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Hey SG, happy holidays, I hope everyone is having a great weekend! It's been a good year for SteamGifts, and we've seen a lot of growth in terms of giveaways. Although there's still a week remaining, I think this December might turn into our highest month on record for giveaway activity, averaging over 3,300 giveaways per day. However, we still have room to improve, and I'd like to see a few changes to our site in early 2017. I'll talk about a few of those now, and I look forward to the community feedback before I start implementing any of them.

Plans

Support

There's been a number of discussions lately asking why tickets are taking longer to answer, and users wondering why we have not yet expanded our team of volunteers to help with the demand. I'm aware of the need for more support, and it's going to be my highest priority going into 2017. The issue with simply expanding our team is the lack of documentation for the wide variety of tickets and edge cases new team members would face. Consistency is an area we still struggle with today when answering tickets. The majority of tickets we face are not simply black and white, and even the most basic of questions, such as, "What's considered an inappropriate comment?", can be a challenge to answer and moderate consistently. I'm in the process of improving our documentation with the help of our volunteers, and writing a set of standard operating procedures to help guide us when answering tickets. Once finished, we'll be able to more efficiently add new members to our team, bring them up to speed faster, and be more confident when handling tickets. Personally, I'd like to see another 5-10 users join our team early 2017, and then further expand again in the months that follow.

Allowing Giveaways for Previously Free Games

I've seen this suggestion show up a few times in the discussions section, and it's one I'd like to implement. As you know, when a game is free, we typically pull it from our game list. This means if a developer briefly distributes their game for free, or if a user gives away thousands of keys on another site, the corresponding game can no longer be given away on SteamGifts. At the moment, it's unfortunate for users that miss those opportunities, since our site does not provide them with a second chance to obtain a copy of the game. We also receive quite a few tickets from users with previously free games, that simply want to find them a home. I'd like to change the way we look at those games in the future, and allow users to give them away with a highly reduced CV, or no CV. I think it'll provide users with more flexibility in terms of what they give away, and it'll provide everyone with a chance to win some great games we've unfortunately removed from our game list.

Notifications

I think e-mail notifications will be a good method of increasing overall engagement on our site in the upcoming year. They could provide users with the option to be notified when games on their wishlist are being given away, or when featured giveaways are posted for games they don't own. Notifications would be easy to subscribe or unsubscribe to with a single click, and not only would they help to grow our site, I think they would be a valuable tool for less active users that don't have the time to check our site daily.

Patreon

This is one idea I go back and forth on frequently, but you might see it tested in 2017. The idea is simple; replace our advertisements with a Patreon page to raise donations. I think the concept of being directly funded by our users would better fit with the spirit of our community, and it would help to separate us from advertising networks, which grow more invasive on a regular basis. If we do ever implement a donation system, it would be entirely optional, and no giveaway or point advantages would ever come to those that donate.

Challenges

User Registration

Looking at our stats, it's easy to see we have less users registering per month, and you might assume this means a drop in activity. However, that's not the case. Our bundle list grows daily, and since we exclude bundle games when calculating registration value, it's becoming more and more difficult for new users to register. It's normal for us to see 75% of users unable to register on a typical day. This is a difficult problem to solve. On one hand we need strict requirements to protect our community against users signing up multiple accounts, and on the other hand, we don't want to block hundreds of legitimate users from registering each day. If anyone has any thoughts on improving this system, please share.

Infrastructure

If you've been a member for a few years, you likely remember the days of slow load times and frequent downtime. We've come a long way since then, and I think in 2016 our site has been reliable and responsive. There's been quite a few updates focused on improving performance during the past year. As well, we have a good backup solution in place with our daily, client-side encrypted backups being stored outside of our servers. Last but not least, we have room to grow. We could likely double our traffic with our current Infrastructure, and reach 5x or 10x our traffic with 20 minutes of downtime to scale our database server. Overall, I think it's one area we're finally doing well.

Thanks to everyone for being a part of SteamGifts this year, and a special thanks to our volunteers for answering tickets and helping to support our community!

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