What do you think of SGtools giveaways?

well I don't really know what all the debation and drama is about, but I haven't had any problems with sgtools myself. shrugs. and I enjoy puzzles.
There's always other things you can do if you are so worried about leaks or whatever. A few times I gave away many games directly to those on my friends list who had the game on their wishlist, often forgetting about steamgifts altogether at times. Quite a few key dumps too. no SG points in it for me, but I didn't give away spare games for that reason anyway.

Again, liberty and respect. Nobody is forcing anyone to use it. If they use it if because they like the features. knsys just made what people has been suggesting in the forums for years. I won't use it (as I will never use public giveaways), but nobody has the right to tell others to don't use it.

I find it annoying to use as a ga maker and enterer. I never really cared muchfor the features and the load time and extra clicking has put me off of it. I don't have a problem with others using it, but I wish people wouldn't because all it does is cause drama.

I voted Yes.
I made GAs or trains protected by SGTools 4 times. 2 of them were for my cake day celebration.
I'm strict about the rule, yes that's my personality, I don't like rule-breakers.

When there was no auto-key delivery system, I created most GAs for my regional groups and private because of convenience to contact the winner. After a long absence, since I came back to SG, I've made more public GAs to test the water, etc.
One day, I rule-checked my winners with SGTools. The result was horrible. I had to blacklist a third of winners at least. There were even a few perma-banned users. That shocked me, for so many dishonest people exist.
I helped some users to clean their records who are generous and regret their mistakes. But also I found out there are persons who feel no shame, rather blame me or SGTools. I think they are not worthy for my small gifts.
I've campaigned to respect the rules of SG in my mother tongue, translating FAQ and Guideline and introducing SGTools.

I've read the many posts in this thread, though not enough, I respect their decision. We all have different experiences from others, and those experiences make us unique individuals.

I'm running a batch of public GAs to balance my ratio of public/private/groups, but I feel sick already. When can I escape from rule-breakers? I ask to myself. Stick to GAs to only for clean groups and whitelist? Nah, I don't think that. Still there are good people I don't know yet.
Maybe, when these public GAs end, I can determine the lowest level for public to not have headache any more.
Hey, but it's highly possible that there are good people at lower level, too. For them, I'll make private GAs protected by SGTools with very simple rules.

The first violator of my GA protected by SGTools was reported to knsys, though I have a list of a few users violated my cake day train gate, I've hesitated to report them for handful of reasons. Of course I blacklisted them already when the event ended.
Like many people complain about VAC vans, one mistake and perma-ban is too harsh, I guess. Unlike not-activating and multiple wins, there is no way to clean it with good or bad intention.

Recently, I've seen users complaining they were banned from SGTools. I don't know about their circumstances, so I don't have my opinion. But one thing is certain, that nothing is perfect. SGTools is great, if used reasonably and properly, I think. Also simpler is better because I'm lazy.

Thanks for enduring my rambling. I like your group, because I don't need to worry about the winner. ;)

I have no problems entering sgtools protected giveaways since most of the time I pass. However, I don't feel the need to limit my giveaways by using sgtools.

I really see SGTools as two separate tools - the giveaway creator, and the activated wins checker.

The wins checker is a great idea. You can easily check whether someone has activated every game they've ever won. Unfortunately, the Steam API is so buggy that sometimes it doesn't pick up every activation. I was sitting on a supposedly unactivated win for months because the API hadn't picked it up. And even now, I'm flagged as not activating some DLC (although SGTools helpfully says that this is a known bug in small text, you still get the massive text at the top saying that I have unactivated wins), which I discovered just after I finished playing that DLC. So, you have to be careful and use it only to assist, not as a one-and-done solution.

The giveaway protector thingy, however, while also a good idea, creates a situation where someone can leak a giveaway link in the forum and make it look like one of theirs... and then everyone who enters in good faith gets punished by having otherwise legitimate wins re-rolled. This whole situation has necessitated a userscript to check if a giveaway is an SGTools one. There's clearly something wrong when this happens.

sgtools should be banned by steagifts.

Well.... The best thing would be implementing some of sgtool features directly on the site as an option. It would also cross out the option to be blacklisted by some spyware tool and also it could affect visibility of public giveaways that would be using this rule cheking option. Maybe. Yes.
As for me i do not use this thingy as i think that even if someone is cheating or blacklisted me for saying yes too much - It's not healthy to think more and more about ways to block other people from entering giveaways i've made. Main focus of every user should be just on giving and not spending even part of a second to think about ways to restrain access to gibs. And as many people said - if one really wants to know that he is giving his games to good people - group giveaways are the best possible solution. As for giveaways that are publicly shared on forum - those should be open for everyone. Just my opinion. Have a good one ;) Yes.

