Blacklists, sgtools, lots of demands, oh my!

Blacklists and SGTools are swords without hilts; there's no safe way to grasp them, and they cut both ways. But even a sword without a hilt is better than empty hands when one is surrounded by rule breakers, regifters and leeches.

The drama has come faster than I expected, interesting thread you made here.

Sorry for not commenting before but I had some busy days and I couldn't read the forums.
Blaming the tools for what you think is a misuse is not a wise thing to do. People are not forced to use blacklists or sgtools to add some filters to their giveaways, but if they have the tools to do it they do. Why? because it's something that they want to use because it gives them more control to where their giveaways goes.

Alot of people was not pleased when they had to give their giveaways to serial not-activators that where already punished for some days for their old mistakes but they didn't care to clean them. I mean it's that difficult to have a clean profile? No, as alot of people already pointed to you.

Are sgtools or blacklists bad and toxic for the community? I don't think so, some people can now create low level giveaways without fearing rule breakers as their winners, before you could only reduce the chance of finding them with level requirements above 4. This will help the community to get public giveaways for lesser levels than before since the creators can control a little bit better the rule breakers.

Of course there will be giveaways with high requirements, but those would have existed either way so the only difference is that now maybe you'll see them, but before where out of your view.

TL/DR: A tool is a tool and better control can get more people to giveaways they previously couldn't enter.

SGtools is giving me more confidence to give "higher valued" games to lower leveled users. It moves the burden of checking that the winner is not someone who has broken rules away from me, and that means that I can make more giveaways.

As for blacklists, well, if I did not have a way of preventing people who made openly racist comments, rule breakers, and incredibly rude people from entering my GAs, I would probably just stick with group GAs. While I think it's nice to give something to someone, I don't want to give something to someone who says that people from region X, or from faith Y are bad people.

"I thought this site was about giving and having fun, not excluding left and right"
Maybe excluding left and right is what makes the giving fun for some people...

Isn't that normal for a gifting process? You buy a gift for people you like so the process of gifting is normally limited and the rest ist "excluded". It is actually more of rewarding process and including more people than in real life. So the choice of word is really irritating. Also the creators are the people who keep the site running. Their rights shouldactually be prioritised before the receivers.
Also blacklists and SGtools are completely blown out of proportion. If you consider the number of active users and take the few vocals ones using the sgtools or having a noteworthy blacklist you will notice that those numbers are probably below 1 % and there is no excluding left and right. You could argue that the majority of the giveaways are created by only 1-5 % of people which use those exclusion tools. But if that would be the case the community should ask itself why it is that way. There may be reasons.

And once again I don't think the phrasing is fair. Especially SGtools is something people use to include more people than before without resorting to much harsher conditions.

Just took a look at my blacklist and there's 5 ppl in it. As far as I remember, one of those was ranting about SteamGifts on the forums and insulting everyone, the other 4 probably were one of those making fake gibs.
I wonder if there's any way to find out how many blacklists I'm in. Since I whitelist everyone who I win a game from (sorry if this sentence doesn't make sense, english is not my first language), I realized that I've been blacklisted by many of those so I can't win 2 giveaways from them.

Instead of blaming people utilizing these tools, blame the leechers and cheats. Or blame admin / mods for not doing more to prevent it.

And back again on the same trade....

Ok yeah ,everyone's right. It's not the guns that kill people it's the poeple who kill people. Don't blame it on me, blame it on the boogie..!

I wrote more than I should but deleted in since either written or not I'll be/am blacklisted anyway since "they" just like to exclude poeple from their GA's they don't know and have the "right" just to blacklist anyone they want without even reasoning....
It could be that there was a good idea about blacklisting but I think that it's really abused atm. Come on, give me one good reason and please explain me how you can actually fill your blacklist? Do you hate people that much? or is it just paranoia that some " non activator" could win your GA. Even among the "givers" there are acc's with multiple acc's even knowing it's not alowed! If you'r that paranoid that "everyone on a free community" can enter your GA's just don't go public! Just do group only, with your "chosen few".

Either way, the new sgtools is even more fun...
Just like it's on my point of view... I've got a multiple win of a game "kinda" by mistake (told it to some before won't explain it again since you'll blacklist me anyway 'couse of "rule breaking" even if it's by mistake)
Since I can't remove a multiple win which happened almost a year ago it means that I'm actually falling out of all the GA's made over sgtools.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Blacklists happen, and anyone is free to limit entry to whatever they're giving away for whatever arbitrary reason. I've been blacklisted by some, whitelisted by others, and in no particular list for the vast majority of SG users.

I enter for the games I'm interested in playing and ignore the giveaways I can't join. Worrying about blacklists, ratios, or anything else is going to cause you stress that could easily be avoided if you simply stopped caring about all the drama. With thousands of giveaways running at all time, why spend any energy worrying about the handful of them you can't join?

If you're annoyed about being left out for a mistake you made 3 years ago, then why don't you just fix it? It's not like it would be a hard thing to do. Your view is that you took the punishment already, for others all they see is that you made no effort to correct the situation in the span of all those years.