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Scrabulous Is Dead, Hasbro's Version Brain-Dead
eldavojohn writes "Sometime this morning, Facebook shut down Scrabulous to American and Canadian users. Scrabulous, we hardly knew ye." This is sadly unsurprising, now that Hasbro's finally taken legal action against the developers, after quite a few months of letting it go unmolested. Seems like they waited until there was an official Scrabble client available (also on Facebook), while the snappy and fuller-featured Scrabulous kept people interested in a 60-year-old board game. The official client, which is at least labeled a beta, is a disappointment. This is not a Google-style beta release, note: it's slow to load, confusing, and doesn't even offer the SOWPODS word list as an option, only the Tournament Word List and a list based on the Merriam-Webster dictionary. (Too bad that SOWPODS is the word list used in most of the world's English-speaking countries.) It also took several minutes to open a game, rather than the few seconds (at most) that Scrabulous took — it's pretty impressive, but not in a good way, that the programmers could extract that sort of performance from the combination of Facebook's servers and my dual-core, 2GHz+ laptop. The new Scrabble client has doodads like 3D flipping-tile animations, too, but no clear way to actually initiate the sample game that jamie and I have attempted to start. I hope that once we get past that obvious hurdle, we'll find there's a chat interface and game notebook as in Scrabulous, but my hopes are low.
The developers asked too much money? Hasbro was too stingy? Hope they realize their mistake now and offer a decent price to the brothers who developed scrablous.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The Boggle clone changed its name, and its still up. There have been perfectly legal scrabble clone games published since the 1940s. I have some in my collection of antique toys and games. All you have to do is not use the trademarked name.
This space available.
My god! It must have been a heroic effort to somehow drum up interest in something that ancient! If they could do that for Scrabble, imagine what they could do for chess, or go, or even poker!
If the people behind Scrabulous have any pride, they'll tell Hasbro to go fuck themselves. They did a better Scrabble than Scrabble, and rather than compete, Hasbro turned to the law.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Just another sad day when an entity demands and is granted the right to continue to profit exclusivly on an idea that is decades old.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
The Web-based version of Scrabulous seems to be working just fine.
We really REALLY need copyright reform. I'm 56 years old. Nothing ever created in my lifetime will reach the public domain while I still breathe, and no matter how young you are nothing created in your lifetime will reach the public domain either. And as this Scabble thing shows, it stifles creativity. When Newton said "if I see farther than other men, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants" (and he wasn't the first to say that), the same could be said of art.
Where would engineering be if patents were endless, like copyrights are? Endless copyrights stifle creativity. Where would Disney be without the Brothers Grimm? And how can we convince our governments that they are hindering artistic progress?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Facebook is a US site
What is that even supposed to mean?
No way!
Ask any fans of Magic: the Gathering or Dungeons & Dragons about Hasbro's digital offerings for those two giant games. Failure after failure after failure.
You really have to blame Google and Blizzard. They get the top online devs and everyone else gets table scraps.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
I believe a facebook app must run on its own servers, not the facebook owned ones. So its likely they didn't do a very good job handling the sudden rise in demand with their hardware. Facebook apps sometimes need to scale very quickly as they become viral. Feel free to correct me, if you have any actual experience developing for facebook, I've just read a few accounts.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I doubt the creators of Scrabulous had the foresight to patent their invention of "method to play the board game Scrabble using information technology," but if they did, they would have an awesome countersuit. Would the courts rule in favor of trademark or patent?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
For a start the game dates back to 1938! The guy who designed it died in 1993, he actually sold it in the 1940s and it was trademarked then. And they still try and extort money from it? For fucks sake.
This can only backlash against HASBRO - they will make not a penny from the new Facebook version in any case and scrabulous was advertising the board game splendidly.
Seems like a really, really dumb move guaranteed to annoy the end users.
What do HASBRO think they will get from this? They will only get advertising revenue if they can persuade people to visit their new version, and annoying the customers is not a good method to do so.
