Tired of these ugly group invitations

Groups can't invite themselves :) Each and every group I was invited to had one member only, different user and group each time.

Sure, there could be users like that in every group but they're most commonly found in those shitty games massive giveaways groups. I'm in quite a number of public as well as large groups (200k+ members) and I'm not getting spammed with random invites. When I've joined those spammy groups before, I usually left them again immediately after grabbing a key because I have little to no interested in those group and their content nor do I want my activity feed flooded with nonsense that I don't care about. I guess the bottom line is, don't stay in a shit ton of groups that offer free keys for shitty games that nobody really needs anyhow except for that +1 or to farm the cards if they have any. Cause that's literally all you get from those groups and, of course, the random invites to random groups that nobody needs. =)

Also, I wouldn't know how you want to make the groups more functional because what options are there? Put restrictions on newly created groups that they have to wait so and so long before they can invite people? I doubt that would stop those people from creating groups and using a bot to send out random invites to whoever. If whoever sent those invites is a legitimate group then one could report them to an admin to have them banned from the group but honestly, admins of those free massive giveaway groups don't care which is usually pretty easy to tell by looking at the comment section and the gazillion CS:GO link spams that get ignored even though quite a number of groups have rules that state "no ref links" and what not. What they could do, however, is add an option to everyone's personal settings to just not accept group invites entirely. Kind of like in some games where you can select whether or not you want to allow people to send you random guild or trade invites. Or add options like everyone, friends only, nobody. That's the only thing I can think of that they could do to permanently eliminate people being spammed with random invites in general.

The Original <Whatever> Groups are public groups centered around guerilla marketing and spam self-advertisement in order to boost their membership so their highest-ranking members could extract keys from indie developers or strike publicity deals that involved mandatory mass upvotes on greenlight games or positive reviews on already published ones. Said scandal I mentioned was revolved around the group owner threatening a developer to order the group membership to buy, idle for 5 minutes, negatively review, then refund his game in mass quantities unless he sends over a few thousand keys.

Comparing this to lovol deciding to create an invite-only group where he invited a bunch of SG users instead of using a whitelist here to make a few giveaways for 130 or so people is a tiny little bit different.

As I said, you can choose your groups however you want, but you also have to accept what groups you want to belong to. If you want to continue snatching the free keys he continues to blackmail from devs, you are free to do that. But then you also have to accept that botnets use the membership list of his groups to find potential victims for the latest CS:GO scam. This is how Steam groups work for a few months now and nothing is going to be done with it in the foreseeable future.

If the calendar is right, exactly two months ago I was at my folks' house for a weekend visit. Why? :)