The morality of Password Sharing
Hey Folks,
I think its about time I published an official line on what I feel are the morality issues behind sharing poker passwords, who this affects and why.
Obviously, sharing poker passwords is one of the fundamental reasons why people come to our (new) forum - but given the special mechanism I have created for the sharing of passwords only internally with forum members, and the credits system, it rewards forum members for their consistency and longevity as a member of our new community.
I am a MOD on a dozen or so other poker forums, including two of the four or five largest by traffic, so I am aware of the other side of the argument where “rival” site owners are upset that their passwords are being shared in this way, but my moral justification for what we accept on our boards is this: Password sharing is going to happen, thats a fact - rather than people sharing them by PMs on forums, or making posts on off topic area’s I am providing a platform for them to share their passwords on.
Im not introducing anything new here, I mean, I had an example about three years ago where a private league I was involved with which had around 30 players, all of a sudden had 200+ registered players. I later found that the password had been posted on an italian forum, and from there it had spread to many other forums. Thats not to say I wasnt upset by the password leaking, but its frankly unavoidable - UNLESS THE FREEROLL OWNER regulates the players themselves.
Some of you will have played in our inaugral forum league match earlier this week - and you will have noticed that only forum members were involved in the freeroll, thats because I REGULATED the distribution of the password effectively, something that other community leaders are able to do, but choose not to.
What about the poker rooms? Surely they should do something to restrict poker freeroll passwords being shared? Well, not likely as the whole point in a poker room giving freerolls away is to attract new members, nothing else, they dont do it through a sense of charity - and using the example above that poker room got several hundred new players, as opposed to several dozen new players. Frankly its not in their interest to restrict passwords as the reverse is beneficial to them.
What passwords have I removed in the past when requested? Well, I have removed quite a few, and Im still treating each request on a case by case basis - the foremost reasons for password removal would be as follows: its a geographically sensitive freeroll, ie, its for players in the Texas area only, or its for players in Sweden only or whatever. Those freerolls are if anything not of interest to the vast majority of our forum members, being an international community. Another reason would be where it is an established league format with few players that form a community on another forum for instance, however where the forum has thousands of zero poster members that only show up for the FR, well, I dont consider that a closed league type deal and its open to sharing as far as Im concerned.
Freerolls that I will never remove from our forums: ones where the password is openly posted anywhere, including on a forum or other affiliate website, ones where a poker room itself is distributing the password days or weeks before the event, or ones where there is a huge turnout already, ie in the high hundreds at least. These freerolls are openly shared amongst our members for the good of the community, and as they would be shared elsewhere anyway, are open to sharing on our forum.
What you can do if there is a password on the forums that you dont want on there? Firstly, send me a PM with a link to the thread, and REQUEST that I take it down and state your reasons why it should be removed, bearing in mind what I have said above regarding what I deem acceptable. DONT post harrasment on the thread or the board in general, you will just get laughed at by our members. DONT send me a threatening message telling me that you will do this, that or the next thing, because its not going to wash with me, and will just result in my leaving the password up, DONT over-react, as I mentioned, its going to happen, and you should be thankful that its on a closed forum, and not posted where the whole world can see!
Anyway - one last thing before I get off my soapbox, and back to coding….. I dont have a moral objection with sharing 90% of passwords. The other 10% I will gladly remove at request of the password owners, but if you dont ask me then you wont know.
cheers
admin 
Tags: , morality of password sharing, poker freeroll passwords