Comment to Entry Ratio is not important

"Sure, your opinion is important, but so is mine and the OP's."

The reason I said "Clearly what you think is the most important thing, and everyone of differing opinions should be drawn and quartered." is because he's taking his own opinion on thanking and making it a justification for his not posting thank you's on giveaways, he's making the presumption that EVERYONE thinks like he does and thus it's execusable and justifiable for him to not thank others on giveaways. In my response, I'm not assuming that EVERYONE wants to be thanked, but if you aren't sure whether a gifter prefers or doesn't prefer to be thanked on the giveaway page with a simple "thank you", that (and this is a proposition, not stating it as fact so you don't misunderstand me even more) you have more to lose by not thanking them then you do by posting a simple thank you.

So using extreme examples to accentuate the point, if two gifters giveaway Bioshock Infinite and each get 5000 entries, I would propose that in general, it would be more saddening to the person who likes to get thank yous and gets 0 comments than it would be to the person who doesn't like "mindless" thank yous and gets 5000 comments that are just variations of "thanks".

That being said I hardly think all variations of the "thanks" comments are user scripted, SFK indeed has been doing it forever, and I could go on about what I think about SFK but I doubt that would be prosperous to the state of my account on this site. There are definitely quite a few other people who are using it, and it definitely is defeating the point (just like people who are too lazy to even scroll down to the comment box and post it and just piggy bag on the first comment). The idea is the thought behind thanking someone who has spent their own money to give a game to a stranger, if you're doing the most efficient method of thanking (using user scripts, piggy backing) because you feel as if thanking is some social expectation that you have to uphold just because, then obviously there are problems. But if you're simply taking a few seconds out of your time selflessly to thank someone.

It is my opinion at any rate that if someone is genuinely thanking someone, albeit a simple message like "thank you" then at least respect them for doing so. Obviously if they are using a script or something just to save them the hassle of having to be courteous, there is something to object to, but generalizing the situation and saying everyone is using a script is erroneous and just that--a generalization.

In closing, I'll just say that at no point was I saying my opinion is more important than that of people who hold beliefs like you or the OP, quite the contrary. In fact I'm actually proposing it's important to consider every single persons perspective (every single gifters whom giveaways you enter anyways). Generally if "thank you" comments seriously offend someone or they find them very annoying then they say so in the giveaway, but very few people mandate you to say thanks, why? Because in most societies being courteous is the norm, so when most gifters don't specify whether they want to be thanked or don't want to be thanked in the comment section, I propose that it's a much safer option to just thank them. This is of course assuming you're actually attempting to do the morally right thing and to be as courteous as you can to the gifters sensibilities. If you just want to say "I don't like thank yous, so I'm not giving them out to anyone" and totally disregard what message that may send to the gifters, then go right ahead, you're entitled to do that.

That does not make all of the comments script generated. About only 1-to-10 entree even posts a comment in the first place.