Giveaways should not be banned.

It could help to bring more people to your community.

It would be better to have a very simple couple of rules.

No posting the codes outright. Simple mechanic for giving the code out like guess the number, or first to comment. State the source (Steam, GOG, Epic)

Like literally all you need, and yes I’m salty because I was literally just trying to give away a game because I have a code for something that is already in my library.

Don’t ban things that are beneficial to others. “We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.” is not a valid enough reason to ban giveaways. Someone is offering something up, if they don’t commit, then ban them, not the practice of generosity.

Edit: added a comma

This is exactly what happens when the system is based on lowest bid contracts.

Because your 0$ per month after dropping them doesn’t hurt their bottom line.

Corporations generally weigh the risks and the benefit often wins out and they make more money because there are enough people that either reluctantly cave into the fee increase, forgot about their subscription or just don’t care that it’s going up.

It’s fairly seldom (but seems to be increasing over the years) to see so much backlash that a company walks back on what they were planning to do.

You are right, it’s really not cut and dry in today’s age.

Could be something like the way I have my son’s tablet setup. If he tries to install something, I get a notification to approve it on my phone.

I can disable or enable the device at any point and have active times setup on it so it automatically does that if I’m not manually managing it.

BUT, that requires the parent to be actively engaging in what their kids are doing while trying to not be helicopters over them. You can setup home networks to block stuff like that also, but that requires some technical knowledge that a lot of people may not want to deal with. Also, that has no bearing on what is done outside of the home.

Also the age of the kid is a huge factor, a 13 year old is going to have a higher ability to get around those restrictions.

So now we’re at the point of basically saying, there’s not a really good defined way of doing that. However, if we ask for a copy of your ID, that’s adds a decent protective layer. BUUUT, that’s going to throw up red flags to everyone who wants to protect themselves and doesn’t want their info out there like that. Which we all know there are data breaches and bad actors out there (like Tesla employees sharing videos from people’s cars) so it’s reasonable to not want to provide stuff like that.

Now at this point we’re kinda back to square one what can be done to manage this, be secure, and appease both sides of the table?

The Boy and The Heron