Inertial Drift - Twilight Rivals Package consisting of base game plus DLC
Level 4 ends tomorrow
(sgtools link updated)
https://www.sgtools.info/giveaways/75a3d2b3-ca46-4239-a86a-b6f9f4172d58
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https://www.sgtools.info/giveaways/a033204c-3dfd-4cc8-ae37-c61dfd9ab126
Level 3 , ends on may the 31st
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https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/vl5S0/who-pressed-mute-on-uncle-marcus-lvl-1-3-days-remaining-leech-n-bots-are-The-welcome-enjoy
https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/UgKtY/sunlight-6-hours-remaining
https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/6RWWE/sunlight-15-hours
https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/qLwHd/sunlight-1-day
https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/9RnMY/founders-fortune-2-days
https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/capC1/cosmic-express-3-days-TGIF
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Always wondered how much truth is to evil forum bots, whether link obfuscation is really needed or just a nuisance.
So I prepared a test-field, 4 times the same game, all at level 1.
https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/IpkUo/
direct link
https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/T6r?L/
? = B
change first letter to lowercase
https://www.sgtools.info/giveaways/52c93c7f-0e7c-4292-9aa7-a667701c29d2
direct SGT link
https://www.sgtools.info/giveaways/2cb7bfc3-8b95-?450-b6e2-25ad1721747
? = 4
add 8 at the end
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I'm curious about the results.
The multiple tests that I have made show a slight difference, but not much.
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Direct SG - 113
Obfus SG - 107 (-6)
Direct SGT - 103 (-10)
Obfus SGT - 100 (-13)
Obfuscation having lower can always be due to human laziness (plus there were 2 instructions instead of 1, oh man the effort!) but I wonder why "Direct SGTools" is 10 less than "Direct SG" if there are no SGT rules. There can be some people that decide not to click on the SGTools but you can also potentially chalk it up to bots not being coded to go through sgtools. SGTools is definitely less effort to join for a human than an obfuscated direct link (in my eyes) but it have less entries than the obfuscated direct link which is strange.
I can definitely see a obfuscated direct link with only a ? being easily brute forced by a bot (26 lower case + 26 upper case + 10 numbers = 62 tries) but adding in any other brute forcing strategies would only get exponentially longer such as switching case for letters. (8*62 tries). So I doubt bots got into the obfuscated links.
What you can say is that the percentage of people that dropped out from obfuscation lowered with sgtools than with the direct link (6/113 or 5.3%) than SGT (3/103 or 2.9%). If you assume no bots clicked the direct SGT but bots did click the direct SG, then it could indicate potentially 2.4% (5.3-2.9) of the entrants from this discussion thread are bots? Or something? But I think it's hard to assume that when the direct SGT got less clicks through than the Obfus SG when Obfus SG (I'm assuming) has no bot entrants.
I'm throwing lots of words at the wall, not all of it flows together nicely so it may get confusing, but just what I thought of for the bit of time I was typing this up.
edit: The numbers of entrants may be lowered a good amount due to the hitsquad godfather twitch channel's giveaway on this game 2 hours prior to the giveaways completing. I got a copy and synced my profile immediately and thus removing all 4 of my entries. Not sure what assumptions you want to make of the people that redeem their games and re-sync their profile in that ~2 hour span but it's something.
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It's very interesting, and seem to confirm what I already saw in my previous tests.
There is a difference, but it's not much.
There are certainly some bots that entered in the giveaways. Difficult to say in what numbers exactly, but your maths seem accurate. However, we do not see a huge diffference between all of these.
So either the bot problem exists but is not so important , or most bots don't stalk the discussions. In any case, we should probably have seen a much larger number for the Obfus SGT Ga. Not a difference of only 13 entries. Unless, as you say, they can bruteforce the obfuscation.
I often have the feeling that using sgtools does not really prevent bots to enter.
However, it prevents abusers, and this is really important in my book.
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So either the bot problem exists but is not so important , or most bots don't stalk the discussions.