On the other hand Scrabulous was shut down by the developers themselves in response to the lawsuit, so either they are covering their asses or this is some attempt to make HASBRO reconsider in the face of user outrage.
Typical. For me Scrabulous was one of the only reasons I used FB - I wonder if this will show up in the FB user numbers as a dip?
http://games.yahoo.com/lt
(you need a yahoo login)
totally free. huge regular user base in all skill levels. you get to keep track of your score/ rank over many thousands of games. there are different servers for different skill levels
its a java app. i've had problems with it freezing on ie (so you lose a match and it hurts your overall standing), but it works fine in firefox. you can play time limit games, challenge spelling games, etc.
there are some quirks and minor complaints, griping about the dictionary of course being the biggest, as usual, but by and large i'm very satisfied by the player population and the overall challenge and the easy in/ easy out/ waste 20 minutes nature of play
you frequently encounter players with thousands of games under their belt, and you can check if their win/ loss ratio is suspect or their abandoned games count is suspect (meaning: they jettisoned games in the first few seconds before it hurt their score if they don't like their initial tiles, which is really lame). as for the players with the weird win/loss ratios: i don't understand why someone would cheat at such a frivolous nonmonetary past time, but you encounter such players way more than you would think. i don't get it. is someone designing bots for a CS class? is someone so interested in winning over enjoying themselves? i don't understand it
of course, it's not 100% scrabble, but how it departs from scrabble, such as pseudorandom letter tiles (chosen at the beginning of the game and fixed but from a much larger pool of tiles) is interesting. so some games are brutal because of a bunch of Cs, Is, and Us, and the next game might be surprising because of a surfeit of Js and Zs
i'm very happy with literati for wasting 20 minutes here and there
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If Hasbro is smart they will sue Scrabulous, take the company, cut a deal with their developers/management and paste the Scrable name to their application. To be fair, I'm sure this was Hasbro managment's plan all along, but a few individuals over at Scrabulous must have dug in their heel. Just a prediction...
my mom posts on slashdot.
Facebook is already translated into many languages and there are networks for most countries. While Facebook the corporation may be chartered in the US, it's obvious the leadership thinks of it as a global site.
ON Top of that mod me up...................
But I will undoubtedly get much more productive during the day... End6!
There are still plenty of us who care about myspace / facebook. Most people on the Internet are on one (or both) of those. I see why this article justifies front-page status.
Or how about I bitch about all the articles about C and Ruby and a whole load of other programming languages I don't know? Or websites that I personally don't care about? Should the front-page only have articles that we all care about? I'm guessing that would be quite a short list.
It means he thinks that there aren't millions of non-US facebook users because he hasn't bothered to look.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
in the mid-1990s the antiretrovirals that revolutionized survival rates with HIV were invented/ discovered in the west. but india came along and simply said "look, we're going to make these antiretrovirals in india and pay the discoverers in the west nothing, as we are treating poor people with them". and their decision has pretty much stood the test of time internationally (and stood the test of ethics of course)
however, the lack of moral equivalency of HIV drugs versus board games might not be so instructive as to establishing precedence i suppose
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't see a single article on the front page that affects everyone.
Your post strikes me as a lame excuse for trumpeting your awesome coolness for not using Facebook or Myspace. Consider your awesome coolness recognized, now leave us alone to talk about things that affect many thousands of people.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
I'd like to see a bunch of people putting some other Hasbro-like games up on Facebook - a Battleship clone or something like that. With different names, of course....but there is money to be made from entertaining fans of other Hasbro games...
If these guys can do Scrabble so well, why not encourage them to do other Hasbro games in a way that makes Hasbro money?
Stop making sense.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
My mom was kicking my butt, 306 to 278, with just a few tiles to go. I guess I should consider this a reprieve. If you can't win, hope for a tie due to complete system shutdown, right?
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
There are plenty of people who don't care for a lot of things.
Skip the article and read something else.
