Will other groups steal my players?

The answer is no, and here’s why!

We often get asked, What if other groups come on board that compete with mine? or, put another way, “Will another group steal my players?”

To address this concern, over the past year we have built in a lot of things to tighten up the “open-ness” of the platform, and limit intergroup spam/cross-promotion. These limits are becoming more sophisticated over time.

Here’s a few front end visible changes:

• If a player joins through an invite to your group, they can only see your group’s events by default under the My Events tab. Of course, because it is a shared platform, if they decide to explore other nearby public groups and events because they want to play more or play different sports, they will be able to.
• You can hide your group members
• You can hide the attendee list for your public events
• We took away the local players list
• We’ve introduced 4 event chat modes (public, attendees only, attendees + waitlisted users, disabled)

Limits we placed on the back end of the system:

We’ve also added a handful of changes on the backend to further prevent users/groups from contacting players from other groups:

• There’s a small quota of interactions an organizer can have with non-group members and we get notifications if somebody hit that quota. If somebody reaches a quota, they are told they can’t send any more (ie., messages) and we get notified and can take action.
• For example, the number of players another organizer can invite, that are not in their own group, is controlled by internal quotas. This means if an organizer creates an event, they cannot start inviting other players on the app (who are not in their group) en masse.
• Another example is we put limits on the amount of messages a user can send to non-group members. Again, if a user hits that limit, we get notified and we can take action from there.

Other suggestions

• There’s an event widget you can embed onto your website to keep all player activity within the confines of your group.

If you have any additional feedback or suggestions, we’d love to hear it! Email alicia@opensports.net