Re: Pokerstars support and problems , cost me 52.5$ look ...
 

Yes, Live chat is a much better support option. You get real time interaction. Once I recommend http://www.livehelper.com to them.
It costs Stars very little money (about $25 a month).
Rakes from me will easily pay such bill.

Stars email support in general is really good.
However, one time I have to send and reply five emails to get something figured out. It just waste a lot of my time getting support this way (by email).

Re: Pokerstars support and problems , cost me 52.5$ look ...
 

Something to keep in mind... We all have at least a little feel for odds being poker players.

What are the odds that PS, Absolute and Pacfic ALL have problems on the same day, much less at the same time?

What are the odds that PS, PP, Absolute and Pacfic ALL had problems LAST monday at the same as each other and at the same time as it happened this week?

What are the odds that any one of these sites would admit to having been the butt end of a internet attack, especially since the end goal of these types of attacks is to demonstrate to the business that they can be shut down at anytime and they had better pay up or else?

Last time this happened someone brought the idea that all of the sites were hosted at the same location. I do not know if this is true or not, more than likely this is correct do to legal conditions in the US. The point the poster was trying to make was that the host location was "having connection problems".

Let me reference some of my background... I am a serior level network engineer. I have built the places that host sites, data centers, both for service providers and for big companies. There is no way I can imagine that the hosting location(s) that our poker sites are hosted at do not have redunant and deverse internet conenctions and all of the other neat tech that allows for 99.999% up time. Even if things went totally haywire and did result in an outage last week, the odds of it happening again on the same day at the same time are higher than you winning the lotery. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

In my educated opinion, our poker sites are being exploited/extorted. The only way this is going to stop is for internet poker to be legal in the US. Then when something like this happens they can call law enforcement and sooner or later get the response to put an end to it. Until then, lets hope they have deep pokets and good "people" skills.

Re: Pokerstars support and problems , cost me 52.5$ look ...
 

[ QUOTE ]

In my educated opinion, our poker sites are being exploited/extorted. The only way this is going to stop is for internet poker to be legal in the US. Then when something like this happens they can call law enforcement and sooner or later get the response to put an end to it. Until then, lets hope they have deep pokets and good "people" skills.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'd agree that it is pretty apparent the poker sites are getting hit by the occasional DDOS. Scalability issues can be taken care of with decent code and hardware - no site raking in close to a million plus a day would let an issue here affect their income.

For the same reason - loss of hundreds of thousands in income per attack - I'd be extremely surprised if Party et al. haven't hired some of the best security minds around to work for them. And that they're unable to prevent attacks isn't an indictment on them but on an inherent weakness with the internet.

Yahoo has a recent article about this. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...nlineextortion

And the geeks (I mean it as a positive term!) at slashdot give their commentary on that article and issue here:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?si...98&tid=218