Let's Talk About Identity Server, Contest Signups & Live Chat

[Greg Ambrosius]

I did something last week that I've never done before the start of an NFBC season.

I took a week's vacation. I took a week's vacation with my wife. And I took a week's vacation out of the country, spending the best time of my life in the Caribbean with my wife.

I didn't say anything about it because I knew we'd be fine with the staff we have running things and I just knew football, baseball and basketball would run fine without me in the kitchen. We just needed a getaway now that the kids are all grown up and I needed to recharge the batteries before the NFBC season really kicks in.

It was fantastic. Until I got home. Then came the emails from veterans I know and love. Then I saw the changes to the NFBC website, changes I honestly had no idea about. And before I could unpack my luggage, I was having conference calls and Zoom meetings to figure out what was happening.

I actually saw some of the internal chatter about the Identity Server and some customers changing their names and doing stupid stuff while I was sitting on the beach drinking a frozen cocktail. I didn't think much of it, but then more of you guys did it and suddenly it caused some problems and apparently steps needed to be taken to address what was going on. It got out of hand before I could get back into the country. So thanks for that.

I don't mean to be a scolding parent, but I'm going to be. First of all, we pay six figures per year in state-by-state licensing fees and we have GEO locators for exempt states and an Identity Server that makes sure that everyone who signs up for our contests is a real person, their identity is verified, they are legally old enough to play with us and they have signed up in a legal way. We HAVE to legally run our contests this way or our licensors will pull our licenses. We take a lot of effort to do this correctly.

Oh, and we pay a lot of money to verify all of this and to be licensed.

To sign up with us, you sign up with your legal name. If a signup comes through with initials or something else, we do what we can to change that signup/account to the person's real name. We do not allow anonymous names in our contests, nor should anyone want them. Sometimes a signup will come through that doesn't look exactly right and we figure out that account and get it right.

Apparently, though, there is a loophole in our Identity Server or somewhere along the line where you guys figured out how to change your names or username. Honestly, I'm not up to speed with all of this info, but when someone did it, others followed suit to prove a point and suddenly there were multiple people doing it and thinking this was funny. Kind of wanted to prove a point to the NFBC. Show us we're so dumb you could change your name. Heck, one person has multiple accounts and drafted from one account and changed his name on the other. He showed us man.

And guess what? Everything you did forced us to change things on the site. A decision was made before I got home to just change everyone to usernames on the site until we can close the loophole. You want the Top 100 in Career Earnings? It's there, with usernames instead of real names. And no dollar totals. Want to know who's on Live Chat? Usernames instead of real names.

There. You showed us. Everyone happy now?

I guess not, because then the emails started coming in questioning why we'd be so non-community oriented as to replace real names with user names. The emails made their points, but they were in a way that made it seem like I just thought this looked better on the site. Like me or Tom or Geoff just decided one day for no reason to make this change.

Nope. We understand the community aspect of the NFBC and we understand the history of our contest. But this stupidity quickly led to questions about Privacy and other rights. And so a decision was made higher than my pay grade to make these changes. And more may be in store because of this.

Contest Signups will now show real names if you are logged into your account. If you're not logged into your account or aren't a member of the NFBC, you will just see usernames under Contest Signups. Again, log into your account and you can see the names of people in each available league.

I've asked IT to change Live Chat, to return the real names and we're still working on that. We're working on an addition there that I can discuss later.

Career Earnings needs a longer look. That page will be disabled for the time being. No dollar amounts showing. Sorry.

Again, some of you thought it was funny to mess with the software and change names, etc. All it did was set off the fire alarms and soon everything got looked at. Now there are different ways to identify everyone. We need to fix the software loophole, but we also have many other tech things we're working on first and so usernames will stay for now. Please think twice before doing stupid shit because there's more than just you on the site. We all want to enjoy this community and what we have, so now we just have to convince some people that it makes sense the way it was. Until then, at least you know why you're seeing usernames everywhere.

Thanks.

[Greg Ambrosius]

Okay, in a couple of minutes Live Chat will return real names to show Who's Online.

If anyone wishes to change that posting to their username, they can do so under Team Settings. That's located under League in the green navigational bar. If you change it to username, it will show up that way in the following areas:

Live Chat
Overall Standings
Contest Signups

Plan accordingly. Thanks.