This post will just address DDOS posts and anything related to it. In the afternoon I'll come back to any other posts.

These weren't down to the DDOS, they were from the packet loss we've had from ~2330 to ~0030 GMT on a few different nights recently. This is being investigated.

This was the same thing and was for a very brief period on Saturday. Obviously it's bad that this happens at all, and it doesn't reflect well on us. It's being investigated just as urgently as the DDOS, and it's something we have a lot more control over.

This was the DDOS. If you have a refund request, please contact support.

No offence in return, but there's a limit to how quickly I can reply by mail. I have got time each day to work on this thread, but it isn't my only job (I'm head of poker). I can't prioritise mails too. If you need a response, please contact support.

Yes, we'll refund players who were in affected tournaments. This should happen later today, and we'll inform players after that.

This isn't a stability issue, it's due to being attacked. Building stability is a different set of problems, which I admit we haven't been great at lately. It's one of our highest priorities though and I expect it to improve as time goes on. DDOS attacks are something else entirely.

What else has happened?

We had some packet loss Friday night and then were DDOS'd yesterday but I think otherwise it's been working correctly.

No, it isn't. Beta testing has nothing to do with being DDOS'd.

This isn't a feature we are implementing. It is somebody attacking the site.

You can contact support and they can handle refund requests.

This should happen later today. Please let me know if it hasn't by tomorrow morning.

We did, but we have to wait and see if it's a problem that's going to be fixed in 10 minutes or not. If the problem takes a few minutes then if we pause and cancel all the tournaments we have made it worse for everyone.

I don't think our procedures for tournament pausing and cancellation worked very well in this case, but that's the general idea.

It isn't a crash - it's an attack. Testing it doesn't make any difference.

Basically, we don't look at what hands people have or what cards might come. It's down to how much money is in the pot at the time of the disconnection.

So we can't refund players as if their uncalled bet had been called, but we can refund the actual uncalled bet.

There're lots of exceptions and difficult cases, but that's why it's done by hand rather than automatically.

It's because we can't tell immediately. It also tends to be that the people who are investigating are doing so with a view to fixing it rather than with a view to informing me.

The client release at the end of Jan will include "emergency messages" for when the whole site is down. It'll let us inform players what is happening and when we expect to be back. It WON'T include messages for this kind of situation unless we purposely take the whole site down in response. This is something that'll be worked on for a future release.

We can't stop ourselves from being attacked sometimes, but we can definitely do a better job of informing players about what is happening.

That's alright, I understand because we have bills to pay too. I feel pretty personally invested in this project, plus I have quite a big career bet on it working.

I would certainly prefer to not be DDOS'd, but there isn't a lot you can do about it, acceptable or not.

Yes - being DDOSd won't affect any player balances.

These aren't teething problems with the new client - this is being DDOS'd.

DDoS-attacks are a serious problem. Not only for small companys like Unibet (Poker) but for really big guys, too.

Some down time cause of DDoS-attack/bugs/bad luck every month - okay no one is angry.

I think it's just a bad timing. There are problems on Unibet every week for a month now. Of course everyone is pissed. Maybe it isn't fair, but every poker player knows downswings.
You have a connection downswing now

Hi, site offline again for me now 'technical error'

Im starting to wonder whats actually behind all of these attacks. unibet is not the only one experiencing such problems.

I'll interrupt posting this to say that we see the client is down again. We are investigating.

This is handled by the events department so you should contact them - the same address that you got the London mail from should work.

If someone wins a package via satellites and then another via Challenges, we can convert the second to €2k in tickets.

If someone has a single package but they cannot attend, they can move it to a later UO.

If someone has a single package and have a good reason why they can't go, we can refund it with a €1k ticket.

Our main aim is to keep new players alive for longer. If we have auto top-up and someone doesn't use it, it's likely because they are new and don't know it exists/don't know why they should use it, and it'd be against various regulations if we had it turned on by default.

Sure, done.

Thanks, any luck with getting log files too?

This is something we have had in mind for a while, and was one of the reasons we added the flops counter to the profile. I don't know if it's technically possible yet, but it's definitely something I'd like to include.

One aim of freerolls is to show people the client, but ultimately we want to make money too, and requiring some form of playthrough will help move people from freerolls to regular games.

Thanks, I've reported it.

Sure, done.

Sure, done.

This was assigned by mistake to someone in my team who was on holiday until today. It should be done now.

There's an iPad app, but not iPhone yet.

We plan to have an Android tablet version for the end of this month. Android is awkward because different devices have different aspect ratios. But the Android version should still work on Android phones. If it works OK despite the smaller real estate and different aspect ratios, we can do the same for the iPhone version in theory.

Another problem with an iPhone version is that Apple don't let you limit an app for a specific version of the phone. We could release an iPhone 6 version right now if we could limit it to that version. There're system constraints that mean the client wouldn't work on versions that are too old (not to mention screen size constraints).

Awesome news.

I credited you with a new UO50 ticket. I'm afraid I don't convert UO tickets to non-UO though:

I think the Android one is the crappy MGS one - it won't work any more.

Yes. To get to, say, 1.25m this quarter will award a sum of €5,401. In Q4 last year, it would have awarded €5,554.

This is because we have changed Challenges to roll over any excess points at the end of the quarter if you have earned 1m+ points. We have also changed Challenges to award points for partially completed Challenges at the end of each quarter.