I like sgtools, but mostly for "all games activated, no regifts" option. I just don't want to have problems with my winner, and to be sure that he would at least activate my game on his account, not trade or regift it. It's not that much to ask, I believe. Before sgtools giveaways were invented, I set level restriction instead, just to make sure winner knows how the site works, but that does not guarantee winner would not be a rule-breaker, so I had to check after win... That's extra troubles just to gift the game. With sgtools I can set less (or even none) level restriction, which means more people would be happy about it, and still get a winner with clean history.
I don't care about most of other options, like ratios, or something - after all, it's a giveaway, not trading, I someone can't afford games I would be even happier if he won from me - because he needs it more. I wish there was some option to check how many trades this person have done though - if he trade a lot, but have no giveaways - he is greedy, not needy.
Don't care about VAC ban check also - I've seen good people go got VAC because of some stupid act - like, family sharing to a family member who actually cheated... Yes, it's their fault that they trust to a bad person, but they are already punished for this, so why punish them more? Yet again, it would be good to have option "have no more then 1 VAC ban" - because one VAC can be forgiven, but if there are more - it's suspicious.

It's an useful filter. I don't think I will create many invite-only giveaways without it. Especially now when I've stolen cool custom rule form MsKot :>. Is it used to exclude groups of people? For sure, but someone's giveaways aren't a public service that necessary need to by accessible for everyone. Obviously I have an issue with unfairly banned people and even though the last case was solved, I think we should always remember that this is a possibility before we pass judgement.

Ignore those since i prefer to keep my profile friends only. Flashing it to whole world once a week long enough to sync library AND wishlist is where i draw the line.

So edit SG Tools and remove the overextending features of it and have a nice day?

Holy hell, already 3+ pages, it will be fun to read through :D
Generally speaking, I see almost nothing bad with SGTools. The almost is for it locks out people with private profile automatically (as it can't work with priv. profiles) while the site allows private profile as long as it's synched at least once a week.
Otherwise, the tool itself is wonderful, because options are just great. I can create giveaways for each specific level - so no level 5 will win the giveaway I made at level 1+, hoping that a level 1 user will be lucky. I can make quirky rules for fun events regarding almost any stat on the page, which is just awesome. Most of them is not widely used, but still good that it's there.
I generally make level 2+ giveaways, with the additional tags of no multiwin / unactivated win. Simply because most, very MOST of the time these are mistakes that can be fixed - people generally regift games they won if they don't like it, very often... not so good / cheap games, and just by buying/trading it they are again clean. Multiwin can be a little trickier to fix, but it can be done as well. So this is the reason why I use these filters, but not the VAC one - half because I believe in people can turn good, half because I don't care that much about my gifts. I'm not poor, but neither rich enough to gift full-price new/aaa games, and I can tolerate my bundle games going for a VAC-banned, even if it's a good game, but also I do accept other people's rules / ideologies about giveaways - some people give level 5+, level 7+ because they don't want to deal with rule breakers on a daily basis. Of course no level is free from rule breakers, but at level 2 public my giveaways' considerable percent is won by either people who broke the rules, or have a little sadness-inducing ratio. And by that I mean winning 10-10+ times more than they given.
So, at the end it's really nice that I can make a train, for example and I don't have to check every single winner's unactivated/multiwin page, and I can use a custom ratio/ games won rule that can balance it out between low and high gifters, as ratio is really shaky at low number of giveaways, and really, really absurd in flat numbers at lots of gifts. (0.5 ratio = 10 won, 5 given. Difference: 5. or 500 won, 250 given - difference 250. Yet ratio would treat them the same - ofc who gave more already shows some dedication, but at least it's easy to avoid situations when someone won 4, given 1 and treated as a leecher while said 500-win person just "took" 250 extra games out of the pot)

Used SGtools a few times for some of my giveaways and used it also to enter other users giveaways, but now I'm fuckin scared of being banned everytime I enter in one of those SGtools protected giveaway since the last epidemy of bans. But it still is a great tool, made with a great effort by a simple user like us so I think I'm very glad of having such a software (?), not only to prevent leechers to enter in your giveaways but also to calculate your exact CV.
And, about leechers, I think they're a lot, since I make a lot of giveaways without lvl restriction and I see quite often people with a two(or also three)-digit number of wins and 0 gifts, so a tool like this is not only useful but also necessary.

