Thoughts On eCogra Renewing GP Seal?

[bonustreak]

Might as well bring the debate to my home turf. It seems that eCogra has renewed Grand Prive seals unbelievable! So they just got the go ahead to continue to screw all of us affiliates for our lifetime revshare of all the players we have sent for years to them. I myself stopped promoting them as much as I use to before this went down and really did not depend much on the income from here anymore but there are others that were totally devastated and put out of business due to them shutting down the affiliate program while still taking deposits from players!

This is a clear case of money talks and bullshit walks, and I am not even going to get into the debate on how much in bed these people are with Microgaming itself! I said it on another forum and I will say it here, if your a non MG program do you really think that you will get a fair hearing if your program ever comes under fire with eCogra? I am considering pulling the seals off all my portals.

 

[Guard Dog]

This is VERY disappointing. I thought eCogra had a little more integrity than this I hate to see what could be an excellent accreditation be shown as nothing more than a paid seal-giver.

I simply cannot believe how horrible this is for both affiliates and players. I'm bummed at this one.

If anyone has an eCogra graphic on their site, I would suggest removing it in protest of this stupid move.

 

[WCD Admin]

I agree 100%, it sucks. I do have a few extra "thoughts" on it however...

They now they have "approved affiliate programs" at least they are separating the two. Potentially an affiliate program could screw us, while the owners did nothing wrong but hired a bad marketing team which wreck casinos "public face" by screwing affiliates. In this case, the affiliate program should be blacklisted. The owners of the individual casinos should be contacted and shown what is going on and be given a chance to distance themselves and make good with affiliates.

The problem is when the owner doesn't come in and straighten things out it makes the whole operation look shady. In that case we would probably want to blacklist the casinos, too, because hey - if they'll do it to us, they're capable of doing it to the players, too! that's the point, right? (and yes it's a shame eCogra doesn't feel the same way)

But is there really anything we can do about eCogra's certification methods in regards to the casinos? does eCogra really carry that much clout? I'm thinking not. Sure we could take down the eCogra banners and lose the spots on their page or make a campaign against eCogra, but if anything I think it just opens the battle up on too many fronts and will distract us from our current efforts which are slowly picking up.

We can still continue to mock the idea that they would re-certify a team like that and it makes their true colors shine, but I think essentially we are already doing what we can by blacklisting places. Maybe we all need to turn into BB1 for a few days and really get people motivated. This is still the best way to get the owners attention. Ecogra saying "bad" isn't nearly the effect of the top10 search results saying "bad" - and if they want to do something about it they can.

I also think (guess) Ecogra is really toothless. Can they really make them do anything or just echo what we've been saying all along? In fact, eCogra seems to be just a little more than a portal site for Microgaming casinos. It would have been nice to have them support us more, but it's not happening.

I'm certainly looking forward to the GPWA tool to help with our blacklisting efforts.

 

[Guard Dog]

But is there really anything we can do about eCogra's certification methods in regards to the casinos? does eCogra really carry that much clout? I'm thinking not. Sure we could take down the eCogra banners and lose the spots on their page or make a campaign against eCogra, but if anything I think it just opens the battle up on too many fronts and will distract us from our current efforts which are slowly picking up.

Yeah, i don't think we should distract ourselves with that. Rather make our blacklisting efforts so good that any effort eCogra makes at 'certifying' places like Grand Prive are proven to NOT be credible.

Maybe we all need to turn into BB1 for a few days and really get people motivated. This is still the best way to get the owners attention. Ecogra saying "bad" isn't nearly the effect of the top10 search results saying "bad" - and if they want to do something about it they can.

Spot on. That includes myself. I am working on that for myself, a global blacklisting system. It takes time, but then I will be able to respond across all my sites easily.

I'm certainly looking forward to the GPWA tool to help with our blacklisting efforts.

I saw Michael eluding to something, but didn't see a thread where anything was 'in the works' or actually being created. Anyone have a place to point me to?

 

[WCD Admin]

Sounds like it's not just in the works but almost done, according to this message.

Well,

I generally don't announce new development projects until they are finished, but since a project nearing completion is very related to the subject matter of this thread, I'll give a prelude to what I will be able to officially announce soon.

We're in the midst of building a whole infrastructure to support community roguing efforts. We'll roll this out first for use with Grand Prive, although on the back-end we are building it in a general way so we will be able to use it for lots more than just that.

The infrastrucure we are building will let an individual GPWA member say they are roguing the various grand prive properties, and then provide the urls of the web pages where they have done that.

Then we are building an APCW rogue page for grand prive that will have links to all of the sites we've been told about that way with links to the corresponding pages.

And we will also provide web services so that anyone who wants can also include the list of sites roguing them on their own pages without all of this manual updating by everyone of their own lists of such sites.

We want to make it easy to work together as a community and to give credit to each other for doing so. And we want to help facilitate high SERP ratings for GPWA member rogue pages.

Michael
<!-- / message --> <!-- sig --> __________________
Executive Director, www.GPWA.org
CEO, CasinoCity.com
Friend to the Village Idiot

Here is the link: Posting links for Grand Prive blacklist here - Gambling Portal Webmasters Association

 

[Guard Dog]

Very cool! I'm glad they are doing this. That will be a big benefit.