Just because it doesn't apply to you, doesn't mean it doesn't deserve front page status. Not to mention this isn't just about facebook. It's about IP laws, etc.
So if you don't like it, then don't read it and shut up.
Niggle is a freeware Scrabble on the Palm that is fairly vanilla looking but is a far superior implementation of Scrabble to the official Hasbro version, but when they came out with official Scrabble on the Palm the authors of Niggle, of course, pulled it.
If it was simply a matter of Trademark then Scrabulous and Niggle would have no more problem than MAD Magazine.
The feature list provided, the integrated chat, the quick loads, and word list, all describe a sort of a tile based game that is essentially different from scrabble the board game. Really, by Hasbro making an online tile thing, they are infringing on scrabulous's intellectual property. Scrabulous should patent everything about their work, and sue Hasbro for infringement on their invention.
This is my sig.
Your post strikes me as a lame excuse for trumpeting your awesome coolness for not using Facebook or Myspace.
Congratulations on not reading what was written. I didn't say I don't use either of those. I said that they don't have that significant of a role to justify front-page status for a news site titled "News for Nerds: stuff that matters".
Consider your awesome coolness recognized, now leave us alone to talk about things that affect many thousands of people.
I would like to see Slashdot return to actually discussing important technical news, rather than piddly things like applications on social networking sites.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The bit I haven't yet deciphered (I have RTFA, but it didn't really help) is what exactly the lawsuit claims. It says that it's filed under the DMCA, but not what exactly Hasbro are claiming copyright on. Is a game concept copyrightable? If not, can Scrabulous just remove whatever little bit it is that they are claiming on?
Deja vu. There used to be a pretty reasonable Tetris on Facebook called Block Star. It was shut down, and replaced with an officially licensed version called Tetris Friends. But no one plays that because it's crap in comparison (and it doesn't work on Macs or under Linux). Sigh.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Sadly, it reminds me of the way Microsoft destroyed DR-DOS... It (Microsoft) promised a more robust DOS that would incorporate everything that people were turning to DR-DOS for, but never delivered (in MS-DOS)... Of course, by the time people realized they were duped, the damage was done.
Likewise, Hasbro is doing this in a probable attempt at protecting the "Scrabble" concept, taking down any/all similar projects, while providing a solution that is "beta" at best.
It should be interesting to see how this all pans out.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
Legallly, this claim has nothing to do with trademark. Please, stop spreading FUD.
This game was pulled under the DMCA. The DMCA only protects against copyright infringement, it has NO PROVISIONS AT ALL for trademark infringement.
If this game had (in Scrabble's opinion) simply violated trademark, they could NOT have leveraged the DMCA.
Now, if Scrabble has, in fact, perjured itself (DMCAing without cause *is* perjury), scrabulous must file a DMCA counter-claim. They will win, and should win big, if, in fact, Scrabble has perjured itself.
I expect Scrabble actually has committed perjury, because I highly doubt any code or instructions (the copyrighted parts of Scrabble, the board/name are TRADEMARKS, totally different) in Scrabulous are non-original.
Go Rajat and Jaynat, go!
The theories of changing the name or the colors are out. The best online scrabble games I ever played was at www.lexiconzone.com, and they've been shut down also.
I don't see why everyone's against HASBRO. Yes, Scrabulous was much better. But if I created a cure for cancer called CanCure and didn't have issues with other people creating similar cures, I think I'd be on good ground being a little upset when someone comes up with CanCures which could obviously be confused with my original cure. The quality of their cure is irrelevant. They stole my trademarked name.
It means that Facebook is owned by a US company and hosted in the US, and therefore falls under US jurisdiction.
Username taken, please choose another one.
It means that as a company located and doing business in the US, it has to follow the local laws. It does not matter that the website is translated into multiple languages.
Your post strikes me as a lame excuse for trumpeting your awesome coolness for not using Facebook or Myspace. Consider your awesome coolness recognized, now leave us alone to talk about things that affect many thousands of people.
