My 1st giveaway turns into disaster

[pandabear]

Its clearly in the rules, so by not following it, you just set yourself up for this kind of thing. And anyone saying oh, they should of issued an general announcement before they did this. Well its is expected that you read the rules of any site before you use it.

. If you are found selling invites or offering them in public, you'll lose your account.

[$we]

I got some of my most-loved trackers by the kindness of virtual strangers. Sometimes I like to pay it forward.

Yeah, i know one of the incentives is our innate disposition to engage in reciprocal altruism (in context: strangers to something for you, so you do something for strangers), but you have to realize the very real risk of that stranger being hostile towards the site and its users.

Not everyone has connections; some users are trustworthy and just need a chance.

If only some users are trustworthy, then by selecting a person out of a pool of stranger you are rolling against the odds of inviting a productive, beneficent member. You have to realize that. The "needs" of a few strangers does not outweigh that truth. (Is joining, say, FSC, FTN, or even What.cd? truly a need? I don't think our definitions of need are homologous).

Even if most of the strangers asking for invites are trustworthy, the fact that even 1% of those users could be hostile is prudence enough to disengage in giving invites to strangers.

I care about the sites I use, and by giving invites to only my (IRL) friends, I am doing my part to ensure the purity of the site's userbase. To do otherwise is to sanction, even promote the opposite.

[shygrrrl]

You must have different real life friends than I do. Mine either wouldn't know a torrent if it bit them in the butt or decide that it's too much work to make it worth it.

I don't make a habit of posting giveaway threads here, but I feel okay about giving invites to power users on the sites I'm on and other people in Internet-land who seem trustworthy enough for me to give my invites to. If they're good community members at site A, it seems reasonable to me that they would be good community members at site B.

We can agree to disagree. It's all good.

[fsephie]

words

While it's perfectly all well and good to say that you only give invites to people in real life, that doesn't necessarily mean they'll be any better than someone online. They get your account banned, so are you not going to be friends anymore? It's just a torrent site at the very least and a nice forum to converse with people at the most.

And there are ways of knowing who you are giving invites to online without a complete veil of anonymity. Sure, you might be able to say that it's easier to go under false pretenses online than offline, but just take one look at the invite section and see how many people fail to at least make an attempt sounding like they don't care about tracker rarity. Either it takes a genuinely special individual to go under false pretenses or online users can be more genuine than for which you give them credit.

[sense]

lol someone got pwnt

waffles ftl btw

Blue > Orange dude!

Well hopefully this is a learning experience for everyone, most sites do not condone giveaways on public forums such as FST. I would at least ask an admin and try to get permission beforehand next time.