Absurd "contact winner" requirements

Yeah it makes no sense that the responsability will fall on the person giving instead of the interested part to take it.
Also the whole commenting on steam's profile doesn't make sense to me, since this is a platform of it's own. I don't want to mix it with steam EVEN if it's directed to steam related stuff.

Personally, I believe the one making the giveaway should only have the responsability of giving the key, the winner should be the one responsabile to picking it up and marking it, failing to do so should be enough (within 1 week timeframe) to reroll to a new winner without any bureaucracy

Site really should support showing support when key was marked visible to winner. And if winner has done no action in 7 days. Well reroll should be granted.

How long has it been since the giveaway ended?

Is the problem that you've run out of open giveaways slots? Maybe you could request more due to this issue?

Personally i think there should be an automatic reroll if the winner hasnt marked the win as "received" within say 2 weeks or a month.
Which would save the mods a lot of time.

If the key was sent via SG, your responsibility is done...

That's it; no more public giveaways for expensive games.

Let's be honest here, who many of us check our steam's profile page on a daily basis(or if steam has an option to get a notification if someone wrote on there, who has it activated) ?
Not to mention that it shouldn't be our(the ones who make GAs) responsibility to contact a winner who doesn't care enough to activate. Fortunately I didn't experience this yet, but I know someone who did and it was a long, annoying and boring process of trying to get someone who was online for more than half a day on both steam and SG .
So yeah, maybe an automatic reroll would save not only the staff time but us as well.

Preach brother. The "You have to contact winner in multiple ways" rule should be abolished in general. You get the option for email notifs, you get a large popup when you enter the site and you get 7 days and you STILL don't want to claim it? Ok then, prize should go to another person then, your loss.

A few of my group members and i wrote months ago about this, from our point as gifters, stupid "change".

By that time new junior mods -so 6 months+ ago?- (now partly promoted to senior mods) enforced this rules, on top with that 7 days of waiting that the winner claim his win and that he have additional 7 days AFTER the reroll request with all the infos and screenshots about two different contact ways that you tried, and got teached to do it this way by higher mods like MSKOTOR.

A senior mod handled it the old way (7 days waiting time is enough and not additional 7 days after the reroll request gets accepted with screenshots etc.), to lower the frustration of the gifter, and MSKOTOR said he done it wrong and the 2 involved junior mods done it correct.

So yes, you not only have to run behind your winners that they claim their wins, on top you need to kiss their asses and hope that they react on a blinking message on sg, which they ignored before for around 1 week, or that you don't get banned on steam for writing on someones profile that he have won something on sg.

The "old" way was never the correct handling and a "change" never happened, they only clarified and teached the new mods the existing thing in the correct way, as MSKOTOR said.

In the end, yes, a big pile of bullshit (that mostly wasn't made from the mods but cg). And one reason more for not creating public GAs.

Ps.: If i remember correctly https://www.steamgifts.com/user/LuckyStrike1305 created the discussion about it but i am not 100% sure because a lot of us were very upset.

i dont know if support can see when you pressed the "Send Key" in your giveaway but generally a reroll should be granted 7 days after you send that key. if the winner didnt bother to view the key even if he was online it should not be your problem to contact them via steam or email, it should be considered as a rejected gift.

It would be a lot easier for everyone if this kind of thing was automated. A week after the key is sent, if no response, give the option to reroll.

I don't like this either. Why should the giveaway creator have to hunt someone down? If the key is unviewed after 7 days, just automatically reroll it imo. Luckily I only had the issue once. They were online on here and I wrote on one of their giveaways. So now they had two notifcations on here to take care of it. The person eventually did that after weeks of waiting and me not wanting to chase after them, I assume they had no computer available to them and simply didn't know you could register keys via browser. But they could have talked to me if they had an issue.

In exactly 7 days after a key has been allocated by the GA's creator the GA should be rerolled automatically, if the key has not been viewed by the winner.
If the key has been viewed, the winner should be suspended at the 7 day mark, GA should be marked by system as received, and depending on circumstances (is the game in winner's library?) the winner should be reprimanded or suspended.
Obviously with "gifts" the procedure would need to be somewhat different.

EDIT:
"GA should be permanently marked by system as received" ;)

State the rule in the guidelines as "7 days = automatically reroll" and then do it automatically after 8 days (to allow for different time zones).

The notification email should also re-state the 7 days rule. The current email notification could be interpreted as a promise of that game, which it isn't.

I suggest:

"Congratulations [user],
You've won a SteamGifts Give-away!.
Your 7-day window to claim the following game has already started.
[Game Title]"

Winners will need to correctly mark their gift as received or not received within one week of the gift being marked as sent by the giveaway creator.

^ That's from SG's very own site guidelines. That alone should be enough, so it's wild you're being told to contact them via Steam message. Extra wild since that can get you in trouble with Valve.

I agree with you.I think the contact requirements need to be updated.

So no matter where you can win something, the winner should take care of getting his gift. I go to the trouble of buying something, then I make it available to the community and then have to chase after the winner so that he is kind enough to accept it... I find that really absurd!

I was lucky enough to have to deal with this only like twice so far. I agree that the rule needs a change tho.

