MeetFighters News

Hey Fighters,

First off, thank you to all our event organizers for using MeetFighters to create and host your events. Without your time and energy spent on hosting events, our event page would be empty and wouldn't need any improvement.

With that said, we're happy to announce the Event 2.0 Update on MeetFighters. This update overhauls our event hosting system to make organizing and joining events simpler and more enjoyable, with many new features requested by the community.

What’s New for our Events?

Most of these changes primarily affect event organizers, but we hope the visual updates are appreciated by all members, as they modernize the event page.

• Public & Private Events: You can now create both public and private events. Private events will require organizer approval for participants, giving you more control over who attends and can follow the conversation inside the event.
• Customizable Event Hub: The new Event Hub can be fully customized, letting you tailor it to fit your needs.
• Event Hub Widgets: Our new Event Hub supports multiple widgets, such as polls, guest books, free text areas, and dedicated picture widgets. These widgets can be colored to match the theme of MeetFighters, and the hub can be configured, including the order of information shown.
• Linked Chat Rooms: Each event now comes with a linked chat room within our main chat system. When enabled by the organizer, it is automatically added for all participants, making it easier to connect and plan. Alternatively, the existing quick chat can be used.
• Event Forums: A forum is added for each event, so participants can discuss everything in one place. This forum is only accessible to participants.
• Visual Overhaul: We’ve revamped the event pages to make them more appealing and easier to share on social media. Better mobile support has also been added when the event page is opened on mobile devices and smaller screens.
• More Detailed Participant Lists: The participant list now shows more member details, making it easier to see who’s coming.
• Mass Messaging Options: Organizers can now choose who to send mass messages to—everyone, confirmed attendees, or those still on the fence.
• Event Templates: Save time when creating a new event by copying details from a previous one as a template.
• Automatic Conversion: Events previously created are automatically converted into the new system. However, you may want to review and enable some of the new features, like linked chat rooms or adding more widgets to your Event Hub.
• Event Highlights: A random upcoming event is highlighted on our What's new? page.

We hope this update makes events on MeetFighters more useful, providing you with all the tools needed to manage your event in one place.

Ready to create your own event or explore what others have planned? Head over to our event section to get started!

We look forward to seeing your local events and the continuation of the upcoming Wrestlefest NYC, Wrestlefest CAN, and hopefully soon Wrestlefest EU for which we are offering our sponsorship again. Once again, we want to thank all organizers for managing and hosting these amazing events, no matter how small or large. Your efforts help keep our community active and connected.

Let us know in the comments below if we missed anything, have other ideas for improvement, or if you're just happy with these changes or the events.

Best regards,
MeetFighters

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Update: 16th of November 2024

We released Event System 2.1, which includes some new features and updates:

Event 2.1 Update

• Event Attendees Tab Improvements:
  • Our comprehensive and loved advanced member search is now available in the attendees section of an event, making it easier to find and Meet Fighters at events.
  • Added a new sorting option type for attendees by enrollment date (for members who enroll after the 2.1 update).
  • Attendee types are now grouped, and you can collapse confirmed or uncertain participants to reduce scrolling.
• Event chat rooms now have a link in the menu to the related event page. The event page also shows the related chat rooms at the top, making the connection clearer.
• Event organizers now get a notification when a new member joins an event. This was previously only for private events.

New none-Event Feature: Reactions to Comments

• You can now react to comments with a thumbs up or other emojis.

We hope these updates make things easier for you. Let us know what you think!

Best Regards,
Admin

Other Recent Updates You Might Have Missed

• Review all your user tags in one convenient place.
• A massive search overhaul, making it faster and expanding its reach across the site.
• Advanced Search now includes your followers, allowing you to filter and connect with them easily.
• Added filter and search options to the Who Has Seen Your Profile? section.
• Interest Groups are now searchable.
• Our Interactive World Map of All Fighters has new filters to help with travel planning or finding past opponents.
• Event organizers can send follow-up messages after an event is closed.
  • A major update to the event system is coming soon—stay tuned!

Many of these updates came from suggestions by our community. We always appreciate your feedback using our overhauled Support Section

Bringing More Features to Your Pocket

We've also been working hard on our app, bringing even more site functionality to your mobile experience:

• Custom Stats integration for the app.
• Support for external links, and more settings from the site, such as email/password changes.
• New options to manage blocked and followed members, as well as your past opponents.
• Enhanced location editor with date-editing capabilities.
• Full access to XXX content (introduced in version 2.3).
• Ongoing improvements to chat functionality and localization.
• Download the latest version and enjoy the new features!

Unlike many sites and apps that restrict searches or limit messaging, MeetFighters remains frustration-free (so we hope!). We are keeping the core functions - browsing, unlimited messaging, and connecting with fellow fighters - completely open and free. MeetFighters is still free, ad-free, and free from data collection, thanks to the support of our contributing members. Your contributions allow us to continue enhancing the platform without compromising what makes it special.

Stay tuned for more updates, and keep fighting strong!

Best Regards,
Admin

Dear Fighters,

We've updated our chat system to enhance your experience and data privacy. Here's what's new:

Key Changes

• Simular to contributing members' Mail messages, Chat messages now do not expire as well.
• All chat conversations (public, private, and direct) will retain their history indefinitely.
• Exception: In the official room (#meetfighters), conversations will now be saved for 7 days (previously 2 hours).

Access to the new Chat History

• Everyone can see conversations from the past 7 days.
• Contributing members can access the full history of private conversations and rooms indefinitely.

