After a brief chat and under the advice of Regen I have decided to take this issue to the forums.

Namely the issue of collectors on TF2OP stating "donations appreciated" or "donations welcome" on their collection trades. Now the question with this is does this come under "No Begging". Now personally (I am a collector myself so I may and probably will be slightly biased, which is kinda why I am posting this here).

Now I personally believe that this should not be counted under the same rules about begging. Especially on things like weapon collections where someone has 200, 300 or even more of the same weapon. Now in a case like this people on the site may well be very happy to donate a spare weapon or two to someone with a trade like this, they can see that the collector has put genuine work in to their collection and is just trying eternally to improve it. I believe that this is completely different from someone who simply comes on to the site and spams trades asking for free things.

In the first example there is a person who has worked hard, spent long hours collecting and will most likely keep that item you have donated until the end of their time in TF2 (at least a serious collector). In the second situation however there has been no work, no time spent and is just an attempt to get something for nothing. But what do you think, should these two entirely different circumstances be judged the same way, or should there be a differentiation between situations similar to the ones described above.

So I am posting this here to get the general community's (and hopefully a few admin's) view on this matter