Well four cases?

Group A: We have a forum! Its lurked by human scammers though, so TRADE CAREFULLY (gogwiki, knownscam thread). Its also roamed by bots, but we also have mahayo for that. Still, somebody drops a code from time to time.
Me: Ok, how about poisoning the forum with fake codes to address that?
Group A: This is not going to work, because ugh.... because! It conflicts with mahayo! It conflicts with gogwiki!
Me: No it does not. Its ok not to use that.

Group B: I use mahayo for that, I don't need this.
Me: This should make the forum less friendly for machine code fetchers. You can use mahayo, its unrelated.
Group B: But I use mahayo.
Me: Ok.

Group C: This will not work.
Me: This will work because (explains the chain).
Group C: But it does not work here: (completely different platform that handles keys differently)
Me: This is not for that.
Group C: It does not use (part of the chain).
Me: Posts a link to prove (part of the chain).
Group C: IT. DOES. NOT. WORK. THIS. WAY.
Me: Ok.

Group D: You are an idiot.
Me: :D


Edit: miscalculated
fake as in fake: F1F1F-F1F1F-F1F1F-F1F1F

Ok, give me a call when you are done talking to the voices in your head, and want to actually address what I said.

So, to summarize, you're essentially saying:
"I'm going to do it my way and I don't care what others think", which tends to be the beliefs of people who drop open codes anyway.
Fair enough. But don't expect people to get on board with you on it. It's better for you to just acknowledge it for what it is:
A bad idea that you're going to carry through on anyhow since you don't want to hear criticism, you want to preach to the choir.

Code worked, thanks for the free game.

Posted my 3 leftover Gog keys on keygiveaway.com . Two of them were already redeemed by aproctor3000 ( registered June 2016 )

True, I don't have a time machine. ;)


Well, I am not frustrated. I see a situation, which I can contribute fixing. Lets addess in detail:

Thats the point! Bot enters a fake giveaway over and over. Bot master pays for every code validation (human solved captcha). A human will never even think that this is a giveaway. Look at my posts in this thread, do you think its a giveaway just because of "noise" codes? Its just a character noise for normal humans. Not for the search engine!


The fake noise code is pretty easy to compose.

Sure. Mahayo+scam list+known scamthread+brains+good members.
This method is not to protect giveaways. Its about salting the water.

I can't connect A with B here. Elaborate/expand please.

Cool, that's very useful, cheers.

Dude, I am wu wei practitioner. I have empty mind.
If you have a constructive criticism, go ahead. If not - well, then you don't have it. Its fine.

There. Is. No. Captcha. Involved. In. The. Process.

So I've noticed.

Where is swatkat anyway? :P

Lin, you would have a point if EVERYONE and EVERYWHERE would be doing it, so that sites like unmentionable name would get such a bad reputation that the market would dry out for them.

BUT as most of the keys are coming from fraud or similar, it would just make a small dent.

And those sites hardly ever care if the key is legit or not, they just say, oh, not our problem. So unless the end user buying there would get ripped off often enough, our behaviour here does not make any difference.

My 2 cents ;)

My adblocker says: its operated for profit.
My wallet says: Domain like that costs quite a lot to pay, so its profitable.
My mind says: its like bugmenot (which was often misused).
My eyes say: its just a variation of mahayo

An ad-operated for profit website on a not-a-cheap domain, that uses mahayo to allow any user publish keys.
For users - I assume its quite heavy monitored.
For owner of the site - (must be) profitable.

But this is not related to GOG and situation on forums and not related to what I am trying to achieve.
Ok. :)

I think it is a bad idea. What will it accomplish exactly? It wont harm the bot software nor the computer it is running on, it wont harm the Internet connection nor DoS it in any way nor stop it from doing what it does, it wont harm the person who runs the software in any way.

The only thing it ultimately stands to do is cause some number of automated bots to send a larger number of code redemption requests out to GOG and/or Steam's servers thus wasting resources on GOG/Steam's hardware. Under normal circumstances these services can normally handle more requests likely and the amount of bots out there likely doing this is probably not large, and the number of bogus keys people post probably not large either so it probably wouldn't ultimately have much of an affect on GOG or Steam in the end. But it would not have any good effect either. If GOG or Steam's service is under load, it would serve to put these services under MORE load for no useful purpose and would have the effect of causing a certain amount of increase of GOGbears perhaps even if the effect is only very slight.

In the worst case, if there are a large number of bots and a large number of bogus keys it could theoretically cause a DoS on the server side of things. That's more likely to be true if someone's bot contains a software bug that causes it to loop excessively or something.

At any rate, while it sounds like it might be "getting revenge on the bots" in reality it wont stop them and wont cause any actual harm or problems to them at all, and it wont benefit anyone in any way, or deter people from writing or using bots in the forums.

It would be roughly similar logic to a "mail bomb", which is not something commonly used nowadays but was more so in the 1990s. Essentially, when someone sent you a spam mail or other unwanted mail, people would retaliate by forwarding it back to them 100 times or similar as a punishment, as if they were causing the originator more harm than they were putting out and the bombing would act as a deterrent against such behaviour. That isn't what ended up happening however because often the mail headers were forged, so the recipient of the mail bomb was often an innocent victim. The mail bombing phenomenon had almost zero effect of harming the intended victim, nor in deterring them, and often ended up causing problems with the mail system which lead to the sender of the mail bomb possibly receiving punitive measures such as losing their email account or similar.

Such forms of attempted punitive Internet lynch mob justice rarely ever work, and almost always have collateral damage to other innocent victims or common Internet infrastructure.

So, what happens if people are successful at causing a handful of bots to say - fire off 1000 bogus GOG redemption or Steam redemption codes per minute to the service's backend servers? Who knows, maybe GOG and Steam implement 10 mandatory reCaptchas every time someone wants to redeem a code in order to cut down on the machine gun abuse that is riddling their servers with bogus requests.

Nobody can control other people, and so nobody can stop people from using bots either to harvest codes. The solution is to not post codes in the first place at all ever, then no bots swallow up codes. If someone chooses to post a code anyway then that is their code to waste either out of ignorance or because they simply don't care, and nothing can be done about that really.

If people want to make a difference, then start by politely trying to educate people with a positive message of why they might want to consider alternative methods to pass their codes on to others such as the Community Giveaway threads. The more educated the community is on this sort of thing, the less the bots have to eat up codes to begin with.

Two wrongs don't make a right, and if the wrongs cause problems that disrupt the working of the system, then the system responds by putting higher security and reliability measures in place. Judging by the highly negative community reaction people have had to GOG's recent increased use of reCaptcha lately, people should think this sort of thing through before grabbing a gun and shooting from the hip.

So that's my opinion, bad idea.