I won't bother searching for someone so that I can gift them something. I'll send an e-mail after a couple of days of inactivity, and a friend request on Steam, once. If that's not enough, then I don't really think it is my fault.

Yeah, those rules really treat the people gifting games like garbage while winners should be served and have "their time and opportunity" devotedly respected... There's an outright entitled atmosphere in many ways on here that I despise... Why are you made to feel like a criminal trying to scam or shameful for asking for a reroll on your present??

Why should gifters and support be annoyed every day dealing with a vast majority of multiaccounters/autojoining bots doing this, for the few rare instances someone genuinely won't be on for the week or miraculously can't see they won with at least 3 different ways to tell them on their own? None of these should be putting stress on someone just trying to give a gift

Could be so simple, if it's been 7 days, they already had a really fair chance! Don't humiliate and torture people giving gifts away :/

I would like to recommend following rule changes so that main responsibility would be on winner:

1. When GA is finished, GA creator has 1 week to provide the key. Winner should not ask GA creator where is the key during first week.This is how it is currently. No rule changes here.
2. Here is new rule suggestion: 1 week after GA has ended, winner has 1 week to claim the key. If key was not provided by GA creator it should be winners responsibility to leave the message on GA page that key was not provided. If key was not provided by GA creator but winner does nothing during second week, 2 weeks after GA has ended GA creator can ask for re-roll no questions asked.

This way:

1. GA creators that have delivered the key right after GA has ended and want to speed things up, and want that winner claims the key ASAP, can still do as it is required currently, contact winner, create screenshots,... and then wait for 1 week for winner to claim it. If key is not claimed after 1 week they can ask for re-roll as they have proof they have contacted the winner. This is how it works now, nothing would change for GA creators that do not want to wait 2 weeks. No rule changes here.
2. GA creators that are not in hurry and can wait 2 weeks, just wait. If winner does not claim the key, GA creator can ask for re-roll, no need for any screenshots or contacting the winner or anything. This would be new rule.
3. GA creators that do not send the key, but winner does not message at GA page during second week that the key was not provided, can ask for re-roll, no need for any screenshots or contacting the winner or anything. This would be new rule.
4. GA creator does not send the key, but winner creates message at GA page during second week that the key was not provided. Then GA creator can not ask for re-roll. Winner must mark the win as not received. No rule changes here.

In my opinion this simple 2 week rule changes might bring back some dignity to GA creators. Doing public GA was not fun experience for me, my respect to all the public GA creators, you need to have thick skin. If there were not moderated groups I would have left this site a month after joining.

The responsibility seems to be shifted to the GA creator. I wonder what the motivation is?

Perhaps someone made a bad call and the mods had to back them up to save face?

From the moment a key is sent the winner should be blocked from taking other actions such as joining new giveaways or even view available giveaways on the site until they have revealed the won key and provided feedback. 7 days is a lot, 24 h would maybe be more appropriate. Or maybe two different deadlines: one to reveal the key before an automatic reroll (this could even be 7 days as usual) and one to provide feedback from the moment the key is revealed (here 24 h would already be too generous).
Contacting the winner should not be required as the site already notifies them (notification should happen when the key is available, no point in notifying the winner before). If someone with email notifications disabled fears they could miss a win to an automatic reroll by not revealing the key in time, they should re-enable their email notifications

As others have commented:
Giveaway maker must send their key in 7 days. But if winner doesn't care much about redeeming it, the giveaway maker MUST pursue the winner after their 7 days have passed until the maker can prove there was enough effort.

I always thought that's big BS. The only responsability, and often remarked, of the giveaway maker, is to provide a working key. Within 7 days. Make a screenshot with the system clock and the key sent status just in case; tho I don't know if it's really that hard to add a field in the database with the datetime when the key was sent to the winner. That's all. The rest of the effort should be from the winner. Winner doesn't care? AUTOMATIC REROLL, instead of more burden and work for the giveaway maker.

Indeed those rules must be reviewed and remade so the giveaway maker doesn't have to do everything, and then even have utmost care to prove it has been done. It's really discouraging everytime the winner doesn't care, makes oneself rethink if it's worth keeping giving when what's received is trouble.

Yeah, it's always been really weird to me that the giveaway creators have to bend over backwards to deliver the prizes. The rules surrounding this are almost like some trading/grey market reseller platform, as if the winner paid for a service and you, as the giveaway creator, sustains the responsibility to deliver the goods. Considering these are giveaways, you would think it's quite the opposite?

It seems it has gotten worse, too - used to be a reroll was very easy to request. Heck, we could even set "custom rules" back in the days (that was a long time ago). Some level of guidelines and rules to ensure fairness is good, but ultimately, the rules should favour the person actually contributing a gift to the community, and not the person whose only effort was clicking the "enter giveaway" button.

I understand your frustration and the response you had from support makes zero sense.
Since admins do not want to do anything about the rampant bot/autojoiner problem, SG is at the very least long overdue for an overall of the basic functions, which are to allow us to keep making giveaways with the least possible amount of frustration, tweaking, checking, rechecking, rerolling and hunting down "winners".

If it keeps going like this, the only SG users left will be the bot and autojoiners. Good luck getting ad revenue off this.