Wallace is a good dude. Cheers to him! 🍻
PS: Very glad this got sorted. It must have been really scary. I would never want that to happen to anybody with good intentions.
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He was SO kind in his message, he's a real asset to the team at Valve! Yay Wallace!
I was a little stressed that I had actually warranted the ban & wouldn't be able to undo it, so a big relief to have my profile back. :)
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My worries was that because you mentioned Steamgifts that would go against their ToS. And as you can see, it sadly is. But, Wallace was nice enough to let that one slide. But to be fair, the team at Valve are very much understanding that without the customer being appreciated the platform would not be so loved and appreciate by so many. I have had countless exceptional experiences with Valve and seen a lot on Reddit where they did an outstanding customer service, very understandable, friendly and helpful.
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Thanks for this info! Could you please link me to this page?
I spent some time during my community ban looking through different sections of the steam TOS and couldn't find anything related to giveaways, except in the case of unbalanced competitive advantaged or for monetary gain. Obviously I have been looking through the wrong part, so I'd love to know where to go to make sure there isn't anything else I've missed ☺️
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Now, I got this via Google Genesis AI. I know it used to be something related to ToS, but I can't recall where I read this to be fair. Maybe it got removed with the updated ones as they understood that Steamgifts is a trustworthy 3rd party.
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Thanks! I do remember it being in the terms previously as well, that's why I was searching so hard haha. Hopefully steam has changed their policy on SG then!
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I hope the same. But anything can change. SG rarely lead to people getting scammed. People being unpleased for not getting their win, sure, that could be a thing, but we normally don't have such issues. It's the trading side that get's a lot of heat.
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don't bother reaching out to winners unless its a direct steam gift.
they have one week after clicking send, if they don't claim it by then, reroll ticket.
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Oh, thank you for the advice! For some reason I thought it was a requirement to try and make contact first but I'd much rather just keep it all on SG like you've said.
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was a requirement before, but there was some changes not overly long ago where support can see when you sent a key now.
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As far as I remember there needs to be some proof you tried to reach out if you want to reroll before a month(?) has passed, but it's been some time.
In my case I just used email provided with winner information to reach out to them after a week, after no further response I sent the screenshot of it to support team asking for a reroll and got approval
Other way I saw people mention is leaving comment under the giveaways they created before, but I'm not sure they would notice that if they don't check wins.
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just made simpler for us now(see linked thread for when it was updated)
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I use 'SpaceCat' to refer to SG in those situations.
Glad it got sorted!
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doesn’t referring to steamgifts as SG not suffice? or do they flag that abbreviation as well?
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Just saying SG might not be clear due to other meanings of SG
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So do you say something like "the SpaceCat has visited you" or would that be too vague?
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Something like, "the SpaceCat has something for you" but you can phrase it how you like.
..but I don't want to contradict the advice to wait it out and ask for a re-roll. That's fine.
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Oh, yeah, that's much more evident.
Honestly I no longer bother to go beyond leaving a comment in one of the winner's own GA, but I luckily haven't had an unresponsive winner in a while.
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I didn't view it as a contradiction at all! A subtle code word like SpaceCat is an awesome idea, and I'll definitely use it when my winner hasn't been on the SG website since winning. It's nice to hear all of the different ways people solve problems ☺️
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You have a very fun way to present the facts :D
But indeed, as Care said, don't use Steam to contact the winner. If they did not claim their win after 1 week, open a ticket to reroll . The mods have now a tool which tells them exactly when you sent your key.
Glad this has been sorted out, and know that you were lucky. Steam support usually is not empathetic.
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Haha, thank you! I found the whole situation a little bit funny once it was over. I felt very silly and naive.
Thanks for the extra advice & ur positive response 💗
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No idea, maybe because 14 is Valentine Day (joke)
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My guess is OP was probably banned forever but the way computers handle dates made the ban end sooner
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
The year 2038 problem (also known as Y2038,[1] Y2K38, Y2K38 superbug or the Epochalypse[2][3]) is a time computing problem that leaves some computer systems unable to represent times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.
(the difference between 02:14 and 03:14 may come from daylight saving time)
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then there's also the stress and inconvenience of the ban also cancelling all steam market listings and friend invites and all recent comments but glad to hear it was sorted
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Yes definitely an inconvenience in many ways! I'm just grateful it wasn't worse 😂🙏
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Thanks for sharing this because I was trying to message someone recently for the same thing. Glad you recovered it!
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I reckon I'll stick to the advice of a few in these threads & just reroll after a week. Especially if the participant has been active in the meantime.
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I'm more amazed you came across a friendly tech support person :D
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The boilerplate answer to these incidents has been changed to a more friendly one. I think that also means there are too many false alarms.
I also noticed that upvoting suspicious content can also get you a ban! WTF!
All in all, I am glad you solved it and I hope you've learned that Steam filters are really intolerant. To the point that contacting someone for something in Steam is dangerous. Next time contact leaving a message on one of the giveaways of the winner, or if a week has passed, right away ask for a reroll. It's not the best, but as things are, dont' search for more trouble.
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Ah! Good thinking, I agree the apologetic tone is a good indication they need it often.. I checked the stats for support requests & yeah, crazy!
The upvoting thing bugs me, too. If they don't want us to participate in the community they should just delete that section. Better than having everyone too scared to try.
Thank you for the advice! I'll definitely be doing that from now on, head low etc.
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The firendly tone of the response is in stark contrast to the atrocities they do to innocent accounts.
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The most funny thing is that their measures don’t stop actual scams at all.
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That's not funny but stupid. Valve pays their employees very well compared to the competition and they're viewed as the best and brightest. In my experience over the years it's just your everyday idiots.
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It is good to see that you are not actually banned. :)
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Glad to see it solved itself, but do mind the fact you were lucky this time around.
Don't mention SteamGifts or similar sites on places like Steam, HumbleBundle, etc - they have in the past rather agressively shut down users accounts after people have done so - be careful. Steamgifts is a lovely place, but due the amount of grey site keys floating around and the points/tier systems used here (which they see as us trading keys for points/tiers) they frown upon the use of it.
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It's probably the "gifts" text that had triggered the bot, which you know is one of the common troller parlances. I sorta think it's what Steam users should avoid directly mentioning (maybe even in dms).
I think "SG" is definite enough to inform a SteamGifts user, if they have idea what they were doing at all.
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Obviously for me, it was ‘you won’. So far i once spelled ‘SteamGifts’ in a comment to a non-friend profile — with no consequences. I didn’t mention any bait things in that comment, just spoke about activation.
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That must have broke some record or some sort lol
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I had similar situation, I just wanted to get my key from giveaway, where I won STALKER 2 like 2-3 years ago and I tried to contact with the person in comments under his screenshot, then Steam banned me, because they think that I am a scam bot...
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Damn steam support said sorry? Must've been AI or Gaben got the belt. Wallace is chill, that's nice.
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Similar thing happened to me, got banned till 2035 but the ban was lifted.
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This is the story of my Steam Community Ban. It's a tragic tale.. well it was for 6 hours until Steam Support lifted it.
The basics: I got a 14 year community ban, it was revoked 6 hours later. Yay!
The reason I'm sharing is to warn any new hosts to be more mindful than I was when you're reaching out to a winner on Steam.
My public profile comment triggered the bots! Try not to sound spammy or promotional like I did.
I uploaded screenshots of the comment that resulted in my ban & the Steam Support conversation to imgur if you'd like to see how it all panned out.
copy and paste plain text for wary link clickers: https://imgur.com/a/0OzWUdb
Oh, I uploaded a snap of my PC to imgur too if you just want to look at that
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