It's funny how, as far as I've seen, people don't complain when there's a Slashdot story about Perl - yet that is relevant to orders of magnitude fewer people than MySpace or Facebook do.
It's also funny how "cool" means one thing on Slashdot, and quite another in the world at large. Somehow I don't think the two sets overlap much.
#DeleteChrome
new meme.
FYI, my lawyer friend says you can't patent/copyright/trademark game mechanics. So, just rename it to "Scandalous" and let's get playing again!
And why would that in any way affect their choice of dictionaries? Are some dictionaries illegal in the US?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=629347&cid=24387571
I haven't bought anything from Hasbro for maybe 24 years, now at last I have a reason!
Boycott Year 25, here we go!
Shit, what about using "Heart" pictures as card faces rather than "Apple" pictures. Is THAT innovative?
For fucks sake, it's copied not because it is innovation but because people know how it works! Just like cars don't use joysticks they use wheels for steering.
Of course ex-users of Scrabulous are going to tank the official version. This is news?
I would like to see Slashdot return to actually discussing important technical news
Then find some and submit it.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
people don't complain when there's a Slashdot story about Perl - yet that is relevant to orders of magnitude fewer people than MySpace or Facebook do.
Actually, Perl affects at least as many (if not more) slashdot users than myspace or facebook. After all, slashdot does run on Perl. You even had to make use of a Perl script just to post your reply where you claimed that the social networking sites were somehow more relevant than the scripting language that you used to post said reply.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
My GOD! You use the name. Scrabble (tm) Hasbro(tm). NOT FUCKING SCRABULOUS!!!!
I'd bet that close to 100% of them use Slashdot.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Hasbro has a HORRIBLE reputation of going after the "little" guys that produce fantastic electronic interpretations of their board games then releasing an "authentic" piece of garbage (Dogs of War vs. Axis and Allies is one of the first to my recollection). Instead they've bought up a bunch of smaller (better) game companies, and did a hack job on the original content.
Maybe I'm not that smart of a businessman, but if someone else did all the work it saves me a boatload of cash to seek out a licensing agreement. If they put in the effort, they're likely fans of my original product and may be willing to work out a deal. I then release it as the "official" version, brand name/product stamp and all drawing a bigger crowd than the smaller developer ever could. All benefit for me at minimal cost.
Oops, there I go making no sense again...
Hasbro should SCRAPPLE Scrabble online?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I've created a "Boycott Hasbro's Scrabble Facebook App" group:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=28435882177
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
In the early 1980's I made a nifty implementation of MasterMind, a game invented (sort of) by Mordecai Meirowitz in 1970, sold to Invicta Plastics, who eventually licensed it to Hasbro. The original board game was based on a pen and paper game, and it has been copied dozens of times in web games and other programs. Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game) I built the game as a developer's teaching aid for drawing into an off-screen device context and some other techniques, but it became quite popular as a diversion. Queries both Invicta and Hasbro about permission to use the look and feel were never answered. I've never asked for nor received any compensation for the game. I've credited all concerned parties prominently in the game. A thorough search of Invicta and Hasbro web sites and catalogs have no mention of the game, it has all but evaporated. When I posted the code on a popular code sharing site (as a teaching aid) I got a very nasty threatening letter from Hasbro. I had to take it out of public distribution, though I still distribute it privately because the code techniques are very useful. Hasbro is (technically) within their rights, though I could make a case by pointing out the other clones and the obsoleteness of the license. The main reason for this post is the tone of the letter -- not professional at all, it was personal, emotional and irrational. Reading it, you would think I had taken a toy from under some tot's Christmas tree. Hasbro sucks.
I was positive that your comment was headed towards a John McCain joke...
Hey!! Get off his damn lawn!
Most of Hasbro's board is so old they probably have to have oxygen tents built into the boardroom.
That made me laugh out loud.
And it's so true. Hasbro is living in the 1980s, still trying to make money off GIJoe and My Little Pony.
They don't have enough tiles to make the word "innovate."
