Was this a good move from Valve?
Finally, tired of all (INSERT NAME HERE) NETWORKxDDDD gleam giveaways just to boost their members/twitter/instagram ratio
#MakeMassGiveawaysGreatAgain
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Follow their shit, get your game key, and then unfollow. It's not rocket science.
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The time i waste doing that isnt worth a Woodle Tree Adventure key.
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Then don't do it. I've only seen two of those giveaways. I've gotten at least 100 games in my collection this way. I've even gotten a few surprisingly good $10 indie games with Gleam free giveaways.
Click the Gleam link, see what game it is, and decide if it's worth doing. I've never had a giveaway that took more than 3 minutes except the occasional "watch this video" ones.
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Videos that you can skip by pressing the End key right after clicking on the video itself. :3
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Yeah, I understand how it could be annoying for groups without proper moderating. Still sucks for whoever needs to post these links.
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I get your pain, your gleam ones where nice giveaways, almost no tasks at all. Keep up with the good work.
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tbh even groups with moderation like yours (nothing personal, I really do love your FGF group and have all topics subscribed ;p) were in fact quite often breaking Steam Groups. It's been very common in gleam GAs to have requirements associated with greenlight - like Vote for XYZ GreenLight page or Check out XYZ on GreenLight - while not directly saying "Vote Yes for free key" - it was still close enough to what we had 1+ year ago and whaat Volvo took steps against. On gleam you were simply receiving other game for voting for other game, not same game. You can argue that "noone directly said "Vote YES" and people could vote otherwise" but fact of the matter is that I've seen not a single GA stating one can vote NO and as many people are not aware how gleam works (for example same is with Subscribe to YT - gleam doesn't check, but people not aware will sub anyway) would vote anyway.
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I agree very much with this post. It really annoys me how Gleam was being misused to trick people into thinking they were requested to do these kind of things - from subscribing on Youtube to referral links and voting on Greenlight. These things should stay out of Gleam.
One of the biggest problem here are the people behind these giveaway websites like Gleam, Woobox, and so many others; they lack in moderation of what is allowed and what is not allowed to do, because in the end they are the ones making money with "premium" accounts. But with a little bit of restriction to what people may include in their tasks list, everything would be much better. One solution would be having a more limited kind of giveaway platform where every giveaway must be verified by a website moderator. Then again, this could prove to be way too much trouble to be worth it.
Honestly, I just wish everyone would go back to the kind of giveaways we had in the past - "Here's your free key, like us on Facebook if you want." Maybe not as profitable for the developers, but it's simple and won't cause trouble with Valve or pretty much anyone else. Besides, Facebook likes and Twitter follows aren't worth anything if the people actually don't give a shit about you. :P
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yeah -it could be done with moderating on gleam or woobox part but it wasn't, and we are all well aware how Volvo does things - they will fix things the easiest way for themselves, which usually mean banning everything. Same was with tradingAPI - I am sure there were some websites which used it for non-gambling purposes, or some gambling sites that did age verification etc - but easiest way for Volvo was to simply ban everything and same is here with gleam ;)
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This is probably why they did it. Another attempt at getting rid of a few bad apples (in this case, greenlight vote baiting & review rigging) by cutting down the whole orchard.
Unless some of their automated filters decided to freak out again. I mean, that's not the first time that happened and caused legit sites to be blocked. I've had that happen for the Harebrained Schemes homepage and with links to Steam Store pages in the past.
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I love Gleam. I get so many free games and stuff, and a lot of them have trading cards. If you don't like free stuff, I mean, get mad. Honestly though it's a way to increase your game collection and find the occasional overlooked game without having to spend a cent and it only takes a minute or two.
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SUPER CS:GO RAINBOW KNIFE FREEEE just join 20 gambling groups follow 30 spammers check out 15 reflinks watch 5 videos with paid advertisements and sell your soul for 1 in 500,000 chance and btw we don't even have a knife.
^ This is why.
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I don't join those giveaways, just the ones where they giveaway like 10,000 or 50,000 free game keys and doing the tasks guarantees you get one immediately. The ones you mentioned do suck bad.
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Agreed, and I like joining those for free games as much as the next fella (to which my shudder-inducing grouplist attests) - but it's still a horrible system that's ripe for abuse and creates far too much spam.
Steam can't distinguish the mildly annoying but legitimate giveaways from the ultra-spammy (and usually ultra-scammy) 'raffle' types that get posted everywhere, so filtering them all makes sense I suppose.
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You can freely leave the groups and Gleam will still recognise you as a member
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Whenever I leave one I have to join them again if they appear in another gleam giveaway. Tell me your secret!
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I have no idea. There's only been a couple I've had to rejoin and those were months after I'd left. It'll still give the join group link but I can almost always just click continue and it'll accept the task as completed.
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I have no clue what gleam or gleam links are, so I guess it doesn't matter at all to me.
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gleam itself is a good tool, it's just been badly misused by many people and they took far too long before they started doing anything about it. but now that gleam are taking steps to reduce some of the over the top requirements and abuse of the greenlight system it seems silly for valve to start blocking them now
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I gave up on gleam when the groups started asking for twitter and tumblr accounts. Twitter demands my phone number every other day, and I had no idea what tumblr was, so now I just try my luck on orlygift...
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For the groups, it is not problem to get a free server space and post the links to the gleam there. So nothing changes for steam. Or they can use shorteners.
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Nevermind, so the free hosting will serve them. It takes just few minutes to register on a free hosting.
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Step 1: buy xyz domain for 80 cents
Step 2: get free hosting
Steam 3: install random url shorten script eg. https://yourls.org/
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unnecessary, but whatever...
they will be probably unblocked soon like they did with steamgifts.
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It was already blocked at least two times *shrugs*
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I have to abstain from voting... I have no idea what the "f" Gleam is... so the options do not apply to me. Granted, I can ascertain what it is by reading the thread here, but it still feels like an uneducated vote... and we 'muricans do that enough already.
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Gleam is that giveaway thing that keeps popping up on the forum.
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Thanks 007... I guess I have pulled a title from there before... it just was not jumping out at me. I could have Googled it I suppose, but then I wouldn't be able to bump your thread through the power of my lacking intelligence. It truly is a force to be reckoned with.
:D
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Ouch, I feel for you homie! The work must continue as a group moderator, AMIRITE?
I imagine there must be a way around it? Maybe a space inbetween the link or something or the sort?
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Yep, RathaWynter found a few ways around it, one of which is an obscure URL shortener, but we'll limit its usage to chat messages since we'd rather not have that one get blocked as well - if nobody knows about it, Valve won't either. :P
As for the other way, it just breaks the link so that you can copy paste, but we can no longer link stuff.
And as for me, I've decided to be a smartass and bypass the link filters on my Steam profile. I won't link directly because it contains a referral link, but check the "Links" section of my profile info box.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/jbondguy007/
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So apparently Gleam links are now blocked on Steam. As someone running a Steam group which posts Gleam links on a daily basis, this is a huge pain in the neck. I wonder what brought that on, as Gleam links are generally mostly safe and legit (with a few exception, I've only seen very few Gleam links being shared which were suspicious).
What are your thoughts on this?
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