How you deal with BOTS & BLACKLIST function?

Most of my giveaways are restricted to groups as well. It is a mechanism to fight with bots.

honestly... its more likely humans entering in the first seconds, its easy to click sort by new, and 1 click enter with scripts like ESGST and be entered with 5 seconds of a giveaway being created.

bots will be refreshing every 15-30 minutes, to a bot it doesn't matter if they enter immediately or not, but a human will want to enter and go on with life.

I usually make giveaways for level 3 or 4. I find it's enough to filter most bots

First of all it's your blacklist. You can add everyone if you want. Secondly you can't run from bot accounts. It's not that easy to understand if they are or not. You are right about 0 levels that 0 contribution tho. That's why there are groups, puzzles, whitelist function etc. I love the puzzle option. You have to find the giveaway yourself. You have to earn it by solving the puzzle. But again there are bots in that field too. Like some people make ai to solve puzzles or jigidis etc. You can minimize that number with these but never zero. Sorry.

The blacklist is limited to 1000 entries and there's way more bots / autojoiners as well as leeches and exploiters here than that. You will probably go through the same stages as most people here and sooner or later start raising the entry level of your giveaways and making invite / group / whitelist only giveaways as well as using SGTools for invite only giveaways to further restrict entries and thus reducing the need to blacklist to the higher level exploiters.

That's botism, you meatbag hater!

View attached image.

Hi, I'm a bot (apparently), nice to meet you!

🫂aww ur too pure for this world.

Judge the heck away IMO! It's your brain😈
Bots/leechers/script abusers (yep there are scripts that let u auto enter giveaways without you having to care about checking ur system) they all run rampant on SG. Side note: Notice the random Thank You comments, there is a fair chance it comes via script users. The scripts/extensions have an option to enable that. But it's never a 100% certainity, so please never ever callout or accuse anyone in here. Might get you banned.

You probably came across someone who only participates in Group GAs (to maintain their ratio and to remain in that group) and Public ones. I'm not sure if they are leechers as ur post doesnt mention their ratio. Some people here don't like that as it means they are simply trading games with each other rather than gifting or sharing with the community. Most folks dont care about such things.

If I could give u some hopefully easy tips:

• Read and reread the FAQ and guidelines. Use the Discussions Search feature to check past query and discussions.
• Lessen or avoid making public GAs if you want.
• Download ESGST, pro tool for SG.
• Learn what terms like Reduced CV, CV ratio, RCV ratio means. Take your time.
• If you wanna share games, consider invite only GAs, not sure what that means? Notice the puzzles/events on Discussions, check out other threads like Community word game/Positivity thread/Cozy Train (currently ongoing)

Most importantly, know that it is pointless to 'fight' against bots or any form of leeching. Also, levels don't mean as much. Participate in GAs, engage with the community and protect your own giveaways however u like (invite only, sgtools protection, groups).

Don't think too much about it, this is a raffle website for video games. Keep bumping threads and talking, be courteous. And ever more importantly just enjoy your wins and have fun :)

A group you might want to check out. Dont forget to read the rules.
Btw good job, you have mastered this site's formatting, way better than before :D

Probably would be good for you to do giveaways in the Taleplay, group, where playing within 3 months is required, or something like Play a Game You Won on SG, where people are likely to play. Otherwise doing puzzles and such, perhaps combined with sgtools, usually does some bot weeding.

I think (i'm sure :p) that different levels users autojoin GA, not just under level 3.
Many level 0 users are genuine, many of those who join fast are genuine too.
As others said, you'll never have enough slots. Public keys return to nature, free your mind.

You want your games to be played ? Make a whitelist or join groups that ask for that.
95% public/private games (even behind puzzles or sgtools) are not played.

Ah, also welcome ! ;)

You seem to have fallen for the masafor syndrome. If you believe you saw 500 botters in 2 giveaways you are simply wrong, however you are new, so it's not your fault for seeing people spread misinformation here about bots. Don't worry though I'll explain.

You say you saw people enter as the giveaway became available and you believed that to be indicative of bot activity. However, if you head over to Active User Stats which CG kindly provided for us, you can see we average about 18k users a day. Not only that, he provided a per hour average, with the lowest at any given time yesterday being 3213 users(at around 4 am), peaking at 6034 users at 4pm(I assume that's MST my time? I don't remember). So at any given time, assuming they didn't have your game, over 3000 people could have refreshed the page and instantly joined your giveaway, if not 6000 people. At any given second you are on this website.

Extremely unlikely they wont all have your game, but what will 3000-6000 online users do when they're here? Likely enter giveaways, and check the deals and discussions forums. What I'm saying is it should be surprising if within 3 minutes of you posting a giveaway, 100 people would join. Which I don't think I've ever seen on one of mine, not even close.

Now I believe you refer to leeches as bots. Leeches are those who take and don't give, hence the 0 given, many taken, especially being here for many years. There are some really bad cases(like someone who's been here for 10 years and won a thousand games but couldn't get a job or $1 to buy some random game to give away at least anything to show their appreciation, but they are rare), but I think it's fair to say we don't know someone's life situation and what brought them or keeps them on sg. I like to look at SG as a site where you give if you can what you don't need, without the expectation to receive. If you expect to receive then group swapping's are the best for you. By that I mean, those groups that say "you must make at least one GA a month, or when you join or etc.".

This brings up the second group of people you mentioned double dipper group farmers, those who have high levels but somehow only give to their groups, yet leech on public giveaways. Still not bots, but those are the worst. Because with your standard leeches you don't know their financial situation of whether they can or can't give even after x years(although if you're in your 30's and you still can't give a game away to a site you've taken around a thousand from you're a piece of .....), but with your double dipper group farmers you know they have the ability to give away and they make the choice not to, not only that, they go the extra mile to leech on public giveaways to add insult to injury. So people who only make group GA's but leech on public ones are toxic af.

Lastly you finally have your botters, and I think all that needs to be said about that is that if you're going to make a bot that joins giveaways, why not add a random timer to it joining giveaways minutes or hours after they've been created to make it undetectable? Somehow this wooshes over every "bots everywhere" persons head, so I'm guessing they just never did any programming or they just don't have that logic implemented. Maybe there's a very insignificant amount of botters(single digits) who enter instantly, but you'd never get to 500 that way in 2 giveaways.

The argument that the bots always join first and fast doesn't work if you consider all the other factors. Looking at peak hours you'd have up to 6000 users and how could you not expect maybe 20 - 30 of those to refresh the page and look for new giveaways, that will explain why some users enter instantly. I guess it's refreshing to think someone else is there with you in that very moment, in a sense, if you're sentimental.

My recommendation: Enjoy the site and don't focus on mirages, if you want to avoid people who don't give to your satisfaction, raise your GA level to the # that makes you feel they gave enough for them to win that game. You wont have any way to avoid the double dipper group farmers, but it's better than nothing. Maybe that's the feature we need next, a GA level based on how many public GA's a user did based on their level. If their level is 0 they could still enter but if they're level 7 with no public giveaways, they can't. That'd be nice but I'm willing to bet they'd be very unhappy and against this.

I've talked about bots with users here many times almost always leading to them insulting me and deflecting off topic, and not one can prove me wrong. They have no proof, and they wont be willing to share any data with you or anybody, because it doesn't exist and it can be disproven easily. Are there bots on the site, I'm sure, but not even close to that extent.

Take care ^_^