Troll -- A Troll is similar to Flamebait, but slightly more refined. This is a prank comment intended to provoke indignant (or just confused) responses. A Troll might mix up vital facts or otherwise distort reality, to make other readers react with helpful "corrections." Trolling is the online equivalent of intentionally dialing wrong numbers just to waste other people's time.
So lets review these points against my previous comments:
Prank comment intended to provoke indignant (or just confused) responses - no
mix up vital facts or otherwise distort reality, to make other readers react with helpful "corrections" - no
Online equivalent of intentionally dialing wrong numbers just to waste other people's time - no
So then the comment deserved troll why? Apparently just stating something that a new moderator disagrees with is now the same as trolling, eh?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'm not David Byrne. I'm just a long-haired metalhead who grew up listening to his father's Talking Heads records.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
http://hasbro.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/hasbro.cfg/php/enduser/std_alp.php
There's nothing wrong with contacting customer support and voicing your opinion on the matter.
In my case, I consider suing the Scrabulous team to be ineffective and wish that they would either offer a license or buy them out and keep an already working and popular product alive.
The Scrabble IP isn't owned by Hasbro -- they use it under license from a Mattel subsidiary that owns it. They are probably contractually obligated to 'zealously defend' that IP.
My blog
It's been updated. Apparently the decision to block US and Canada from Scrabulous was the Scrabulous developers' own decision, presumably a pre-emptive move to prevent themselves being sued under US law (or Canadian law, for some reason). Curious that it has occurred at the same time as Hasbro launch their own version - maybe a deal was struck after all..?
What an idiotic way to win the bad will of million of users. Way to go, Hasbro.
Greetings, programs!
Wouldn't that be more of an anti-social networking site?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
the significance of an argument about how web 2.0 apps are changing the business landscape.
He have caps filters and characters-per-line filters but no MBA-speak filters?
I kid, I kid :P
I agree with your post though. I always have wondered how Hasbro, Mattel and some of the other toy companies are staying afloat. It's always amusing when I see an ad for a Wii game or something followed by an ad for...a board game. I guess they make money on families who can't afford video game systems, or have some sort of moral problem with them (there are a lot of parents who think video games "rot their children's minds," turn them into serial killers, etc.).
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Hasbro's BIGGEST mistake in all this is completely and totally alienating the people who play the game.
In 30 years, when I'm bouncing my grandkids on my knee, I'm going to tell them that when they grow up to be ocular implant software developers, they should dust off this forgotten old game that nobody has played in 30 years called Scrabble. And I'll tell them that the most important thing is to NOT name it Scrabble.
I thaught the power of a trademark was diminished once it became so common that the average person used it to referance anything similar to it. I think scrabble ranks up there with xerox,kleenex and aspirin.
It would be more accurate to say that Facebook is already sort-of mainly translated into many languages. I use it in Spanish, and at times the mistakes are painful.
To pre-empt those who want to point out that it's Web 2.0 and I should get involved, I have. I've installed the translation module, translated a couple of phrases, and voted on a lot more. But it's not infrequent that when I find a mistranslated phrase the translation module claims not to know anything about it.
The only logical way to answer Hasbro is to hurt them financially. Don't buy Scrabble products. Don't
participate in officially sanctioned Scrabble activities. If you are a member of the NSA (the National Scrabble Association, not the spooks), resign in protest.
There are all sorts of interesting alternative anagramming word games out there -- Perquackey is a good example. And, for that matter, why not invent a superior anagramming board game, one with more scope for strategy. A game with more of that ineffable quality of "beauty" that Scrabble so sorely lacks.
Game rules are not copyrightable. The idea for a game is not protected by copyright. The same is true of the name or title given to the game and of the method or methods for playing it....Copyright protection does not extend to any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in the development, merchandising, or playing of a game. See http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html
Poor choice of words on my part... I meant that the Hasbro Facebook app is mainly concerned with the US audience. It is kind of stupid that they wouldn't let you change the dictionary.
Username taken, please choose another one.
