After seeing my blacklist, I think the best thing would be a permanent ban. Seven users (of eighteen) included in my blacklist have been suspended. Two of them with level three and four. Some are veterans with more than two years in the community (there is one with five years old and zero gifts offered to the community) Another one with more than 120 gifts obtained, and another who had almost a gift per day, I imagine that just started...
From my white list, it's small, only ten members, nobody. I'm very happy.
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Interesante... voy a revisar mi BL y WL también :]
edit: 0/34 in my BL, most of them I can barely remember why they are there so I might lift the BL now that BL are bidirectional (a few were added since I was added to theirs without knowing why lol). And my WL is +10x bigger than my BL so I won't check them haha
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How can you see your blacklist? I've seen the url in another topic once, but I don't remember it.
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You can access it from the top menu under account > sync with steam https://www.steamgifts.com/account/manage/blacklist
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I only looked at the last page (18) of my BL (i have over 400 users on it). So only at 7 people and 2 of them are suspended for that short period.....
I think that say enough.
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400? You're my idol. Give me time, I just got here ... XD
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Looking at it that way it seems there's very few h4x0r cheaters around, but still, good riddance of 1614 auto-entries in public and some private GAs at least!
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Well, thats all registered users. I dont know how many active users there are.
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anywhere between 30 and 50k. 30k featured GAs have less entries than copies, but considering that some users may not join them we can assume that itt's a little more than these 30k, but not much, considering numbers of entries in shovelware GAs.
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it's so unfair, those users contributed with "good games" :O
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Most of your comments makes me laugh.so here have a blue heart from me :)
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We need longer ban. It's impossible to win games with these bots
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a short suspension as a reminder to disable their scripts
Don't worry, this seems to be Strike 2. Next time it's highly likely that the ban hammer will be permanent for bot-users :]
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Discovered a few known users, at least some mid level users, quite unlucky ones :D with similar win to sent ratios, suspended for being lazy, but with less winning chances than lower levels without auto joiner.
enforcing this rule was a good thing, that doesn't really warrant a blacklist, i don't think less of those suspended, i just wouldn't care for their situation even if it was permanent. A lot of them, don't really care for the community, knew what they were doing, and were only worried of the script being detected. It sad that some of them took from you, and didn't really acknowledge it as a kind act.
If the FAQ and guidelines read like clear rules, rather than suggestions and if this one was enforced early, you wouldn't have people not reading GAs descriptions or taking 7 days to activate a key because they are so accustomed to a script doing everything for them.
EDIT: also suspensions seem to be directed at heavy usage of the scripts, not abranging everyone that uses the script but only enters for specific games, so the lower number than expected is not that surprising
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I really think the suspensions should already had be permanent.
I don't have any ideia why they we're so short haha
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I'm glad it wasn't a much larger amount more. I had less confidence in the overall community use of auto-joins, even if just over the past week or so. I'm glad the infractions will become more severe in the future, since it is almost like cheating on a steam game, or anything in life to get ahead unfairly, in my opinion. Of course, if one is using auto-join, they probably will not get this kind of information posted here easily - since it bothers them to click on stuff. Reading is a step harder than a simple click... ^_^
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Yay! After five months minimal effort is being made! Good job you lot!
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maybe offtopic.
but why you can't give choise for ga maker to add captcha to ga?
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Chrome web store has a feature to report abusing scripts. Could you add this info to the OP? Thanks for your hard work detecting these bots.
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scripts that automates anything on the web are not against Chrome TOS. They can be against particular website TOS (in this case against SG TOS), but google only removes addons that are breaking their own TOS, not website you use them on.
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Google and ethics were never in the same boat but if they receive, let's say, 500 abuse reports for a particular script they would probably take some measures.
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doubtful, if asll it takes for removal of addon was 500 reports it would be crazy-exploitable. Imagine this - you are running an addon which is used by millions of users, you are competing with other addon used by millions as well, you want to take these millions and easiest way to do it is to get rid of competitor, if his addon gets removed his users (clients) will come to you as an alternative. So you hire a botnet to send unique reports, hiring a botnet of few thousands is quite cheap, especially for one time action - and you think something like that will be enopugh to take something from Chrome, if this something is not breaking any Chrome TOS rules? just because 500 people don't like it? If a lot of people report google will look into addon, but they will see it's not breaking their TOS and move on.
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pretty much what you said ;) That's why it cannot work that way, X reports and we automatically pull something off even if it follows our rules. There are botnets for hire with hundreds of thousands computers infected, any automatic system like this would be a suicide.
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what probably does happen is that after a threshold it triggers a human review of it or something along those lines
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yes, exactly that ;) but if an expansion is not breaking Chrome Store's regulations all these reports can cause someone to look at it, review it, and if it's not breaking TOS leave it be. So if an expansion is not against the rules no matter if 10, 100 or 1000 people organize themselves and send a report - in the end it will still be reviewed by human, and positive review means it stays no matter how many people does not like it.
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I haven't read the rules for the chrome store but, it might be against it's rules to have an extension that breaks the TOS of another site (well at least breaking YouTube's or Facebook's TOS generally isn't allowed)
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you see, you didn't read yet you assume that something may be, I read the rules and I even already mentioned it in this discussion here. The mentioned script don't seem to be breaking any of Chrome Store Policies nor Terms of Service. Generally automation is noth against rules unless it's used for spam, in this case it is not. As for FB/YT it may as well be the case of these scripts also breaking Chrome Store rules. For example anything that circumvents login restrictions (so for example exploring FB without logging in) is against rules, script allowing management of multiple FB accounts in one browser in different sessions also circumvents login restrictions and can be used for spam as well, so may be against the rules anything that enable the unauthorized access, download, or streaming of copyrighted content or media is against the rules, so all kind of YT scripts allowing you to download video, convert it to mp3 etc wopuld be against the rules and so on and on. So the reason such scripts are taken down does not need to be necessary caused by these scripts breaking TOS of other websites but because they are also breaking Chrome's own TOS.
