Your Suggestions

First, I want to reply on your suggested topics for this blog in '09:

Gabrielct87 and our close-to-Black Member HoRRoR (what an honor!) both want pictures from the office and gibraltar. I promise to deliver! Just need to get a cam. Guess there should be one somewhere in the old office.

Our Diamond Member Gofa wants to read about the new forum - I will write about it in this blog entry. 

Chris suggests a vote for every partner site. This is a little of topic, as it would not fit in the blog (too small sample size & no poll options), but I will try to answer to the idea!

Gerv wants to read about strange habits of our employees, which is a great idea. I will certainly do that as often as I can think of something intersting. Maybe even some non-standard interviews here in the blog?  

sb22 wants more Heads-Up videos with two coaches and videos from both players. That again refers more to PokerStrategy.com as a whole, less to the blog. But I'm pretty sure, such formats are also planned after we got such a great feedback to our past experiments.

 

The new Forum 

In early 2008, we already noticed that we will have to do something about the forum. The two main reasons were and are performance and new features. Especially according performance we were nearing a dead end with our old and still current forum software, which is basically a modified version of an older commercial board software. As it is so heavily modified, just updating it to newer, more performant versions is not possible.

So we decided it is necessary to set on a new forum software. That one is now being in development for more than 8 months, which is much more than planned. But it really is a big project, as we have to do it much more modular in the past to make sure it will be sufficient for the next years. We also need to re-implement all the modifications for hand judgements and even improve them.

Once it will be published, the main advantages ought to be:

• improved performance, less loading time
• improved moderation options (more transparent to users, more easy for moderators)
• hand judgements easier for both the "customer" and the hand judge
• the option to implement certain sub forums into multiple high level forums - a use case would be to integrate an English language high-limit hand judgement forum also into small language communities that still do not have a vivid high-limit community on their own
• several other gadgets

 

Polls to judge our partner poker rooms

On first sight, this is a sound idea. But in the end, we will have a lot of problems here. For one, things at poker rooms may change rapidly. So when do you do a new poll? Every change in the software or the VIP system can dramatically change the percieved quality of a certain poker room. But doing a new poll every week cannot be an option.

Another problem is the different needs of different players. A player that wants to multi-table NL100 will be annoyed by e.g. the problems of Pacific Poker / 888 software to support multi-tabling with more than 4 tables. But this dislike of 888 does not play any role for a beginner who will play different limits and less tables.

Same counts for VIP systems: for one they might be bad, the other might like them.

So in the end we decided it is better to describe our poker rooms as good as possible and make a difference in what we suggest to new players starting with their free $50 and experienced players who want to try out a new poker room.

I agree: yet, our information about poker rooms is not very good. That is why we started in October to build up new information sites. In terms of content, they are 99% finished. Basically we're just waiting for them to be on top of the queue for our web developers to integrate them into the site.