Live Q&A discussion thread - March 14th

Is this caused by the datacentre move 31-Jan-2011?

Pretty much a rehash of the last Q&A so far..

The selection of the commission refund markets is quite broad and a welcome step, and appears to be set to compensate in those sports which were most effected, which is, of course, fair.

However, a significant portion of Saturday night's betting on the World Golf Championship was lost, much to the frustration and financial loss of golf bettors, yet there's no compensation for this.  Golf might not be the biggest sport on BF, but there were a lot of frustrated punters left high and dry on a significant golf event.

As stated on another thread, give everyone who has placed a bet on the site in march £50 free, no strings attached. A few Commission free markets means virtually nothing tbh.[>o]

The gall of you people to tell us that you have sufficient management structure and good IT practices in place.  You clearly don't, else you wouldn't need to roll back your upgrades with such regularity.

no horse racing 100% commision free market on Gold Cup day -  come on Betfair look again please.

re: Please can you tell me how many test environments there are at Betfair and what methodology is used in terms of stress & contention testing to migrate system upgrades?
We have a huge range of test environments including development, performance/stress and staging. Even though our Quality Assurance team of over 100 people undertakes extensive testing, it is very difficult to replicate the actual live behaviour seen on the site.

It is not "very difficult to replicate the actual live behaviour" because you run historical data against a sandbox - just as every other company with a decent IT department does.
Your 100 QA staff can't even script for the most basic interface checks - take the error of missing markets that crops up time after time.  Do you run any UAT - because I'm pretty sure even the most novice of users would be able to spot a gaping hole down the left-hand side of the screen!

re: The last time the system crashed on a Saturday afternoon, you did some testing on the following Thursday. This involved stopping the live system, which caused API bots trading systems to crash. Will you be doing this again?
The last time we did this we were trying to check whether the fix we had in place would be completely effective under live conditions. As this particular problem is a completely different issue that we know we have fixed, we have no immediate plans to do this again.

So you DO test against a live system then... jesus wept BF, are you trying to lose all credibility.
A company with so much spare server capacity that they can (alledgedly) triple their storage and still have lots to spare!

... but not enough spare storage to set up a separate test environment...

dear betfair

if i dont place a winning bet, when the 100% commission back comes into effect, how will i feel compensated?

Betfair
I agree with what has been said about golf bettors etc. some people may not want to bet on the commission free markets offered this week! Anyway why should we HAVE to place bets "risking" more money in order to qualify (if the bet actually wins)for compensation which is a very small percentage of what I and many others would have lost at the weekend. For traders like me, the majority of liquidity is provided by traders and by offering 5% of winnings as compensation I simply do not think this is good enough.
Alex

Re this in the Q and A:
"Why aren’t all channels taken down during an outage to prevent bets from being unfairly matched (i.e. API, Mobile, etc)?
As soon as we become aware of a significant issue, it is our policy to disable all betting channels to ensure a level playing field for customers."
Please if you manually disable things (a good thing) but we still have access, PLEASE make it so markets are suspended but bets can at least be VIEWED and CANCELLED. If you can't cancel them, then it comes back up later especially if you're now away, you're obviously possibly in a bad scenario, also if you can see what bets you have, that's obviously extremely useful as well at the time.

there might be no crashes this week, but i dont have much confidence that when they try to roll out new "features" they wont introduce something catastrophic to performance. They have had 10 years of website experience but test environments still dont match live

generally a very disappointing q&a session so far. not addressed the issues of anyone trading. not restored my confidence at all. whilst traders seem to have been considered pretty unimportant due to low comparative commission for betfair, maybe the importance of them in providing liquidity for others to bet against is now being understood. recent weak markets will continue if their issues are not addressed. if someone has a £100k trading bank for example that he is prepared to risk say 5% of in getting the trade right or wrong how do you expect him to react now he is expected to risk the whole £100k of it?

we identified that the database had some threads that were frozen and we needed to free them up in order to guarantee performance for Sunday

So thats 2 issues a web front end issue and now a DB issue

We intend to keep adding great new products

I suspect I speak for 90+% of the forum when I say simply
"Please don't"

imho there will always be problems in february to the cheltenham festival due to doing stuff to try and make cheltenham go smoothly which causes site probs. this year has been exceptionally bad though. agree all the new 'rubbish' should be on a separate site as the slowness now must seriously put off anyone interested in having a traditional bet. personall i lost £600 a few weekends earlier so have taken a couple of weeks off expecting saturday to happen some time soon. the question is now do i go back at all? the question of providing compensation via commission free markets is bizarre as it just seems like a promotion open to everyone rather than adressing anyone's losses. very sad to see a company i once considered the very very best of british come to this.

well said Lori

Betfair Customer Services     13 Mar 11 16:10 

When the website failed on Saturday, our first step was to disable Betfair for all our customers on the web, API and mobile services.  Once we identified the actual problem, we determined that we needed our website "available" but with betting disallowed.  We recovered the site internally around 18:00 and re-enabled betting as of 20:00 once we were certain it was stable.


So 24 hours later you release your apology, even then you get it wrong, i had a load of bets matched from 17.02 to 17.17
probably not the biggest issue but does show a level of incompetence to not get the facts right.

So anyone who got stuck in a large losing position on Saturday and has had to scale down or out as a result will get compensated less/not at all. Whereas anyone who got stuck in a large winning position will be able to bet more and thus benefit more. Who came up with a compensation idea that discriminates against those that lost the most? You should be refunding people commission from last week, not this week, and implementing a discount decay suspension.

Betfair: We looked at a whole range of options but we felt the fairest option was to give a commission refund and announce it in advance so that everyone has the chance to benefit.

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how does anyone who got wiped out have a chance to benefit? and again, what is the rationale behind a "compensation" system that people can benefit from in inverse proportion to the amount they suffered?