nope - just had a free civ 6 key from buying a rx480 card and nobody I knew wanted it. Unless I buy a humble bundle, don't expect I'll have unwanted keys in the future.
probably the above wasn't clear. I knowingly gave the key to a guy I assumed was a scammer/impersonator just because he was more amusing than figuring out this process. I'm done!
The thing is a single steamtrades profile will always respond to the same steam profile (it can't be changed), just open their steamtrades profile and visit their steam via the link there. Also Enhanced Steam Addon for browser is useful and puts links for their Steamrep, Steamgifts etc. on their steam profile in the browser below games, wishlist tabs etc. I'm not sure why did you allow yourself to get scammed?
why complete a scam?
Well, a legit guy didn't want to deal with someone with no public steam profile (and didn't ask me to make mine public since it matters) and he didn't want to deal with someone with no rep (however you get that). Fair enough.
if the site actually encouraged legitimacy by documenting how it works and how you avoid scammers, I'd be more inclined to treat it as a future resource. Since it doesn't, the efficient path for me is to get rid of the civ key to the guy who has a use for it and is taking the time to acquire it (ignoring moral judgement), buy dirt rally if/when I want to play it, and leave the world of trading to people who are getting something out of it commensurate to the time they are putting in.
Although I can understand you, I can explain why did he decline (at least the private profile part) basically if you want to trade you make your profile public or everyone assumes you are a scammer. Another thing as to why this site is safer is because the same person can't actually leave feedback to another multiple times, only once. And you mentioned in your post you couldn't find anything about it through google, i just typed "how to trade steamgifts"(that's the one where giveaways and discussions are) and got a few results. Alternatively you could've just created a thread over on steamgifts about this.
About the trade itself? I presume you did open a thread here with H/W with Civ VI and whatever else you wanted, so why didn't you wait for someone else to come and offer if the first guy declined to trade with you? Anyways I'm sorry you had bad experience with the site, and wish you good luck.
"Although I can understand you, I can explain why did he decline (at least the private profile part) basically if you want to trade
you make your profile public or everyone assumes you are a scammer"and someone new knows that how?
"steamgifts"and someone who wants to trade a key knows that term how? If steamgifts is relevant, why no link to it?
"I presume you did open a thread here with H/W with Civ VI"nope. Dirt rally was the only thing I could think of wanting to play with, so I just looked for people offering it.
"why didn't you wait for someone else to come and offer if the first guy declined to trade with you"The guy I responded to effectively shut the door with just enough information to force me to go figure out what he was talking about. That took more time and effort than it was worth.
it's just kinda sad that the site is as poorly implemented as it is. It leaves explanations up to existing users to keep answering the newbie questions, doesn't have obvious things like linking the username to steamrep, a FAQ, no reference to available tools and techniques that help keep the system honest, and no way for community members to help police the site.
I've built a lot of bad websites in my time, but this one lowers the bar a lot, so thanks for making me feel good about those poor efforts :-)
enjoy your weekend and thanks for educating me.
interesting site - afaik, no way to contact the people who run it and no overview that I could find on how the process works.
seems like:
1] make your account.
2] on steam, you probably should make your profile public
3] either post your have/want, or respond to one by adding a comment
4] if you have tentative agreement, you will friend the other party on steamcommunity
5] right-click on the friend icon in your steamcommunity profile and get the url of the other person - this may be different than the name they are using (red flag #1).
6] plug it into steamrep.com to see if any reported problems. Also look at their profile to see if they appear to be sane. Steamrep will also show their ID64, which is not changeable for the account.
7] complete the trade on steam or via chat (keys).
8] there's some kinda rep system which I'll never get to because ...
I did all the above and was amused that not only had the person changed their name/profile pic/link to another persons account in their profile that was different from yesterday when I friended them, but steamrep listed them as a scammer.
It was interesting enough to watch them hustle that I just emailed them my unwanted civ 6 key (to an email address on an unused parked domain - red flag #126) and let them scam me (I assume) just to be done with this.
Apparently there's better ways to do this process - someone offered to be a middleman - but I didn't want to take their time asking how all that works.
It would be helpful if there was a link on the site explaining all this stuff, or a writeup was findable by google. For me, next time I have a spare key, I'll just post it and the first person to activate it wins.