Stats & Referral Management System

The Online Poker Stats & Referral Manager project was initiated to solve a specialized problem for a poker affiliate client. The problem was that as a membership site, not only did the client want members to signup but also to provide special incentives for current members to refer the service to their friends. Therefore, once a member logged into their account, there needed to be a easy method for referring their friends that would not only track all referrals sent out but track referred members that signed up and link all referred members to the referring member.

In addition to tracking referrals, the application had to provide state of the art tools such as a specialized rakeback calculator, message center for posting, retrieving and managing private messages, a helpdesk system for tracking resolved and unresolved member support issues, access to business card templates for members, site banner management, FAQs management, and typical account management support such as retrieve lost usernames and passwords, change passwords, all members to submit cashout requests, track cashout requests submitted, news and announcements section with an option to mark announcements as urgent so they will show up in the main member's area, allow members to edit preferences and edit profiles for personalization.

• MySQL was chosen as the database to support the member's and the admin backend and Perl was chosen as the language of choice - although a few of the simpler features were implemented using PHP.
• For security reasons, the VPS hosting environment was setup to use several aliases to hide the location of directory and script names.
• The backend database currently consists of 22 separate tables to implement the relationships between the data entities.

What follows is a brief description of how some of the features were implemented:

Referral Management

Once a member signs into their account, they have access to the refer friends tool consisting of options to send a new referral, view confirmed referrals, and manage unconfirmed referrals. When a new referral is sent out, the application saves the referral information into the referral table, which consists of who sent the referral, to whom the referral was sent, the date the referral was sent, and the custom text of the invitation composed by the referring member. The system composes an invitation with a custom link to the member's custom signup page, which tracks a click to the member who sent the invitation. The member who sent the invitation can see all "unconfirmed referrals" in their member's area, as well as all confirmed referrals.

When a referee receives the invitation and clicks the link provided, they launch a backend script that first sets a cookie on their PC containing the ID of the member who sent the invitation. Then, they are forwarded to the main site signup page. For instance, if a member sent a referral to their friend to signup at Doyles Room, the link in the email would send the reader to the Doyles Room signup page for doyles rakeback. If the referee decides to signup right then and there, the signup script grabs the cookie and uses it to link the new member to the member who sent the invitation. This also works if the referee decides to look around the site first before signing up.

A CRON job was setup to run every 4 hours to check if unconfirmed referrals signed up and insures that new members are connected to the referring member correctly, which essentially keeps the referral table trimmed as they removed if they signed up. Unconfirmed referrals are displayed in the referring member's area using data from the referral table. Unconfirmed referrals are displayed in the referring member's area using data from the member table.

If a member's referral doesn't signup after a week or so, the member has the option of resending the referral using the Refer a Friend tool.

A member also has the option to create a personal landing page, which is customized by the system. This personal landing page contains instructions about how to signup and other information necessary for referring new members. The personal landing page gives each member a unique URL that they can post in email, forums, and blogs with affiliate information embedded in the link.

Administration

In addition to the many tools designed for members, an administrative system was designed and implemented so that the administrator can easily do the following tasks:

• configure the website
• post and manage announcements
• post and manage FAQs
• build promotions
• upload images for posting in announcements
• manage member accounts
• mass mail members
• manage the helpdesk
• manage member cashout requests

There are many other features not described in this project overview. Overall this application took a year to build, implement and test, and currently is being used on multiple sites to manage their rakeback memberships. There are around 5,000+ active members on the sites at last count and grows at about 6-10 new members per day.