Overall we're spending the same amount of money in Challenges though, at least as far as my model says.

Yes, we changed that too - that will work out as equal to what we awarded in Q4 too. The average Challenge awards the same number of points, but now there's variance in Challenge points to reflect the difficulty.

I sometimes get this when I lock my PC or change desktop resolution - might that be the problem?

Yes, it will queue. Due to the welcome bonus it will be possible that you have some bonuses that queue forever as Challenges will start crediting you with more bonuses as you get higher up the payout scale. If that happens, let me know and I can sort it out.

When we made HU SNG we wanted to only have one game type because we knew we would have limited liquidity. I therefore chose a format that's pretty turbo but not as fast as on some sites. It's got a very smooth structure which is something I didn't want to alter, but we could potentially have reduced the blind times.

This month's mission has been pushing HU SNG and they're performing well, but I don't think we're at the point that we can split the liquidity yet.

Sure, done.

I can mail this to you if you like, but so far you've earned 10,625 points via completing Challenges. You're on 11,588 in total though due to the credit for the 50% Challenge bug earlier this month.

This might be hard to replicate, but I don't think it's on purpose. I'm not sure what the best plan is here really. I guess it makes more sense to play the hand out and have them time out again when they face a bet on the flop?

Thanks, we had noticed it before but the guy who understands the banner system the best didn't get in until today. I'll pass this on to him.

Sure, done. I'm afraid I'm behind on mails at the moment, I'll get to it when I can.

Sure, done.

I don't mind doing this this time, and for your existing tickets, but let's agree to make this the last time. We do UO satellites and fund overlays for them because the UO has value to us outside of strictly being another tournament in the client. I don't want to convert tickets and lose that value, which is why I don't do UO tickets to non-UO normally. I'll extend that prohibition to €250 tickets too for players with existing packages as of now.

Sure, done.

Thanks - for some reason the guy in charge of that page has been having trouble updating it. We'll chase him.

Basically, no, I'm afraid I can't. We don't have the tools to edit missions like that. I agree that if players are stopped from completing it due to problems on our side (DDOS or not), we should refund them though.

I think you were able to complete this step? That's how it shows for me in the back office now. If not, let me know and I'll credit you the prize for it.

I'm afraid it's against AU legislation to let us offer poker. We only have casino and sportsbook there. I am pretty sure that NZ will be fine when you're back home though.

It generally gets 45-60 entrants.

Ticket expiry depends where you win it, but most of them are set to 30 days.

Oh. To get hacked sounds worrying to computernoobs as myself. What is the worst thing that can happen to us players when your site gets DDOS'd? (dont even know what that means)

I'm mildly technical (I like Excel more than is healthy, I know the difference between a class and an object), but not super-technical (I don't know any Unix commands), so I'll explain it as I understand it.

It stands for Distributed Denial of Service. Someone hires a botnet (lots of computers that're infected with a virus) and has those computers ping our server (send it a query saying "how far away are you from me now?") or similar. Because our server receives so many pings at once, it spends all of its time trying to reply instead of do its normal job.

A DDOS isn't really hacking per se. And it doesn't endanger account details or player balances or anything like that. It just means that our servers spend all of their time replying to the attacks. There're botnets of a hundred thousand machines, so it adds up pretty quickly.

Hi Andrew!

Could you please change my 4x1€ MTT ticket in 1x4€ Sng Ticket?

Thank You!

Sure - could you post your alias or PM me your login name please?

are the disconnects fixed for today? wanted to play at midnight CET.

We can't tell - the site problems were caused by a DDOS attack. The last attack was at 14:55 GMT and it's been clear since then. I'm fairly optimistic.

thx

ok thanks. No worries. It's for Tuesdays double trouble, but if you dont get around to it - that's fine, I can imagine how busy you've been lately with these ddos idiots attacking.

--

Feedback.

lobbies, they are still a huge issue.

If you leave a lobby open sometimes your machine will just grind to a halt. It's happened to me twice today. I've got 3 poker clients running and excel and skype, and unibet is the only app that does this. Then I suddenly remember its probabally unibet and i go into the program and see the lobby and manage to close it and the pc springs back into life.

Nice to have this fixed sometime just wanted to feed it back up the chain

Cheers!

Disconnected again, no option to login.

thanks for reporting. won't play tonight on unibet then.

It works for me. We've had no reports to CS and we've had no packet loss on our network monitors. That doesn't rule out something happening on your side or somewhere in between, but the site appears to be fine at the moment.

Works here, though I was only playing some HU SNG and cash for maybe half an hour.

works nice

Yeah sorry i forgot to put that!

It's Taavetti90.

Thank you!

Right now there are literally zero players at the fast hold'em tables. Do you plan to keep these tables or get rid of them in the future?

Hi Andrew,

Could you convert my tickets to 3x 25 HU SNG please?

Yes, no problems since yesterday afternoon (that was DDOS too by the way).

Hmm, I take it you don't need this any more? Or did you want to do 1x 4 sng into 4x 1 sng?

Probably the latter. It doesn't run unless we put a lot of money into it.



Probably - could you post your alias or PM me your login name please?

Dear Andrew,

I haven't received the double trouble freeroll ticket yet. I really want to participate to win some money and play again this week (even with the DDoS attacks

greetings,
player: EaRRivRant, login: sipelan