MeetFighters News

I have great news: This week, little over 2 years after its creation, AllFighters has passed the 4000 member mark! This is excellent news indeed. After all, no matter how many awesome features does the site have, it is useless without people to connect with. I'm not going to get all misty eyed here, I just want to say: thanks everyone.

There has been a lot of work recently, most of which is behind-the-scenes optimizations. Of the visible changes the most noteworthy are:

• Tracker/2010-12-28: The number of past opponents is now shown on the members list and on search results. It is even possible to sort the list by the number of past opponents!
• Tracker/2010-12-11: It is now possible to remove someone who has marked you a past opponent. So go look through your past opponent list and see if there is anyone who doesn't belong and click the "reject" link.
• There have been some complaints about unclarity in the photo moderation-related messages; there is now more information being provided about this.
• Voting and commenting is now faster and no longer requires a page reload.
• A couple of bugs fixed: Tracker/2011-01-08, Tracker/2011-01-10, and Tracker/2011-01-12.

Once again, thanks everyone for hanging out here and making this the second largest wrestling personals site in such a short time. Spread the word: Link us and invite your friends!

Hi everyone!

Happy 2011! We at AllFighters are starting the year with a bunch of great new site features.

First and foremost, the Fight Venues are here! I would like to take this opportunity to ask all members to submit information of Fight Venues that you know about. Please include a contact person in your submission.

• Tracker/2010-12-21: There is now a "British English" localization for those who prefer it over "American English".
• Tracker/2010-12-27: Forum posts now has a "Translate" button that invokes Google Translate.
• The Events system has been largely rewritten to support a bunch of new features:
  • Tracker/2009-11-02: You can now list all past events. You can also rate and comment on events that you participated in.
  • It is now possible to list the events that you applied for.
  • Tracker/2009-10-02 2: Notification messages are sent for canceled events.
  • Tracker/2009-10-02 2: You can choose to receive notification messages for new events. Go to the Administration page and tick the checkbox if you want this.

Smaller changes include:

• The "fans" and "favorites" lists that appear on profiles are contracted, and can be expanded with a button click.
• The photo moderation page shows a random Suggestion Box entry to vote on.
• Entries in the Suggestion Box are automatically "opened" once they receive 10 votes.
• The "Past Entries" section in the Suggestion Box has been removed as it served no purpose.
• Voting now has two small pictures that suggest that "1" is bad (thumbs down) and "5" is good (thumbs up). This is useful because in some school systems around the world, "1" is the best mark you can get.
• Lots of small fixed and speed optimizations.

Happy wrestling,
Admin.

Hi everyone,

It was 2 years ago that AllFighters opened it's doors to the public. Wow. A lot has happened since!

We now have

• 3,826 members
• 12,712 photos
• 3,138 recommendations
• 373 blog entries
• delivered 867,147 messages

Does anybody remember the time when we didn't have a "preferences" page? Or the first time you could mark your past opponents? Good times.

Before I get sappy I will stop reminiscing now, on to the new stuff!

• Tracker/2010-09-17: The Recent Changes page has been reorganized to recent show forum posts too. This information now appears when you log in.
• You can now attach photos to forum posts.
• Tracker/2010-11-30 2: It is now easier to delete your private notes of members who have left the site.

Some smaller changes:

• The "Archive" section of blogs is now grouped by years
• Some smaller tweaks for our Interest Groups.

I have been more proactive in requesting your opinions about Suggestion Box entries, and it seems that events feedback if on the top of the poll, so I will be doing that next.

As requested by a member, I would like to re-open an earlier poll:

Would you be willing to donate for webcam chat?

Hi everyone,

In the last week, I have been working with the site's hosting provider on fixing the performance issues that we have been experiencing since the hardware upgrade.

AllFighters is the largest website that I have ever created, and I am slowly gaining experience about how to set up and administer a site of this scale. The most critical time of day is usually the 9PM to 11PM (GMT) period of the day, when 150-200 people are online simultaneously. I have managed to tweak the site code and the server configuration enough to be able to comfortably accommodate this load on the present hardware, and the hosting people seem to have fixed whatever was wrong with the server.

In other news:

• Tracker/2008-12-26: I have created a bunch of link banners that you can stick on your site. Please link "http://www.allfighters.info/" from your pages and help others find our site!
• Tracker/2010-08-22: Some international character encoding problems with the weekly newsletter have been fixed.
• Tracker/2010-06-07: The way AllFighters is handling languages has been changed. It is now easier to change your language, the site will simply set a cookie to remember your latest setting.
• Tracker/2010-11-18: The Body Mass Index (BMI) metric is no longer displayed in profiles as a default. Apparently some guys believed tha BMI is the work of the evil one. Those of you who like evil can enable the BMI on the preferences page.

Now, the big question:

What next?

I was thinking about creating a mobile version of the site, or perhaps enhance the world map feature. What do you think?

Dear members,

My previous greatest idea, the Battle Reports feature has basically imploded on the launchpad with zero (0) battle reports having been created in about a month. So, I'm removing them, the battle reports are gone from now until I can think of a way of making them more appealing.

So, I'm presenting you the Latest Greatest Idea: the Special Interest Groups. What are they, you ask? Oh, they are great. Basically they are for discussing a specific topic, like, say, submission holds or Turkish wrestling. Anyone can start a group, and other members can join to start discussions. Oh, and they will also appear on your profile, so people will know what your Special Interests are.

Further recent site changes are:

• The favorites page is now broken into tabs and looks less like the dashboard of a commercial airplane. I hope you guys will like it better now.
• Tracker/2010-11-14: Profiles and the statistics page now show something called BMI (Body Mass Index).
• Tracker/2010-10-19: Wording of recommendations has been changed slightly.
• Tracker/2010-10-29: There is more detail on your "Who has seen my profile?" page.
• Tracker/2010-10-15: Your past opponents now appear with thumbnails on your profile.
• The main site forums now appear as a submenu on the lefthand menubar. I also fixed something that has caused the submenus to disappear in Microsoft Internet Explorer (scourge of the web).

There have also been a bunch of behind-the-scenes work, like optimizations for better site performance. The photo moderation was simplified a bit: the "clean with face" category was eliminated.

Happy wrestling!

Admin out