Yes, this was talked many times before but its should be talked till the site is out of business.

Why it is taking more than 1-2 years to get rid of this site ? Its VERY bad for poker.

Is it too hard to stop the datamining or they just dont care ?

That would be the one. Short of making it impossible to watch tables you're not sitting at, there's probably no way for them to stop datamining.

So make it impossible to observe tables then or else allow SN change!!!

if they succesfully stop datamining before jan1 i'll try for SNE otherwise i wont even bother staying supernova and i think PTR hurts their traffic in many more ways.

From what I've read on this forum, regarding penalties if you use it.

Those are penalties for users using it (and its easy to bypass obv) but problem is existance of this site.

Sorry my post wasn't clear. There are no penalties for using it, so no, they don't care. A PS rep stated that the worst thing that will ever happen to you is a warning not to berate others with their stats. Ooooh nooo's. It's basically a free for all, and they don't care obv.

they are idiotic for not putting more resources into trying to handle the issue because it is incredibly terrible for their bottom line. they should just stop allowing observers.

ptr is the best site of all time who cares.

I thought it was warning and then ban. This is even worse then.

PTR is not the reason you can't beat the games. Those beating the games before, still beat the games. Those not, don't.

Because they can

Is it FTP that bans you then? I thought it was both.

Yes FTP is said to ban people for it.
FTP seems to be a ban happy site on top of all the other threads about being banned for this, that or whatever apparently they consider waiting at 2 tables to be excessive and threaten to ban for that.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...ll-ftp-620079/


Next up FT will be limiting the # of times you can log in daily

PokerStars is not ignoring PokerTableRatings, and is dedicating significant effort across a whole series of different avenues on this issue.

We don't take any action against people who visit particular websites largely beacause members of this forum (and others) got very angry when posters became aware that we did this. So, we listened to our players and acted by disabling the function to check if people visited certain webservers, and are continuing to work to stop datamining in other ways.

We previously had the function in our software to detect players who visited prohibited web services, but we accept that such a function could have been interpreted as a breach of player privacy. Consequently, we've changed our approach to focus on stopping the collection of hand histories at its source, rather than a mere symptom.

It's not an easy or small challenge, but the only response to that is "Let's keep working on it." As a result of our efforts, every major tournament tracking site (including SharkScope) now offers an opt-out function to protect player privacy. There's still some way to go on datamining sites that sell hand histories, and we will continue working on it.

@pokerstarsmichael

thanks for posting in this thread. i hope u'll eventually stop the datamining,even at the cost of 'easiness' of observing tables or something.

@nofx

thx for info

Thanks for the post, Josem. It's good to hear that you do care and are actively looking for ways to address the issue at it's core.

thank you for the post. i hope you guys realize both how unethical and awful it is to your players privacy as well as how terrible it is for the future of online poker and devote resources accordingly.

Not to mention that people that really want to do it are just using a second computer or an anonymous web surfing portal. So you only catch the casual/unaware players.

MichaelJ,

thanks a lot for your efforts and for your presence on these forums. this carries a lot of weight with players and it encourages the rest of the industry to hold a higher standard

if there was ever a time for pokerstars and full tilt to work TOGETHER it would be now. dataminers, and such huge and public datamines are so awful for the future of online poker and they both know it. they should really get their best heads together and get on this issues ASAP. if it means no more observing games (perhaps they could make an exemption for nosebleeds) than so be it.

I absolutely could not agree more. Kmoney hit the nail right on the head. I really hope that you and others colloborate to do all that you can to take these sites down Michael, as they do nothing but ruin the game in the long term. The idea of not being able to observe games (save for major tournaments and nosebleeds) would be absolutely fine if that is what it takes. Cheers!

+1!

This is good post, if main sites cooperated and have list of IP's accessing their sites they could more easily find and ban the miners IP's - ofcourse this is just one measure, threes lot of small things that can be done.

+1

I would prefer there to be no PTR, but the idea of my poker client checking my browsing history is just creepy and wrong, regardless of intent, so I am happy to hear that practice is no more. And although it would be nice if PTR + HH selling sites ceased to exist, if it were to come at the expense of the transparency and thereby the accountability that allowing the games to be observed engenders, it would definitely be a net negative. So, I can see the difficult position this puts the major sites in; there's no silver bullet answer.