Dedication
This document is dedicated to the hundreds of volunteer staff, hosts, Navigators, admins, TDs and site managers that make this site possible. Without them, there would be no SafeHarborGames.
Our Origins
On June 19th, 2006, MSN Gaming Zone closed their community based games and left an enormous void
for players who enjoyed the community interaction in virtual lobbies, as well as playing a number
of different games. This closing left an opportunity for several other groups to start gaming
sites targeted at these players.
The three future founders of Safe Harbor Games all worked for some of the groups that wanted to
fill the void of MSN Gaming Zone closing their community lobbies. None of these groups satisfy
what the founders thought was necessary to support the previous "Zone" players, so they banded
together to start a new site.
Opening
April 13th, 2008, SHG opened to the public with just three active games – Backgammon, Spades and Hearts.
Within the first year, Canasta was added as well. From the start, SHG supported Tournament groups
and League and Ladders as well as site wide tournaments.
Starting with a handful of hosts and administrators, it quickly grew from the influx of players,
hosts and group from other gaming sites, including people from the Zone that had not joined any
other site.
Founded by a group of like-minded individuals who all had experience in programming, hosting and online game play from other sites and were still looking for something more - a true community driven site. SHG was designed from the ground up to support community based games, peer communication and most of all, a place we would all feel comfortable visiting and playing.
Closing of Yahoo Community Games
In 2015, the gaming site, Yahoo discontinued their community lobbies as well, and
Safe Harbor Games experienced an immediate influx of new players, hosts and groups. In response to
the new growth, and recognizing that the site had grown past just be an inheritance of the MSN Gaming
Zone, it looked to making some fundamental changes to the site that Yahoo had supported, such as
allowing players to play simultaneously at more than one table in a single lobby, as well as support mini-tournaments.
Mobile versions of our games
Browser community drops support for Flash - ex Pogo groups are welcomed
Due to the support for HTML5, and the non-secure nature of Flash, all major browsers are dropping support for Flash by default. This, in turn caused Pogo (https://www.pogo.com)
to make the decision to start eliminating all of their Flash-based games in 2020. Safe Harbor Games has experienced another growth spurt, so not as fast as the Yahoo closing because Pogo is more slowly
closing down their Flash games than Yahoo did. Though no fundamental changes have been necessary for individual games to meet the influx of Pogo games, we have
introduced a site-wide change to allow the resizing of the game windows - a feature frequently used in the Pogo Flash games.
Now and in the Future
As we continue to grow, we look for avenues to improve our site such as:
- Network performance.
As our network grows and new devices and operating system changes affect the performance of applications over the internet, we review our code to see how we can improve our performance and adapt to the changing bandwidth. - Always open to suggestions and reports
As with any site, we are not perfect. We always reasonable consider any suggestions for change and improvements, as well as thoroughly investigate any game issues to see what we can do to address them - Our goals are the same - to provide a community-driven site offering a friendly place for people to meet, play games and chat with each other.
Support for Leagues
MyLeague leagues must like our site. Taking a look at MyLeague, here are some statistics:
Support for Tournament Groups
We support individual Tournament groups, including options for Ratings, Group points and SHG Game wide points.
Support tools for admins and hosts
In addition, with training, we offer our group admins and hosts special tools to give them greater control over their lobbies.
Tools suchs as:
Tools suchs as:
- Player Messaging
- Boots and Gags
- Support for Macros
Still Free!
Since we opened, we have kept to one of our original goals to provide a free site for people to play - whether in Social, Rated, Competitive or other tournaments.
Our costs
Our costs to run this site are not insignificant. We pay a reputable, well-known hosting site to keep us up 24x7x365. We pay for additional security measures to protect our site and availabilty.
Our income comes from Google and private ads, as well paid memberships and some donations. As long as we earned enough to keep our site going, we are committed to continue offering SafeHarborGames to the world.
