BETA: vBookie

vBookie

Beta release

What is vBookie?

vBookie is a 'bookmakers' or betting extension to vBulletin. It enables authorised members to post Events and Outcomes that forum members can bet on. Each Outcome has its own set of odds, and odds can be modified through the life of a bet.

Once the results are known, Events can be settled and forums members awarded their winnings.

vBookie uses its own vCash by default, but this has no more use than as 'bragging rights'. However, vBookie also comes with a built-in switch to allow it to use uCash instead. That means that all bets are paid for and settled using uCash, making betting even more attractive than just for fun on forums with uShop installed. Although vBookie does not have any built-in facility to integrate with any other store hacks, it's a very simple job to hack vBookie itself to integrate it with any store/points system you care to use. For example, you might wish to link vBookie with Petz, so that Petz players can gamble their points. It would be possible to reduce the amount of points awarded for posting etc. and make betting the best way to make money, which might go some way to tackling the 'forum spamming' that seems to be part and parcel of a Petz installation. If integration with any particular store hack or other system seems popular, I will build it in to vBookie, so please let me know if there are any requests.

For a more detailed explanation, the beta manual is online here.

Why is this a Beta?

I have tested vBookie on my own PC and on my main forum, and it works OK in both situations. However, there are quite a lot of changes, and there is also an installer that only I have run, so I would like to get some other people to check it out before I claim it's a release version.

Expansion

vBookie requires manual intervention for the settlement of bets as a human being has to select which outcomes are winning ones, and also to specify the available outcomes in the first place. However, if you have a PHP-based web site that has ladders or leagues/matches with a scoring system, it should be a fairly straight forward job to hack vBookie so it can be plumbed into that other system. No doubt some people will come up with other ideas, too. You could take an automated stock ticker and bet on the final value of Microsoft after each day, or something. =)

Feedback & Bugs

I welcome feedback, particularly the positive sort. If you find any bugs please do let me know. If they are esoteric, please try to give instructions for how to reproduce them.

Image attachment uploads don't seem to be working at the moment (I've tried GIF and PNG) so view the manual for screenshots.

Enhancements Not Yet Released

From 0.7 Beta 1

• Added switch to specify whether punters may bet on more than one outcome
• Added "decimal odds" display as well as the UK style fractional display
• Added graphical display of the relative popularity of each outcome on a bet (like poll results)

TODO

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

• add option to award a gratuity to all users when a new bet is placed
  (so everyone always has *something* to play with, even if it's only a
  small amount). Alternatively, only make awards to people on zero.
• 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.

Updates

Changes in 0.6 Beta 2

Daylight savings time is taken into account when editing events. That is to say, it's assumed that the person editing is entering the time they want in their local time, whether or not daylight savings is in effect or not.

To upgrade from 0.6 Beta 1 to 0.6 Beta 2 simply overwrite the vbookie.php file.

[tjdrico]

Originally Posted by Mike11212

be cool if you could set it to work with paypal

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. =)

[gmarik]

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

[tjdrico]

Originally Posted by gmarik

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. =)

[Pady]

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

[Mike11212]

Originally Posted by gmarik

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

its basically gambling.

[sabret00the]

how much additional server load does this cause?

[tjdrico]

Originally Posted by sabret00the

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.

[bradsears]

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.

[tjdrico]

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.

[sabret00the]

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