'm interpreting this as "We here at Steam support are completely unaware of Steamgifts and to us, it is just another scam site". Proceed accordingly and be careful.
I actually have had a review banned (I believe that's my only banned review) most likely because it included a Steamgifts link. So yeah, Valve support can't be bothered to do their freaking job and once and for all check out SG for a few minutes and take a note that it's freaking legit. Top quality service 🙄🙄
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I'm still waiting for my profile to get banned. I think it's always on news and all over forums when they actually do their job because it's so rare.
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Next time you can contact the person through Steamgifts.
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Well, it's all their fault. If they have made a convenient gifting system - people would use it. It's easy - just allow people to buy gift for the price gift recipient would pay, problem solved. If I want to gift to someone with higher regional pricec - I pay more. It would deem region locks useless. But instead they decided that even more region locks should take place. Instead of gaining money on giveaway sites - they decided to lose money. Logic? Nah, never heard of it.
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This retarded system just flagged me, i sent a friend request to the winners and they ignored it, so i decided to write that they won a giveaway and now im blocked...
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So here's an update, my password was reset, my phone and mobile autenticator deleted and now i have a 15 day restriction in trading, all of this because according to steam i was promoting a non-related website, wich broke the subscriber agreement, to be honest, and even tough it was yesterday, i don't remember if i wrote steamgifts, so i think i will stop giving gifts bought in the store and return to only keys.
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The same thing happened to me 5 days ago. I posted a comment on the winner's profile and mentioned SteamGifts (just like others had done before me on that same profile), but didn't post any link and didn't see any message saying that my comment was being held for review, so I'm not sure if my comment was flagged automatically or by the winner. The lock was lifted the next day by Steam support, and it seems that my only comment that was removed was the one I posted on the winner's profile.
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So, here's another update. After over two weeks of being ignored, I finally got another message from Steam support which basically said "Uh, we see some of your posts were deleted but we don't see any indication that this was related to the ban you got for the Steamgifts message".
This has become Kafkaesque.
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This is from The Wall, right ? I did not watch it again since previous century, but I should.
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In another 2 weeks they are going to start blaming you for deleting them yourself and figure out that it must mean your account is compromised after all.
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The fact that this is actually a plausible scenario is frightening.
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UPDATE: So, after over two weeks, my forum posts were finally restored. No actual explanation, just a "we did it" comment from Steam support. I guess that's taken care of now.
Before I close the ticket, I'm asking them a few questions about how this happened and the possible toxicity of the word Steamgifts. I expect no specific answers but I'm hoping for at least some acknowledgement that they are now more institutionally aware of the fact that we aren't a scammer site.
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It just recently came to me that it might actually not be the words SteamGifts itself but rather the phrase "You have won" because I assume that phrase often comes up related to scam attempts.
At least everytime I browse some shady website (where I need to disable Ad block) I always get those annoying pop ups telling me I have won 10 grand or a car or whatever.
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Glad to read that situation finally concluded.
The phrase "you won" along with the link leading to another site is enough to suspect scam.
The most effective solution against it I've seen was applied in one old forum 20 years ago: the links to all non-whitelist sites were partially masked with *** It's probably not the best solution for the modern internet, so Steam uses a more harsh method
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Looking at some forums I can say it is 99% chance it is about "https://www.steamgifts.com/" as I have seen many times that things like list of monthly GAs etc. were fine a few months ago and right now most of these links are deleted by a bot.
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So, here's a cautionary tale. It had been a few days since one of my giveaways had ended without it being activated. I posted a comment on the winners profile to let him know he'd won and that there was a time limit for activation. I included a link to the giveaway which turns out to have been a mistake. The Steam automod held up my comment and a few hours later, locked my account. Now I get to wait for Valve support to respond to my ticket. Yay.
Don't make my mistake.
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