Requiem to a famous forum: Winneronline is gone

Requiem to a famous forum: Winneronline is gone

July 10, 2015

Doing a bit of spring cleaning the other day of the many external links to other sites listed here, I noticed that Winneronline had gone. Its forum had been defunct for some time, but now the entire site has been removed.

Winneronline was THE online gambling forum in the early years of the new century; between 1999 and about 2004 it was extraordinarily active, and it was the primary public face of many online gambling payment disputes: the Golden Palace furore in late 1999 / early 2000 where an avalanche of advantage players, taking up an unlimited 20% bonus offer, resulted in many disputed confiscations of winnings; the "Pirate Of Caribbean 21" episode in which a player won $1,300,000 dollars at an underfunded RealtimeGaming casino; the SciFi Casino bonus disputes; The ReefClub Casino issue, where a sister casino to a very well known operation offered an excessively generous bonus and realised - too late, as is invariably the case - that it should have been more prudent; The CasinoBar cheating debacle, where it was established that this now-defunct casino was cheating at blackjack; The "Goodfellas" collapse, in which a new Microgaming casino ended up closing after just one over-generous signup bonus.

And many more besides.

The Winneronline forum, or "WOL" as we called it, suffered badly from aggressive moderation in the later years, causing the migration elsewhere of almost all active members and effectively the death of the forum. It soldiered on for a long time as something of a ghost town, ultimately closing its doors along with the rest of the site relatively recently.

Many advantage players aired their bonus complaints exclusively at WOL, and many disputes were settled in its then very much rough-and-tumble environment. In short: it worked, in large part. There were at least two disputes that I had with Realtime Gaming casinos that would never have been resolved any other way, and I'd be poorer today as a result, as would many others.

Thanks, WOL. It was an experience on many levels, and a good laugh as well.

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