It costs ($0.01)*2^[years] to register a copyright for a term of [years].
So, you want to retain copyright on your new work for 10 years? Pay $10.24.
Made a lot of money? Want to keep it going another 10 years? Pay $10,475.52 ($10485.76 - $10.24)
You're Disney, and you want to keep a copyright for 75 years? Okay, that'll be $377,789,318,629,571,617,095.68
Very simple; artists who need protection are easily able to afford it. But, 2^x grows exponentially (literally), so nobody can retain an abusive copyright indefinitely.
Write your representatives about this plan.
I don't know much about copyright law, but couldn't Hasbro argue that the positions of the bonus fields was somehow part of the artwork?
Scrabulous as a name is dangerously close to the trademarked name Scrabble. Yahoo has Literati which is Scrabble with a different name, and Hasbro leaves them alone. There are a hundred other scrabble clones as well, all with the sense to not use the trademarked name.
They are finding it difficult to toe the line.
Infuriate left and right
You can't use licensed material without the license. Duh. Do you think the guy who wrote "LightSaber" for the iPhone is going to keep any of that money? Of course not! And shame on Apple for putting it up without the license in place - thye might also get sued.
That being said, Scrabble owners should have just embraced at this point (e.g. bought the competition), rather than alienating so many customers.
Big deal.So Hasbro files suit in New York.Can a US court try an Indian citizen for developing a product in India probably without violating any Indian laws ? In that case, Indian Jet airways should sue US Jet Airlines [ http://www.usajetairlines.com/ ] in an Indian court, and claim a trillion in damages, and a perpetual injunction. Finally, even if the US jury awards trillion dollars in damages, unfortunately, US courts do not have jurisdiction over Indian territory.
It looks better. Some people have complained about the animations; they don't take that much time, and Hasbro has announced they're going to implement a switch to turn them off, as well as keyboard (based upon user feedback). Hasbro owns the rights to the game, implemented their own version, and are enforcing the rights.
I don't know why everyone has so much hate on for the new version. It looks better, they're fixing up the couple of things people have complained about.
Most importantly, with Scrabulous you had to refresh your page manually, or set up a 2-minute auto refresh. Not great for games with any interactivity. The official Scrabble doesn't need this refresh, it tells you when someone has moved, instantly, which really is a make-or-break feature in my book.
Yes, some games are one-turn-per-day, and each works fine for that. But when you want a play-the-game-now interactively with someone, Scrabulous was a joke.
I don't see it as a big loss, in my opinion. The new one works fine, and should be even better when it's out of beta.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I wish there was a Facebook game app based on the zombie survival game, Last Night on Earth
It is.
Xerox? Generic name for any photocopier. Kleenex? Generic name for any paper handkerchief. Aspirin? Generic name for any painkiller with acetylsalicylic acid as its active ingredient.
Scrabble? Um, highly specific name for a single board game made exclusively by two companies. The average person wouldn't refer to any other board game as "a scrabble", even if it involved making words with tiles.
THANK YOU - I have been trying for years to remember the name of that game. Everyone I describe it to gives me a blank stare. Now I can find it and buy it!
As for Hasbro - someone here mentioned Monopoly rip-offs - let me tell you, they are still very much in control of that franchise. One of my clients wanted to use it as a theme for an event and I had to jump through hoops and recreate all the imagery to keep them off our back. So this is not a surprising development.
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
It started off as a highly specific name for a single board game, but now, is and has been, used to describe a countless number of similar games. (board and software clones) I've been playing scrabble clones for over 20 years, everyone that ever played just assumed they were differant versions of scrabble.
Gee, according to wikipedia SOWPODS contains 5,454 four-letter words. That's nasty.
typical hasbro, where you need a multigigahertz cpu, 2gb+ ram and a broadband connection for a turn-based card game where cards may turn left or right by exactly ninety degrees.
http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=1015059
http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=1022627
You can just play it at their website http://www.scrabulous.com/
Big deal...
