MeetFighters News

Dear Fighters,

I am working on a improving the Browser Chat, based on the latest Kiwi IRC release. If you have some time, give it a try and give me feedback in a comment below.

Click here to try the new browser chat.

I'm also making some new things to replace/enhance the existing Statistics page. Here's a preview screenshot that shows the change in the number of members over the past week:

Happy New Year!

Regards,
Admin

Salutations!

As mentioned in the previous news post, I've been working on the design update. I thank everyone who responded to that news post, the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive.

I am proud to announce that the job is finished, and the new, fully mobile ready and responsive design is here. The structure imitates the look and feel of the previous iteration closely, but under the hood much is modernized.

In case you are missing some of your favorite links:

• Look at the profile menu near the top right.
• Some menu items are on the left now, if you have a narrow screen, tablet or mobile phone, you need to click the burger icon near the top left to access them.
• The rest of the links are on the main page and in the footer at the bottom of the page.

Please add your comments and questions regarding the changes below.

In the likely case that I don't post anything else this year, I wish you all great and fighting-filled holidays and a Happy New Year!

Regards,
Admin

Hello everyone,

This blog post is to announce that MeetFighters has passed 15,000 active members! This is the "raw", uninflated number of members who have logged in at least once in the past month. We never inflated our numbers, not when we were the smallest, and not now that MeetFighters is the largest wrestling personals site.

Let's celebrate, and what better way to do that than to show you the upcoming new site design for mobile devices. Please note that these designs are just "wireframes", which means that they represent structure and layout, but not style such as fonts, colors or sizes. I'm happy with the existing two color schemes of the site and not planning on changing them.

So without further ado, here's what the mobile site will look like on a handheld device (smart phone):

For tablet users and small laptop screens, we also show the member ticker (horizontal scrollable list of random profiles), and a search field in the navigation bar.

For yet wider screens (normally desktop computers with decent sized screens), the burger button is hidden and the sidebar is automatically expanded:

Some other changes to expect:

• The "What's new?" page will be renamed to "Content" or something similar, and will directly link to the latest stuff such as photos, videos and blog posts.
• Continued work on improving layout for smaller screens.
• Don't forget to vote for member-submitted ideas!

This is the plan so far! Feedback is, as always, appreciated. Thank you all for making this the most popular and fun site.

– Admin

Hi guys,

A few short months ago I asked you about how you would classify backs and gear pics. You responded, and based on your votes, I have updated the photo classification rules:

• Photos taken from the back / side now belong in the gallery. (This has been a de facto policy of most photo classifiers until now, now made explicit.)
• Photos with singlets and similar gear now belong in the gallery. (This is also common practice, now codified.)
• The "slightly erotic" photos now all belong in one category. (Two categories have been merged for simplicity.)
• Hard porn (sex, erections, etc) are now private only. (There are better sites out there for porn, this one will continue its focus on meeting and fighting.)
• Many categories have been clarified.

Read the full list of rules here. It's a bit better organized now.

In other news:

• The Members page now lists the members who are closest to your primary location.
• Avatar photos are now circles. There's a bit of AI driven logic that tries to guess where the face or similar focal point is in the photo when it is cropped. It's not working 100% of the times, though, so if you need to adjust your avatar photo, you can do so by clicking the "Edit" button next to your primary photo on the photo management page.
• Member lists now show the country as a flag icon and your distance to the user's primary location. If the member is your favorite or past opponent, there's color badges to indicate that.
• You are now notified when your favorites post something on their blogs.
• You can see a collection of a member's latest forum posts on their profile pages.
• Improved support for touch devices (tablets and smart phones).
• Other miscellaneous small fixes.

– Admin out

Hi guys,

This blog post is to inform you that the default theme of MeetFighters is now the one with the light background.

If you want the dark background back, please change your preferred theme on the Preferences page. As always, your patience and comments are appreciated.

I am currently working on a series of changes designed to make the site more responsive on tablets and mobile phones.

I would like to thank everyone who gave advice to new users last month. I have incorporated your contribution into the Tips for New Users page. The contents of these pages are now automatically sent to new users over the course of a few days to get them up to speed on how to best navigate the site.

– Admin

Update 30th July

Thanks for all the comments! Most common complaint was about the light blue colored links. I agree, they were hard to read. I have now replaced them with a darker shade of the same blue. I will continue making tweaks, hopefully it will all fall into place eventually.

A little stroll down memory lane... Those of you who have been with us for 1.5 years might remember, last major change was the new message center which replaced the old message interface. We did the same thing then that what we're doing now: introduced the new version months earlier, let it mature, listen to comments, and then switched the default, while leaving the previous version available for those who preferred it. What happened was that there was almost no feedback in the beta testing phase. Once the new message center became the default, there was a number of constructive criticism that got incorporated into the code quickly, mixed with an intense hatedom from about 1% of the site's membership. (Granted, at 14000 members, that 140 people.)

What we do in every case is observe what percentage of the site's members still use the legacy version regularly. In the case of the previous example, use of the old message page dwindled fairly quickly. It's still available today, because we didn't invest time into its removal, but it's use declined into single digits. This is just one example. Had we found that most guys kept using the old message page, we would have just rolled back the new one and never looked back.

I ask everyone to give the latest changes a fair chance and be patient. If you see some bug or something is not working on your device, please use the Report and Error link at the bottom of the page.

P.S. There is no need to use your fighting words when responding to a change. Every time, there's a bunch of guys who think they can make themselves heard better if they carefully search their vocabularies for the most extreme adjective and then just use it. Trust me, we listen just as closely if you express yourself moderately. (Maybe even more.)