Chat Features Reminder

• Create or be invited to private rooms.
• Join or create public rooms.
• Participate in the official room (#meetfighters).
• Have private one-on-one conversations, including video or audio calls.
• Share pictures from your MeetFighters Picture Manager for full control over your images.
• Use drag & drop or copy & paste to attach new pictures directly to the chat.

Picture Privacy

Your privacy is important to us. Nothing has changed regarding pictures:

• You can delete any uploaded pictures from MeetFighters, and they will also be removed from the chat.
  • Applies to pictures uploaded through your MeetFighters Picture Manager.
  • Pictures shared outside the Picture Manager or via external links will remain, as they are hosted outside our platform.

Privacy Tip

For better control over your pictures:

• We highly recommend using the MeetFighters Picture Manager.
  • Your pictures are protected from being copied or pasted.
  • Deleting pictures via the Picture Manager removes them from all attached emails and chat messages.
  • Pictures will be automatically deleted if you decide to leave MeetFighters.

This update is effective immediately. Please note that previously deleted chat messages will not be restored. From now on, no further messages will be automatically deleted.

As this was a significant update, we appreciate it if you report any issues you encounter so we can address them promptly.

Best regards,
Admin

Dear All,

You may have noticed that MeetFighters was offline for over 24 hours. To clarify, this was purely a technical issue and a failure of the cooling system at the data center. It was not a data breach; no data was accessed, and the outage affected thousands of servers and websites, not just MeetFighters. For transparency and to clear up any rumors, here’s what we know and what we will do now:

• Outage Timing: Our server went down in the early morning of September 2nd, European time.
• Data Center Issues: Along with our server, many major components of the data center provider's infrastructure also went down, including their ticket system and admin dashboard control systems.
• Cause of the Outage: Shortly after, the data center confirmed a major outage at one of their locations, affecting all servers and customers hosted there. The cause was identified as a significant cooling issue. Again, this was not a data breach, and no data was accessed.
• Data Security: Even when the server is offline, the entire MeetFighters server is fully encrypted, and certain sensitive information within the database is additionally encrypted. This ensures that your data remains secure at all times.
• Domain Forwarding: About two hours after the outage, we forwarded the MeetFighters domain to our ticket site to provide you with updates as best we could. You can still view the history here: https://www.cmwf-services.com/meetfighters-outage.
  • Transparency Note: "CMWF Services" is not the data center provider. It is our company that runs MeetFighters and handles invoices (if you contribute to us). It is 100% owned by me, and CMWF stands for Chat-Meet-Watch-Fighters. You may have seen this in our site footers and TAX invoices over the years.
• Alternative Chat Provided: On the news ticket page, we offered an alternative chat on our new site, MeetKink.com. As most of you know, MeetKink is our latest website, introduced earlier this year.
  • Clarification: We did not take MeetFighters offline to promote MeetKink. However, we did use MeetKink's chat to provide a place for you to connect while the situation with the MeetFighters server was still unclear. We also used this chat to provide additional information and to answer your questions.
• Backup Preparations: We began preparing for the worst-case scenario of restoring MeetFighters from our offsite backups—fortunately, this wasn’t necessary.
• Future Resilience: To improve our resilience in the future, we will evaluate the additional costs of implementing an automatic or at least manual failover in another data center, ready to take over if something like this happens again.
• Future Plans: The data center still has ongoing issues, and we are unsure if the cooling system has been fully fixed. Unfortunately, the poor communication and the fact that a data center was offline for over 24 hours have resulted in a massive loss of trust. Therefore, we will be moving MeetFighters to one of our other data center operations, which already host our other websites. This transition will take place over the coming weeks and will result in a very short downtime, which we will announce in advance.

We deeply apologize to everyone who had planned a match yesterday and struggled to communicate. A full day outage is extremely rare and has never happened in the history of MeetFighters. We understand how frustrating this was and are committed to preventing such issues in the future.

Best Regards,
Admin

Dear All,

We continue deploying updates to MeetFighters, and three items among those updates are worth mentioning in a news post.

By the way, all of these have been requested by members of our community. Thank you for helping us improve the site!

1) Privacy Settings for Notifications

You can now disable sending notifications about your meetings to your followers. These notifications include new past opponents, recommendations and future opponents.

To disable sending these updates to your followers:

• Navigate to your privacy settings where you will find a new option: "Meeting - Notify my followers of my new matches and recommendations".

On the "Settings" page, find " Your account", and click on:

To disable receiving updates about people you follow:

• Under "Your followed profiles," you will find an option to disable the 'meeting' category. You can also use the handy quick links at the top to enable/disable this setting for all your followers at once, or you can adjust this setting individually for each member.

On the "Settings" page, find " Interact", and click on:

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2) Chat Picture Expiration Update

Pictures in the chat will no longer disappear after a few hours. Instead, they will now disappear together with the room/message's expiration date in the chat.

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3) Apple Pay Support

We're also now supporting Apple Pay as a payment method for contributions. Apple Pay is a convenient, discreet, and secure way to pay using Safari and Apple devices. If you have added your credit card details to your iPhone's Apple Wallet, you can now enjoy a seamless payment experience. The transaction will not mention MeetFighters.

On the "Settings" page, find " Your account", and click on:

We want to take a moment to thank everyone who has contributed to our site. Your support helps us continue improving and providing a better experience for everyone. If you haven't yet, consider contributing to help us grow and enhance our features. Every bit of support makes a difference.

Stay strong, fight safe, and enjoy the site!

Best regards,
Admin