MeetFighters News

Hi AllFighters,

Starting this week, you can specify which languages you speak in your profile. If you haven't already done so, please take a moment to edit your profile and select your languages.

Other, smaller changes include:

• Tracker/2011-02-08: The wording of event notification messages has been changed to make them sound less like a personal invitation.
• The way you can select interests and languages has been improved (for those of you using a modern browser).

That's all for this week!

Please read on for an important request from the site's Administrator that might impact your profile!

Improved Site Performance

There are no new site features this week. Instead, I have spent considerable effort optimizing site performance and tweaking the web server configuration.

The result is a dramatic drop in the site's processor usage, which translates into quicker page loads, especially in the evening "rush hours". To give you an idea of how large the difference is, have a look at this monthly CPU usage graph and see if you can tell when the new version of the site was deployed!

Fake Past Opponents

Past Opponents is a very important metric here on AllFighters. Along with Recommendations, they help you identify the "real" people from those who are just here to chat. Granted, there is nothing wrong with chatting, in fact, "cyber past opponents" and "cyber profiles" are welcome on the site as long as they are upfront and honest about it.

What is absolutely not OK is pretending to want to meet people when you really don't. This is where past opponents come in handy.

Unfortunately there are some unscrupulous people who make a habit out of marking people as past opponent whom they have never seen and probably never will. I would like to encourage everyone to look at your past opponents list and make sure you haven't accidentally marked anyone whom you haven't actually met. Failure to do so might result in the suspension or termination of your profile as I start weeding out the fakes!

Thanks and happy wrestling,
Admin.

The Interest Groups feature has proven to be quite popular. We have 54 groups at the time of writing, with a combined membership of 1851. 54 groups are a lot, and sometimes it's a bit hard to find what you are looking for.

To make it a little bit easier, I have introduced a few broad categories like "Fighting styles" and "Specific holds". The categories overlap a little and sometimes it's subjective where a group should belong, but still this should help you find your favorite group a bit easier.

In the interest of limiting the number of groups, I plan to make another change starting in about two weeks: I will start purging groups that haven't proven to be interesting. In order to remain on the site, a group must satisfy two criteria:

• It must have at least 20 members by the end of the first month. (Local groups are exempt from this rule.)
• It must have at least 3 forum posts in the past month.

This should limit the number of groups that are just not interesting enough, and make the good groups easier to find.

On an unrelated note, those of you who have been looking at the Top Members list might have noticed that the "100 past opponents" barrier has been broken! The first member to achieve this is toughwrestler. Congratulations!

Hi guys,

Fun fact: did you know that AllFighters has delivered the One Millionth Message this week? It's true! :)

In other news, our sibling video site, http:/www.FighterBoyy.com has moved from my staging server to a faster and more robust one in The Netherlands. This should help fix some of the video skipping problems!

As for AllFighters, there are two small changes:

• In the Photo Moderation pages, "Softcore content" has been renamed to "Mild content". (Some guys were feeling uneasy about the "softcore" word, as they thought it implied their photos were "porn".)
• If you are using one of the non-English editions, you might notice that the names of countries are now also translated.

Admin out.

Hi guys,

Before I get to the main event, here are two smaller pieces of site news:

• I have changed the layout of profiles a little; the photos now appear on a "film strip" and expand when you mouse over them.
• The price of donations will increase starting next month: bronze will cost €10, silver will cost €20, gold for €30. Platinum donations will remain €50.

Now that we got that part out of the way: I am happy to announce that I have started building a new fight-related site; this time, however, it is not a personals site like AllFighters, but a video streaming site. This is something that has been requested twice before, but at the time I did not have the resources (and, honestly, the motivation) to create one.

Now the motivation has come and I am happy to announce that FighterBoyy.com is now officially open. It is, for the time being, on a backup server meaning two things:

1. It is dirt cheap for me, and
2. The network connectivity is below par.

There has also been some reports that the videos don't play with old versions of Adobe Flash Player, and some Mac users have experienced intermittent playback problems. I hope to work these issues out as we go.

In the meantime, enjoy the videos that are already there, and upload your own!

– Admin.