MeetFighters News

A quick announcement:

MeetFighters has passed 8000 members this week!

Big thanks to everyone who made it possible:

• Our Terrific Translators,
• Our Savvy Supporters,
• Our Noble Donors
• Everyone who has ever invited anybody to join
• and me. :)

Hello Fighters,

I have some good news: the video service is now in the next stage of beta. This means that I have extended testing of video playback to guys who have uploaded popular videos (over 100 views and at least 3.5 vote average) and members with 10 or more past opponents. This means one in 5 members can now view videos.

Also, I am working now on a complete rewrite of the site's engine (the software behind every page of MeetFighters). This is going to take me about half a year due to the sheer size of the codebase (over 50,000 lines, about 950 pages), but when I am done, the site will be faster, better and easier to add new features to.

In other news:

• The statistics page displays the distribution graph of past opponents.
• You now need to enter a date and location when adding someone to your past opponents. This helps avoid two common mistakes: adding someone you haven't met yet (but arranging to meet) and accidentally adding a cyber past opponent as a real life one.
• Miscellaneous bugfixes and small enhancements.

– Admin out.

After several months of not doing anything about them, I am happy to announce that T-Shirt are finally coming to MeetFighters!

We are going to have T-Shirts, hoodies and mugs with a few select designs for you to choose from. All of our T-Shirts will be made from quality materials with a flex printing process that is very durable and resistant to washing. Delivery costs will depend on your location, with sources in the UK, the USA and Europe. It is my hope that our merchandise will be very affordable and stylish.

Prices will start from the neighborhood of €15 (or something similar in US Dollars or British Pounds) for black-on-white shirts, and a little more for white-on-dark. There will be 24 colors to choose from. None of the products will be sold at a markup.

The store is opening on the 30th of October, and for the first two days we are starting with a special promotion: free standard shipping! Visit the store page now for a sneak peek into things to come.

In other news:

• It is now possible to display search results or your list of favorites on the map.
• It is possible to search from one of your locations, or an arbitrary point on the map, say, an airport.
• The message list is more compact and shows the thumbnail photo of the sender.

That's all folks!

Hi Fighters,

First a public service announcement: wrestling will remain a part of the Olympics. We can all stop panicking now. :)

I decided to spice interest groups up a bit a while ago. The first step is now complete, which brings photo galleries to interest groups. Any member of a group can upload photos to the group's gallery for others to browse, discuss and rate.

Additionally, interest groups feature more prominently on the Recent Changes page, showing your most busy interest groups, and possibly some others that might interest you.

I have some more plans for the groups for the (near?) future:

• Let group owners appoint a few trusted lieutenants to become group moderators.
• Moderators can then make sure the discussion stays on topic by being able to remove forums and photos that they consider to be outside the group's scope.
• Maybe more to come? Your ideas can help!

Some unrelated changes that happened since the last site update:

• The new and modified users are displayed in a more compact and appealing format on the Recent Changes page.
• There is now a limit on the number of favorites and blocks one can have.
• The dialog showing messages is now more robust and can also flip to the next or previous message directly.
• It is now possible to change the title of a wrestling event after its initial posting. It is also easier for event organizers to keep track of their submitted events.
• Disabled the cloudflare CDN as it was causing some unforeseen problems for some users. The new server can handle the load anyway.
• It is now easier to change your e-mail address (also helps at registration time).
• Trial users can no longer upload videos. (Apparently it was a popular passtime to register here and then proceed to upload something taken off youtube...)
• Fixed a couple of bugs, including one involving thumbnails in the newsletter. (Made some new ones to fill the void.)

That's it for this week's news. Keep on wrestling!

– Admin out

Dear members,

First, a collective pat on our backs: the site has passed 7500 members this week. I think that cool enough to mention. There, got that out of my system.

You may have noticed that MeetFighters has moved to a new server, hopefully one that will serve better than the previous one, with fewer 500 errors and strange performance drops. I have confidence that the latest configuration will serve until we have 10.000 members. At the time of writing there are 400 members online, and the server is 95% idle. That is a good sign.

I took the opportunity to upgrade the server's operating system too, which presented certain... challenges in porting some of the software, the chat service being the most difficult. In any case, use the link above to report any problems that you started noticing after the 1st of August. I am fairly confident that we are in good shape.

I would like to announce some changes that I am planning to make now:

• More engaging groups. The idea is to expand on the Interest Group concept, and allow group members to upload photos to group galleries, get an overview of new photos and members, and so forth.
• Certain improvements to the messaging service. This might be simply reverting to the one message per page concept. I'm not sure.
• Number of profile photos, gallery folders. I hope this will allow members to upload more photos while uncluttering the main profile pages.
• Limit blocking and favorites. Only affects a small percentage of members who got a bit too addicted to the "add favorite" button.

That's it for this week!

– Admin