A lot of bots exist but not so much stalk the discussions, besides all sorts of keydrops, because the gain in the discussions is much lower as the same invested time as autojoiner.
However, it prevents abusers, and this is really important in my book.
This is only half correct because in the theory yes but in the reality it give 30 - 50 hardcore abuser accounts that are perma banned on sgtools and still can enter the GAs after getting the clear sg link from friends or their other accounts.
The sgtools perma ban can't stop this extreme abusers and sg (or better cg?) don't care for other sites punishments, which means sg don't stop the known abusers too.
The owner of sgtools could give cg or the mods a list and they could perma suspend the accounts that clearly repeating to break the rules many times and check each of them for multiaccounting on top.
Would be a fast and effective way to stop this extreme ones... but nothing happens since years
With other words, only the small fishes gets stopped.
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I'm in line with you.
But I'd add that in the few trains/GA I've set since I joined, I closely looked to the invalid entries and did not have the same abusers each time. Possibly coincidental, but I keep looking anyway.
But clearly, I was VERY surprised to see who were the abusers. Some don't have the profile....
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SGT's account is just another "Sign in through Steam" button so that shouldn't stop anyone being redirected from steamgifts to login. Not sure what privacy concerns there are that would stop someone from logging in, especially when sgtools is thrown around quite a bit on this site.
EIther way, the sample size is pretty small and you can't gleam much. Not a huge difference anywho. You can gauge some information if you want by grabbing the info of the entrants and seeing who entered one but not another and the statistics of that person vs those that entered both but that's pretty involved.
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I have the game, and have tried a few combinations, and I also can't enter to the second giveaway.
Maybe I'm dumber than bots.
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Nah, I think the process of copy and paste, it directed to the original link, instead of the modified one, even if i was seen the modified one, it directed to the original one. It seems when I modified the letters, i was only modifying the text of the link, not the proper link. I should have made it in a dumb text editor.
Once I pasted just the letters on another GA it worked.
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https://www.sgtools.info/giveaways/87412ce7-b397-4d45-8bac-920b5658f8f7
last number <> first number
Poly Towns
Begins in 1 hour
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Bought a DIG bundle that had Super Toy Cars Offroad. I only want Super Toy Cars Offroad, so here is the rest
https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/vm5g1/poly-skies
https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/SbvJZ/16bit-trader
https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/lh63v/corrupted
https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/J0Iqf/violett-remastered
https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/GgEbk/jigsaw-pieces-sweet-times
https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/TVQHc/dungeons-of-the-fallen
https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/VlX2S/gravitrex-arcade
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If you can solve my jigsaw puzzle and if you are at least level 3 then you can hop onto my train.
Hurry up - the train leaves in less than 21 hours.
Edit:
The train will stop at the following stations: Apocalipsis, Grotto, Styx: Shards of Darkness, Creepy Tale, Creepy Tale 2, Just Die Already
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Very appropriate Jigidi for today :D
I'll get to it now!
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https://www.sgtools.info/giveaways/8_287e35-_2c5-43b9-b160-e758173_2285
_ = between c and e
Short train, Lv2
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Empyrion - Galactic Survival
Lvl 3, one day
https://www.sgtools.info/giveaways/5b7fac54-0eeb-4871-b896-c423b6934064
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The Knight Witch
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1872680/The_Knight_Witch/
Level 3, one day remaining
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So you want to create public GAs, but you don't want bots and auto-join scripts to enter? Good. Just post a comment in this thread with a link to an invite-only giveaway. The idea is very simple and is really not different from many (most?) of the other threads in the forum, except that you don't need to invest much time or thought into it. Just post the link in a comment, and you're done :-)
A few additional guidelines:
![](URL)
I'm trying to find how serious the issue with bots really is. So far the results don't really prove things one way or another. Here are some stats from my latest experiment:
Game: Space Trader: Merchant Marine
Number of giveaways: 5
Period: 3 days
Yet some more stats:
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