I know many readers of this blog are also PAW members, so this post will make more sense to you guys (and gals) than anyone else. Speaking of readers, I can’t believe how many visitors this blog actually gets now days. When I started the blog, I really just did it for fun. Well, also because I needed to replace my real estate site. I never realized I would have so many readers, nonetheless I will continue posting every day, entertaining people, and occasionally pissing a few people off.

Anyhow, what a wild couple weeks it has been at PAW in terms of posts. It certainly hasn’t been the normal link exchange, seo, poker affiliate program gossip, and general marketing talk. It all started with the Absolute Poker Is Rigged theory. After that, a few more interesting and controversial posts started. Below I will share my thoughts on a few. For the love of God though, I am not even going to discuss Absolute Poker again since they graciously offered me a super user account funded with $1,000,000 to simply be quiet. <———-I’m tearing up .05-.10 limit as we speak.

1. The first interesting topic involved starting a private forum at PAW.

Initially I was indifferent on the subject. If some of the veteran members wanted to be able to have discussions in private off the public forums I was cool with that. However I have ALWAYS wanted the direction of the community and forums to be determined by the members and not me. With that I opened the topic up for discussion. After several posts, it became clear to me that this would not be the best for the overall community. I also realized how PAW substantially differs from the other larger affiliate forums in the industry. The members at PAW are a pretty tight knit group, and everyone is viewed as equal. I also think there are more relationships and business going on at PAW than any other forum.

The established members at PAW are almost a small family, versus just a bunch of random people on a message board. With that said, new members are always welcomed into this group. By opening up a private forum, it would create some separation and take away one of the foundations that has grown the PAW forums to be what they are. The lesson here is that if it’s not broken, don’t try to fix it.

2. The second controversial topic allegedly involved a webmaster stealing a website from a partner.

This story is quite the drama in itself. Apparently these two guys were partners on rakereport.net. Then the original owner for some crazy reason thought it would be a good idea to transfer the ownership to the other guy. A few months down the road, the website goes up for sale on PAW and all hell breaks loose. I won’t recap the whole story here as you can read it all at PAW. But basically these two went to war in the thread. It really got fucked up when emails were posted with the original owner threatening to rape this dude’s wife. Seriously, who makes these kinds of threats over a website. I don’t know the whole story, nor am I judge, so I am not going to take sides here.

But threatening acts like this are just fucked up and makes a huge statement about ones character. Who knows how this whole thing will shake out. But I would say having all this aired out on a public forum is probably not good for the overall brand. The lesson here is never, ever, under any circumstance, transfer a domains ownership away unless you are willing to part with it 100%. Oh……. also don’t be an e-punk and threaten stupid shit against people’s families.

3. The third controversial topic involved PokerSourceOnline.com and their translation company.

This is the latest and probably most interesting post. You can read the entire thread above. (Pop some popcorn and plan on a long read). The basic story is that Poker Source Online purchased translation of their website in a bunch of various languages including Swedish, German, and Russian. The translation company is in India and apparently they have done translation for several sites in the online gaming industry including PartyGaming. After a couple months submitting translated pages to PSO, all of the sudden PSO did a quick audit and found out that more than a few of the translations were garbage. They had to spend thousands more dollars to hire new people to audit and fix these translations. Several emails apparently went back and forth between the translation company and PSO about fixing the files throughout this whole ordeal. The translation company expressed how much money it would cost to fix and pleaded with PSO to understand their situation. They did however agree to fix the pages.

In the end PSO sent their final invoice payment with $15,000 less. Keep in mind though that PSO has already paid this company over $85,000. (I should have taken more foreign language in college, it seems like a pretty lucrative field). Akhil, the translator made a post at PAW calling out PSO, and of course Mike from PSO responded. Most of the affiliates sided with PSO except for a few, including a huge affiliate and one of PAW’s most respected yet outspoken members, PPP. Akhil gives a lengthy response to EACH affiliates post. At the time of this being published, the thread is on page 7.

Although I agree with some of what PPP is saying at PAW, I also can see PSO’s point of view. If I ordered a Porshe off of Ebay because it was a good deal and it was described as excellent condition…… Well I expect to get a Porshe similar to what was initially described in the auction. If my Porshe arrives and it is beat to hell, I am not paying the full price for it. Sure the seller could fix the damage. But then I am still going to be nervous and have to spend more money to have a mechanic look it over further after it’s fixed. It shouldn’t matter that I payed below market value for it. I still expect to get what was described initially.

I have spoken with Mike from PSO about the whole situation. And for the record, he does feel very bad about what transpired. Their not trying to fuck anyone over , it’s strictly business. From their end, the whole translation process has turned out to be a lot more expensive than was initially projected. They simply are not going to pay 100% of what was agreed upon up front, when they didn’t receive what was agreed upon in the end.

On this topic of translation, I actually wrote an article about Poker Affiliate Translation prior to the PSO issue. This article is also being published in the GPWA magazine that is being released at CAP Euro, so it must be half way decent.

Regardless of your thoughts on who is right or wrong here, it clearly shows that going global and having your websites translated are much more involved than you would initially think. Personally I am quite happy that all of PokerNews’ translators are on the payroll and commissioned. This way if they suck, we can simply fire them. If they are great, they now have the opportunity to build a very nice long term residual income, simply by translating. <————-win/win.

And although not PAW related, I’d like to give a special mention to the NeverwinPoker.com Drama.  This shit gets funnier every day.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Affiliate Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.