big yes for sgtools giveaways, the added flexibility that the custom parameters are giving, allow us to select who whe think should be able to partecipate in our giveaways. I know whe are here to gift and it shouldn't matter too much about who is winning, but honestly if you have like 500-600 games on steam, i expect you to be at least level 4 here on steamgifts... and if you aren't and your ratio is 0.2 then you don't quite need an additional game. I am not sure about the ban hammer system, to be honest it seems fair (ban = you cheated so you deserve it) but i would add the option to allow or not banned people to enter giveaways, based on what the users that is giving away the game wants.

i am not sure if the above are 100 words but yeah this is waht i think - and actually i will start using it more for my future real CV giveaways

So I am fairly green here myself, but I've encountered the SG tools gateway quite a few times and while I think I do see some value to it, it shouldn't just be for all giveaways. It seems to just be abused at this point. I mean if you're creating a gate for bad rats, then that is just silly. I think the tools steam gifts offers should cover most needs. You can set the level high or whitelist/ group only if you're wanting to keep it to the more deserving. Having said that, all the games I've ever given away have been from bundles and I do think there is a place for a tool like SG tools that if you have something special to giveaway, will let you do some more in depth checking of a persons deserving status. So if I was in charge of the world, my rule of thumb would be that SG tools should only be used on unbundled or high-value bundle games only. If you're using it on every single game you got from a $1 bundle then that's just silly.
Then the other thing that does bug me about the tools is also that it seems to blacklist or ban people incorrectly? Hasn't happened to me but I see lots of complaints on the SG tools giveaways threads. I think if it worked 100% there'd be less complaints as well.

Anyhow, that's my 2 cents. Alright for some giveaways, but should not be spammed on cheap games, that's just annoying.

Eh I never go for giveaways that deal with SGtools (to be honest I don't really enter into many normal giveaways either), I mean sure people have the right to use it if they want but I feel its too scungie. It's more like either you want to give a game away or you don't. I can understand if you want to put a level restriction to broadly target a level (for example people who don't just have 20 steam accounts just to increase chances). But after that it becomes a bit to over themselves, wanting people with this, and not that, and certain these and blah blah. Its like meh I'd rather just buy a game then have to conform to all your rules or have to go through some sort of "inspection" (SGtools inspecting profile) just to even enter into a giveaway.

Then again I don't even bother with giveaways anymore, I just drop all my keys in IRC chats, forums and skype chats, so what do I know.

So far, I’ve tried to use level requirements to prevent problems with the winners of my giveaways, and I’d say I haven’t run into any ugly situations. But I like how SGTools gates allow checking the basic site rules such as “all wins activated” or “no multiple wins of the same thing”. However, I think this is something SG itself should be doing – it just shows that many people view three-day (or whatever the usual length is) suspensions as too soft punishments for breaking some of the most basic SG rules. If SG itself offered to create “no rulebreakers allowed” giveaways, it could be a bit more reliable.

I’m a bit undecided regarding the VAC ban checking – it has nothing to do with the SG site, and even if someone’s ban was a case of “I was young and foolish”, Steam support won’t help you remedy the thing. (On the other hand, I guess SG staff might assist you in making your profile look “as good as new” if you for instance activate the missing wins or do some sort of apology giveaways for some of your questionable wins.)

The value and ratio criteria seem less controversial to me, quite on par with level requirements. Some of the other checks are definitely nice in some situations, such as “giveaway for people who have won very little so far”. “Maximum number of entries” is a relatively ordinary and potentially useful one, but again, something that would be done much better by SG itself.

The biggest problem (again, stemming from the separation of SG and SGTools) is that the banhammer is so easy to trigger unknowingly, which can be misused to create traps and such.

Its good SGtools exists , its not mandatory so people that like it can use it and the ones that don't like it are free to not use it. Lately i've been using SGtools for several reasons , the basic level on steam gifts is sometimes insuficient to prevent some people to enter your giveaways ,and most of them were going to people that have poor ratios , don't activate games , regift and all sorts of things that are not allowed or frowend upon by the community, with SGTools you can limit the access to the giveaways with far more rules and constraints when compared with the regular giveaway system. and try to keep the system fair and balanced. I don't have much time for private groups or whitelists so SGtools offers a good alternative.

