Your Opinion: Banning CD-key giveaways

I vote Steam-gifts only.

Wow, 16 hours and over 100 comments. Pretty amazing how active this community is compared to SGS.

I'm guessing that the cd-keys that we are discussing about also include voucher codes that come included with certain computer components, notably video cards? In that case, I would vote to keeping cd-keys on SteamGifts.

Although I have not read thoroughly the opinion of users here, I agree with the argument that cd-keys might involve scams or problems in regards to the original owner of the CD. Nevertheless, banning cd-keys altogether would eliminate potential legitimate (which will probably be the majority) giveaways, and this will negatively impact SteamGifts.

I feel that a compromise would be to mark giveaways as real Steam gifts or cd-keys and to warn users of potential scams associated with cd-keys before they participate in the giveaway. This gives the user the option to participate or not in the giveaway with full understanding of the risk.

I say no.

However, there needs to be a rule to tell where you got your key on description of giveaway. Giveaways for keys obtained from Polish website (Dark Messiah MP key for example) needs to be removed straight away and user must get punished for not reading rules.

Alright.... Here's my view.

If the game is natively available through steam, then No, the CD key should be given away.

HOWEVER, if the game has a CD-key that will work through steam, but, is not available through steam (Prey, for example!), then it should be allowed.

Security is main reason! Ban

Ban for this? Nonsense.
What about gifts from carded/stolen cards?

Banning them all also hurts the legit ones. Admins be on your toes and ban just the exploited ones. Just remove the exploited ones from the database. If you ban them all you still cant make sure donators wont still be giving them away for other games.

After thinking it through, it'll be better to have an option to mark giveaways as steam gifts or CD-Keys, as well as making it mandatory about describing how the member got the gift copy/copies in the first place. Maybe a report function for those that break the rules might work too.

Personally I say ban CD-key giveaways. As an alternative we as a site could suggest that steam comes up with some way to redeem a CD key as a gift Key through their store. I doubt it'd be that hard, just mark the key as having been turned into a gift and create a gift copy of the game yeah? Trick would be actually getting them to do something so mundane.

Ban all but humble packs.

I think CD Key Give aways should be seperate from true Steam gifts since there is more risk involved.
and/Or have them have to be approved / validated some way.

Ultimately getting Steam on-board to back/validate cd key give aways would be great.

I want to say ban them. Most every CD key giveaway looks pretty shady. And ban humble bundles too. Those are basically free anyway and If people pay attention to the forums they can figure out when another humble bundle goes on sale.

However at the same time a lot of these are legit giveaways. What If Ubisoft has another 100% discount? We would miss out on alot of good deals. The only safe route for this site would be to ban them I think. It is called steam gifts and not CD key giveaways. Although, maybe we are all getting worked up over nothing? No one has posted any issues yet, maybe we should just wait a little while and see how this plays out.

My thought it that CD-key and Gift giveaways should be labeled on the giveaway page so the entrants know what they're getting. The same issue with CD-keys can pretty much be applied to gifts. AFAIK, recipients' accounts can be banned just as easily for receiving a fraudulent gift as with a CD-key. But with that, what would be the point of GIVING AWAY fraudulent keys? It's not as if the giver is gaining anything monetary from this site. They can do this via ebay, craiglist, or a slew of underground cd-key selling/trading sites.

I'm glad I read this topic, I was able to get my friends Dark Messiah mp for free ^^

CD Keys can be cheaper in some cases and they can be abused easily, so they should be totally banned. Also the humble bundle stuff are not that reliable I guess. Someone can say they are gifting Frozenbyte Bundle but give a key instead.

Guys, just a cd-key/proof of purchase of the cd-key is not enough proof for steam to just hand over the steam account to someone else. There's also IP adress, verified steam accounts and the new steamguard protection system that will all ensure that no one will get their hands on your steam account trough a cd-key.

Definitely I think we deserved to be at least told about that it's CD keys, because it's not fair with the winners who get their account stolen don't know what hit them.

If it were possible, it should all be banned.

Limiting the gifts on steamgifts to steam gifts seems more than logical.

i think this is call for STEAM ... for example i have tons of STEAM keys but i don't think i can turn them into gifts

So, is there any conclusion? Can i add another Prey? ;)

Just make it have a 'This is a CDKEY' flag so ppl know when they enter the giveaways, they know the risk?

(PS, no risk with RUSE ;D)

maybe "force" the person to give as much information as possible about the key? (example: they have to fill out where they got the key from or else they can't post the giveaway and leaving it empty results in it getting removed?) as in, where he/she got it from, like someone else in the comments already suggested. i think this would give better insight, even though you probably can never be on the safe side with this and just have to trust in the person giving away the key.

allow this feature only to verified trusted gifters / official gifers and problem is solved ...