I don't understand why the Scrabulous folks took an approach that virtually guaranteed that they would be shut down. The rules of the game are not subject to copyright or any other restriction, so anybody can make a Scrabble-like game. The name itself is trade-marked, and the board artwork is copyrighted. That means that all you have to do to be free of IP restrictions is use a clearly distinct name and different artwork. It would not have been difficult to avoid legal problems. Why they didn't is beyond me.
I just installed Foxyproxy and told it to reroute "http://apps.facebook.com/scrabulous" through a free proxy outside of the effected area. http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/
If Hasbro asks, I'm in Brazil.
Scrabulous is not dead.
It is merely shut down on Facebook.
It still works perfectly well on Scrabulous.com, so everyone can just stop freaking out, and go play the game on their own website.
Also, while I personally think Hasbro is completely within their rights here (nobody stopped the Scrabulous guys from rearranging the bonus tile layout, and calling it "the amazing Indian word-making tile game"), they'd have a hard time stopping scrabulous.co.in or just for kicks, scrabulous.ru
Because, I just fired it up after reading this, and it's better than scrabulous by far.
Better interface, ability to play words in while the others are doing their moves (just to see), better chat window.
I like it.
I don't know how much different it is to the 'beta' one, but this one is good.
Scrabulous was my only on-line game...
.
The toy business is about kids, their parents and grandparents.
Changes come slowly and changes are subtle - never so much as to destroy a toy's essential appeal and recognition across three generations. Beloved Characters as Reimagined for the 21st Century
Hasbro is one of the largest toy makers in the U.S., second only to Mattel.
Hasbro is the largest producer of board games in the world:
Clue, Dungeons & Dragons, {as Wizards of the Coast], Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit.Hasbro
Board games are social and tactile. Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Knife. They bring out the elemental relationships within a family. That is why they endure.
RJ: [Lays down some Monopoly play pieces to signify what they will do] Okay, this is us.
Hammy: Can I be the car?
Bucky: I wanna be the car!
Spike: I'm the car. You be the shoe.
Bucky: The shoe is lame.
Lou: Why don't you be that snazzy-looking iron there?
RJ: Hey! It's not important. Besides, I'm the car. I'm *always* the car. Over The Hedge (2006)
Everyone has said what I wanted to.
I'll just be brief.
Scrabulous is better than scrabble.
Scrabble got pissed off and killed the better game.
Now we have a crap game to play, if you play it.
OLD story.
Might makes right. NO IT DOESN'T.
My recommendation : NO ONE play scrabble online.
Tell them to stick it where the sun don't shine.
No lawyers, No court fees. Just STOP.
Its so simple, so easy.
They should have done the right paper work now it is back to scapple i mean scabble ahh forget it.
Hudsucker Proxy.. anyone?
You don't need facebook. You can play at http://www.scrabulous.com/ - there's even an email version, which will email you when your opponent has played his/her move.
Scrabulous was the reason I originally joined Facebook. When I found that I could play without having a Facebook account, I had my account deleted (mailed them and told them to delete everything!) and I play exclusively using the email version of the game.
T.
This is the same greedy company that killed the entire D&D franchise, so to see them do this as well should be no surprise.Everything they touch turns to S#17.
As a simple protest measure against Hasbro I won't play their "official" version. Let me choose thank you very much which version I'd like to play. If you don't give me that, bite me, and stuff it. I ain't playing it.
Toria
I hadn't played Scrabulous or Scrabble on Facebook until I read about this lawsuit. I decided to add both applications and check them out. I actually thought the Scrabble app was a lot easier to use, so maybe it's all in what you're used to.
The official Scrabble client on Facebook is being developed under the auspices of Mattel, which holds copyright outside the US and Canada. It has nothing to do with Hasbro. Officially, it's not even open to residents of the US and Canada. It offers ONLY the Sowpods dictionary at the moment, not TWL which is what US and Canada use.
Get some basic facts right and we might consider your opinion.
PS. And it loads a lot faster than this preview pane.