SGtools is basically additional private security in what is already a police state.

I have never aspired to become a speechwriter, politician, or mainstream political columnist. Nevertheless, if you can look beyond my pitiable writing style you'll certainly see that I have something important to tell you about sgtools. As this letter will make clear, one can consecrate one's life to the service of a noble idea or a glorious ideology. Sgtools, however, is more likely to foment a radical realignment of industrialized economies. I am highly critical of those who tolerate or apologize for people who work for sgtools. That's not something that we learn in school—though it should be. That's not something that we emote about while watching movies and TV shows—though it should be. What it is is something that tells us loudly and clearly that we should agree on definitions before saying anything further about sgtools's out-of-touch, censorious sermons. For starters, let's say that “Maoism” is “that which makes sgtools yearn to gain a virtual stranglehold on many facets of our educational system.”

Yes, sgtools may be nothing more than a disposable tool of power-wielding, insidious fast-talkers, but if its whinges get any more querulous, I expect they'll grow legs and attack me in my sleep. Sgtools has conceived the project of reigning over opinions and of conquering neither kingdoms nor provinces but the human mind. If this project succeeds then foul-mouthed self-promoters will be free to blame those who have no power to change the current direction of events. Even worse, it will be illegal for anyone to say anything about how purists may object to my failure to present specific examples of sgtools's destructive revenge fantasies. Fortunately, I do have an explanation for this omission. The explanation demands an understanding of how not only does sgtools burn books, but it then commands its zealots, “Go, and do thou likewise.” Sgtools is famous—infamous, really—for limiting the terms of debate by declaring certain subjects beyond discussion. It's that simple.

If you or I were to go around saying that we can stop mercantalism merely by permitting government officials entrée into private homes to search for stroppy, adversarial megalomaniacs, we would be held up to ridicule—and we would deserve it. That's why I instead point out that sgtools has said, on more than one occasion, that the only way to expand one's mind is with drugs—or maybe even chocolate. However, it has also said that the peak of fashion is to keep us perennially behind the eight ball. If you're scratching your head now, you should be. Sgtools's bruta fulmina are so arbitrary, so inconsistent, that I can't help but think that sgtools does not merely deliver an additional blow to dignity and self-worth. It does so consciously, deliberately, willfully, and methodically.

I, hardheaded cynic that I am, unmistakably gainsay sgtools's notion that it acts in the public interest. It may be more correct, however, to say that sgtools insists that its ideals will spread enlightenment to the masses, nurture democracy, reestablish the bonds of community, bring us closer to God, and generally work to the betterment of Man and society. I believe that this allegation does not withstand scrutiny, in part because sgtools wants to persuade many of its competitors to enter into a one-way “dialogue” with it. It gets better: It believes that scapegoatism can quell the hatred and disorder in our society. I guess no one's ever told it that its capricious admirers have been reopening wounds that seem scarcely healed. There must be justice and restitution for this, and those who are responsible for such phlegmatic behavior must be held accountable. I suggest we begin by tamping down any doubts that sgtools has no conception of our moral and ethical standards. Doing so will at least prove that anyone who is genuinely superficial must also be genuinely alabandical. Sgtools is both. This tells us that its policy is to provoke grungy, unenlightened ivory-tower academics into action. Then, sgtools uses their responses in whatever way it sees fit, generally to anesthetize the human spirit.

Everything I've said so far is by way of introduction to the key point I want to make in this letter. My key point is that an armed revolt against sgtools is morally justified. However, I insist that it is not yet strategically justified. Sgtools's secret agents have been pivotal in sustaining the narrative that all any child needs is a big dose of television every day. Towards this end they toss about inflated figures, dubious “facts”, and exaggerated claims about how snooty palterers are inherently good, sensitive, creative, and inoffensive. A final note: Sgtools's buddies operate secretly so as not to excite suspicion.

SGTools isn't something I ever plan on using.

That said I think it is a fantastic tool for allowing people to really customise the rules on a giveaway and as they are spending their own money to give something a random person in this community then I am all for them being able to dictate in some way the requirements.

I would however prefer to see the functionality of SGTools moved into Steamgifts itself so everyone could create a standard giveaway as they currently do or tick an advanced option to really refine the process.

better they create their own website with its own rules
(¬_¬ )