The quick story
For games in which you are a full timer or a goalie, when you accept/decline to that game on a device which you are not currently logged into 20Skaters on, you will have to click “Confirm action” on the resulting page. It will now take 2 clicks under those conditions.
If you’re a paid sub or you are logged into 20Skaters on that device, nothing changes and you can accept/decline with 1 click from your email invite.
Update: We are rolling this out in two stages. Today, you will have to login to accept/decline. After we complete some testing and validation, you will be able to accept/decline without having to login but with the ‘confirm action’ click.
The longer story
We’re making a change that we hope will only impact you positively. Over the past several years, we’ve seen an increase in players being automatically declined from games within seconds of being invited.
You would likely only experience this if you are a full-timer in a game and your email address is hosted with a large institution such as a bank, university or municipality.
The short story is that some email virus checkers are now clicking the links in your emails. Our accept and decline links are unique to that invite and allow us to know who you are and which game it’s referencing. This makes life simple for our players as you can accept and decline from any device without having to worry about logging into our site on that device.
The impact for some of our players is that they are invited to their weekly game and within seconds they receive an email confirming they have declined. For them, this seems like someone has declined on their behalf which is the case since that’s exactly what the virus checker has done.
Up until last Friday, this issue seemed to be isolated to auto-declines and only a few players which means it was annoying but low impact. Last Friday we had an incident where a goalie was auto-accepted into a game without them knowing. The result being one of our games was short a goalie.
That, as we all know, is not cool and we take this very seriously. We decided we have to make changes and address this asap.
The change?
First, if you’ve been experiencing this issue as a player then here’s what should change for you. You should immediately stop receiving these auto-decline actions and emails. Assuming you are logged in on the device you accept or decline from then you’ll notice no changes beyond that. If you sometimes accept or decline on a device you are not logged into then you’ll now need to click a “confirm action” button before we accept it.
TL;DR
In order to address this, we are making the following changes. If a full time player or a goalie accept or decline a game through their email invite link but are NOT logged in on that device then it will now require one more click on their part.
It’s only a click to “confirm the action” you are taking. You do not have to login to the site so you can still take this action from any device.
The reason this should eliminate these issues is simple. The virus checker is never actually logged into our application. So we’re assuming that 100% of the clicks from a virus checker will be unauthenticated.
As well, if you’d rather not have to double confirm on that device then you simply have to login to 20Skaters.com on that device.
Our hope is that this removes 100% of these virus checking issues from our system with minimal impact to you, our players.