I'm not sure about this, from an implementation point of view and from a legal perspective.

It's not possible to directly take money from someone's Paypal account, and donating money requires a confirmation, but I think the way round this would be for the forum in question to have something tacked onto the side using the Subscriptions system or something, but hacked up so that payments went to pay for vCash. There'd also need to be a system to pay people using Paypal again using their vCash total. When dealing with real money everything would have to be bulletproof to prevent fraud and theft, and I think it would be quite an effort to write something that I would be confident of.

Also, boards using it might need some sort of gambling/betting license, and I also don't know if I could be held liable in any way for providing a tool that uses real money.

All of which is a long way of saying I'm sure it's possible, but I have no plans to do it myself. =)

Can't get the point of this, hard nut!

What don't you understand? I suppose, if you can't understand what it's for, you don't want it anyway. =)

looks like a very impressive hack you have created, will watch this one with interest for when it goes final - thanks for sharing

its basically gambling.

how much additional server load does this cause?

I have absolutely no idea whatsoever, nor do I really know how to go about working that out. =) I don't expect there's a huge price to pay as there aren't any really nasty queries involved. There are no indexes on any of the tables though, apart from their primary keys, so there's some scope for tweaking some of the joins that are present when someone views the Stats page. Some of the row fetches might take a while on the viewitem page because it will display all bets by default - could be a lot of you had hundreds or thousands of users that like to gamble. I've only tested it with a small forum (200 members or so), and it hasn't had any really big Events to chew on yet.

I don't expect it adds any more load than adding a poll to a thread, but as I said before I really can't qualify this nor quantify the impact.

There is a setting to turn it all off though, so if you found it seemed to be a problem then it's easy to "remove" without editing any files.

I'm certain it is against paypal's terms of service to use them for gambling. For that you have to go to a dedicated (expensive) service like neteller.com. There is too much risk of chargeback from gambling transactions.

I just updated the first post with the following information:

TODO

This is the current list of things I plan on adding to vBookie imminently:

• Add switch to specify whether punters may bet on more than one outcome
• Add "decimal odds" display as well as the UK style fractional display
• Add graphical display of the relative popularity of each outcome on a bet (like poll results)
• Add 'accumulator' bets
• Add "each way" betting
• Build in a switch to use Petz points instead of vCash
• Improve user feedback on bet status and why they can't bet.

Please email me any requests or add them to this thread.


Note to INSTALLERS

If you have installed vBookie, I am interested in hearing how it went and how it's still going, since this is a beta after all. Was the installation script OK? Were the code changes accurate? Is it working on your forum OK?

Please let me know, so I can prepare for a general full release, thanks.

installed it, installation was easy thank you, my only thing is that the templates could be worked on a bit.