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well, my assumptions were based on stuff that happened so not a pure guess on my part. the Facebook case i was thinking about the problem was the part of it that detected when someone unfriended the user (I can't think of any reason why that would break any copyright or spam rule), it was promptly restored after that functionality was removed.
And about the YouTube case, I don't remember what was the difference between the chrome store version and the script available directly on the site but I'm almost sure that the downloading function was available on both(so it wouldn't be the cause for the removal as it stayed after it was restored).
anyway, I'm gonna try to find the exact differences on these two cases and compare them to the chrome store policies and TOS to see if they broke any part of it other than doing stuff the website creators don't allow.
any thoughts on the Facebook case? (I'm not gonna ask about the YT one as i don't remember the exact differences)
edit: I was kinda wrong about the Facebook case they removed It's FB page(as far as I remember they also got it removed from the chrome store but i couldn't find any evidence of that so it probably didn't happen) and I was wrong about the YouTube case(I might have been right about it at some point in the past but as it is currently not on the chrome store and the dev does not have a blog/fb page as the dev from the FB case does I can't know, i could check the GitHub issues but that would take way more time to do properly than I can spare now) it isn't back in the chrome store
And most important of all I read the rules you linked, check my other comment.
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As for YouTube - keep in mind that YT is currently owned by Alphabet, parent company of both Google and Chrome, so it is understandable they will interpret their rules in a different manner in aspect that affects their company directly and in aspect of some relatively small community passion project like SG.
As for FaceBook, they are one of the biggest tech-companies in industry currently, so similar situation, it's not really profitable to go for court war against FB, it would cost millions for no gain, especially as both companies heavilly profit from each opther. Contrary I doubt Google is profiting a lot from SG ;p
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just read part of the rules linked by you, and I was right that breaking the TOS of other sites/services is not allowed, a quote from the Google Chrome Web Store Developer Agreement:
4.4 Prohibited Actions.
4.4.1 You agree that you will not engage in any activity with the Web Store, including the development or publication of Products or other materials, that violates the Google Chrome Web Store Program Policies, or that:
- knowingly violates a third party’s terms of service,
edit: but the auto-join prohibition would probably need to be here for that to apply I think (I might be wrong about that, might not be, Don't know of a way to check)
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you may be right on that one, this one I might have missed, so sorry for that and I stand corrected.
But first, like you said, it would have to be in SG TOS, 2nd I believe they would still be reviewing and determining third party TOS to validate whether the rules in said TOS comply with them. Because theorethically it could be exploitable as well, I could make a shitty website with account creation option with TOS saying 'you are not aloowed to have any addon/extension installed that start's with a letter A' and write to google that they should ban all Chrome extensions/Plugins starting with letter A because people using them may visit by website and create an account. I also believe this perticular point is there mainly to protect Google from companies that may be costly to fight against or simply not worth to fight against, because it's better to deal with them so you both profit. So if someone is making a script that breaks TOS of a big company Alphabet can use this point as an excuse to ban it, because they want to continue making business with said company (for example FaceBook) or don't want to risk massive expenses of a big lawsuit battle over some niche extension, at the other hand they may still just ignore it in cases of small websites not worthy of their time, passion projects like SG which surely would not be able to afford a court battle against a moloch like Google.
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Aww thanks! But in all honesty, I'm not really a fan. At least not anymore. I had a brief fling with HammerFall's music aeons ago, bought 2-3 albums (Legacy of Kings is one of them) and saw the band in concert once. :3
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There's nothing wrong with not loving everything from a certain band. It's not a sect ;-) As long as you still like listening to a song or two from the way back - that's cool :-) I like metal in general, and that usually means two or three songs from 40 different bands :)))
Have a great day!
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More chance for us I guess. Surprised there were only 1500+ of them
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Thanks for the good work CG.
That's a good start to clean out the crap so the community can improve.
Have some appropriate banhammer party gifs
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I have a question, I just see one Sg user the win one of my giveaways and he/she is suspended with 1 day remaining, So, I send the key before this.
What do I have to do? Wait or ask for reroll, or what??
Sorry for my very basic english
EDIT: just see all the "Awayting Feedback" and 6 of 8 user are suspended!! All level 2+ users
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con razon gano pocos juegos, no sabia que hubiera esos scripts...
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Do those ban apply to those who use SG Plus? The one that add join button without having to enter the giveaway page.
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no, SG Plus still requires you to manually click this button, it's not autojoining. However if you would for example setup autoit script that would go through all pages and click this button for you in specific periods of time you would get banned, but not because of SG+ but rather because of this automation component.
tl;dr: SG+ can be used in autojoin scheme, and it would get you banned, but sg+ alone will not.
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Hi SG,
You might remember that 5 months ago we had a discussion about scripts and add-ons used to automatically join giveaways, and how they are against the rules.
Unfortunately, a large number of users continued to use those scripts, and we needed to suspend 1,614 users today. The suspensions are based on activity from the past week. For now, those users have received a short suspension as a reminder to disable their scripts. However, future suspensions will be more severe, or permanent.
Hopefully this will help to keep the community fair for everyone. Enjoy your week!
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