I hate to be a dick, but your opinion is completely illogical. Stopping bumhunting is an incredibly more complex and involved problem that isn't even something that can be fixed 100%. Bumhunting itself is just a pejorative term for extreme game selection. No poker site is going to disallow game selection completely. So the simplification of the problem is that subjectively someone has to assess what level of game selection is acceptable and what level is unacceptable.

Tracking sites are a completely black and white issue. There is nothing subjective to have to interpret at all. These sites provide information that players should absolutely not have access to and it is up to companies like Stars to stop them. Bringing up PTR's yearly profits is a joke. Stars makes infinitely more money than 100k a year. If Stars wasn't seemingly so complacent on the issue of tracking sites, they could easily spend several times that amount paying salaries for people that are employed solely to prevent PTR from functioning. The only reason a solution isn't in place yet is because sufficient resources have not been allocated to the problem.

There are plenty of ways without affecting gameplay or watchability of the games.

To give a few examples, have observer accounts enter a periodic code. Or, to observers, randomise the position/ font/ colour etc of the action. If the method PTR is using is not screen scraping but reading information passed to the client, then simply don't pass this information to observer clients and display the action as an animation.

+1 again to all of this. I'll also add that stopping tracking sites wouldn't necessarily be a 'one time fix' and most likely using a variety of strategies would be the best manner in which to stop them long term. The added benefit of that, is each adjustment made by Stars, would cause new problems for tracking sites. If they frustrated tracking efforts for long enough there would no longer be a large enough profit margin to continue running large scale operations like PTR.

Someone just toss stars an e-mail with a link to this thread. Tons of great ideas. I'm sure they haven't thought of all of them. By suggesting the good ideas and making it clear how important an issue this is will deffinitely help the progress on this.

I've been waiting for Stars to actually do something for over a year now. They say they are working on it but so far it just seems like BS to me. They must think PTR benefits them in some way if they haven't stopped it yet, or at least seriously hinder its ability to gather hands.

It's a problem that has been left unsolved for way too long. Maybe poker sites should work on improving the games instead of constantly increasing the rake.

PTR was unable to track run it twice hands on FTP. I found that interesting.

The fix for this couldn't have been that complicated.

I'm sure the lack of importing RIT hands was simply due to laziness of PTR, rather than their inability to deal with the problem. Due to the low % of hands that would be affected (All in hands where both players have RIT checked), I don't really blame them for not bothering.

If you can observe the games, that observation can be converted into data. That data can then be categorized. There are different things that sites can do to make this more or less difficult, but there is no changing the reality of the situation.

If you accept that as a fact then you have a few different ways of dealing with the issue.

A)You can make that data irrelevant by allowing screen name changes. There are pros and cons to this method which have been rehashed countless times so I won't go into detail. IMO it is very unlikely for stars to implement this for a variety of reasons.

B)Limit the ability to observe the tables. This is the most viable option IMO, however it must be done in a way that does not impact the game experience for the average player. I think this should be the focus of our discussion.

The solution will have to go at least one step farther than simply limiting the number of tables observable without logging in as I would assume it is fairly trivial to just scale up the number of virtual machines being used to datamine.

+1 to ^

I think the issue is that stopping tracking sites is at the bottom of a very, very long list of issues that Stars deals with on a regular basis. I agree wholeheartedly that the length of time this has gone on is absurd.

+1 to the rest of the stuff you said, but I think it should be made clear that if Stars actually does something about PTR, everyone should get a one time account name change. While stopping tracking would be great itself, the fact that all the previous data would still be available would still be problematic.

IMO the ideal solution involves stopping the tracking, giving everyone a fresh start so to speak and being more diligent to not let things get so far out of hand in the future.

I just want to point out that screenname changes are relatively worthless to prevent bumhunting. It might, however, encourage more action in reg vs reg arenas (mid stakes+?)

They're better than nothing for preventing extreme game selection. A huge problem with PTR right now is people can instantly see you've played hundreds of thousands of hands (or millions even) and refuse your action. People will instantly sit out or not join and 0 hands are played. At the very least if sites like Stars aren't going to do anything about tracking, name changes can create a slightly more even playing field. By no means are they the best solution, but they sure as hell are better than doing absolutely nothing. Which is currently exactly what is happening.

Afaik large scale datamining is done by having tons of virtual machines running per system so each of them can have it's own Stars installation and observe the max amount of tables. Lowering the limit you can view without logging in won't have any effect. Allowing unregistered accounts to only view a selection of tables, being the same tables for every unregistered account, would. This would force them to log in, making tracking them almost trivial. The only downside to preventing datamining is that it becomes much harder to spot collusion/botting etc, and you'd have to trust the sites own securety department to be competent enough to deal with this.

How about showing anonymous tables / players unless you are seated. Friends who are being sweated can find people by seat location/number.

That would work if they don't use screen scraping to build HHs. I am not sure if they do that or import the actual HH created by PS? Also, it might be an issue for PS since a lot of people love to rail the HS games.