Zock: the free betting office

Zock: the free betting office


Zock is a new piece of free software for organizing betting games.

It is a "betting office" targeted at cliques of friends or co-workers which would like to organize a betting game for a sport event.

Right now, it needs testers. If you are interested in using it, read on.

If you like to bet only for fun and make a tournament with points, or if you want to bet money, Zock is the software for you.

Zock is brand new: the current version is 0.5.1. This means that there's still more to come, although it is already quite sophisticated.

Go to Zock's home or have a look at some screenshots.

Installing Zock

To install it:

  1. Download the tarball from launchpad, extract it into a folder on your web server or your local machine.

  2. Make sure the "installation"-folder and the "src/vars.php"-file are writable by the web server.

  3. Access it preferably with Firefox and fill in the necessary database information; then, click "install now!"

  4. There you go! The installation is perfect. Delete the folder installation and login with your chosen user name and the password "admin"

  5. Change your password in the menu "My Profile"/"Password".

  6. Click on Admin, Betting Games and Create Betting Games

  7. You will be guided through the creation of a betting game.

  8. Finally, get your friends to participate and everything is perfect and even the most annoying games become interesting.

Using Zock

Once you created a betting game with a couple of matches, you have ranking of the betters which are fighting for a possible jackpot. If you give a wrong bet, you get -1 point; the ranking is especially flexible, and changes a lot. The overview makes it possible to see the bets of all the people as soon the placing phase is over. This way, everyone has access to the other bets, especially to those of the admin.

Zock can be customised -- it even has different money distribution algorithms -- or you define who gets what share.

Testing it

Zock is fairly new. Please test it and let the developers know if bugs or problems.

Category: 
End users
Tagging: 
free software
gplv3
cms
betting office
bet manager
zock
tool

Author information

mpschroeder's picture

Biography

I am a student in Bioinformatics and have a very big interest in free software, epsecially for research purposes. Also in science labs, the working tradition could be characterized as proprietary and free software gives same standards to all labs.

Most forwarded

Interview with Dave Mohyla, of DTIDATA

Dave Mohyla is the president and founder of dtidata.com, a hard drive recovery facility based in Tampa, Florida.

TM: Where are you based? What does your company do?
DTI Data recovery is based in South Pasadena, Florida which is a suburb of Tampa. We have been here for over 10 years. We operate a bio-metrically secured class 100 clean room where we perform hard drive recovery on all types of hard disks, from laptop hard drives to multi drive RAID systems.

Anybody up to writing good directory software?

Since the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).

Interview with Mark Shuttleworth

Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Thawte, the first Certification Authority to sell public SSL certificates. After selling Thawte to Verisign, Mark moved on to training as an astronaut in Russia and visiting space. Once he got back he founded Ubuntu, the leading GNU/Linux distribution. He agreed on releasing a quick interview to Free Software Magazine.

Is better education the key to finding better software?

I read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.

Most emailed

Free Open Document label templates

If you’ve ever spent hours at work doing mailings, cursed your printer for printing outside the lines on your labels, or moaned “There has got to be a better way to do this,” here’s the solution you’ve been looking for. Working smarter, not harder! Worldlabel.com, a manufacture of labels offers Open Office / Libre Office labels templates for downloading in ODF format which will save you time, effort, and (if you want) make really cool-looking labels

Creating a user-centric site in Drupal

A little while ago, while talking in the #drupal mailing list, I showed my latest creation to one of the core developers there. His reaction was "Wow, I am always surprised what people use Drupal for". His surprise is somehow justified: I did create a site for a bunch of entertainers in Perth, a company set to use Drupal to take over the world with Entertainers.Biz.

Update: since writing this article, I have updated the system so that the whole booking process happens online. I will update the article accordingly!

So, why, why do people and companies develop free software?

More and more people are discovering free software. Many people only do so after weeks, or even months, of using it. I wonder, for example, how many Firefox users actually know how free Firefox really is—many of them realise that you can get it for free, but find it hard to believe that anybody can modify it and even redistribute it legally.

When the discovery is made, the first instinct is to ask: why do they do it? Programming is hard work. Even though most (if not all) programmers are driven by their higher-than-normal IQs and their amazing passion for solving problems, it’s still hard to understand why so many of them would donate so much of their time to creating something that they can’t really show off to anybody but their colleagues or geek friends.

Sure, anybody can buy laptops, and just program. No need to get a full-on lab or spend thousands of dollars in equipment. But... is that the full story?

Fun articles

Santa Claus - the most successful open source project

It dawned on me the other day, as I was shopping for the dozens of gifts it seems I have to buy every December, that Santa Claus is the most successful open source project in history. (Bridget @ Illiterarty would agree with that). Santa Claus is essentially a marketing development that is embodied by everyone who stuffs a sock, gives a gift, hosts a dinner or wishes Merry Christmas over the holiday season.

Most emailed

Editorial

When I first started thinking about Free Software Magazine, I was feeling enthusiastic about the dream. I had Dave, Gianluca, and Alan willing to help me, I had established members of the free software community willing to help me out, I had writers volunteering their time and energy for free, and I had a generous offer from OpenHosting for servers, all before I'd proved myself. There was a sense of excitement in the air, and I thought maybe, just maybe, I could make this work.

Free Software Magazine uses Apollo project management software and CRM for its everyday activities!