MeetFighters News

Hi everyone,

I made a change to the site so you can mark more than one location in your profile. In fact, you can mark up to 5. The intention is two things:

• If you commute to another city/country for work, you can mark both your place of residence and your workplace, and turn up in searches for either of them.

• If you plan a trip, you can mark the place(s) you are about to visit in your profile.

This change, however, proved to be more difficult than I originally anticipated and required extensive changes to the site's engine. For this reason, it is possible that certain things are now broken. Please let me know if you find something that doesn't work anymore!

In related news, I have closed a bunch of tracker entries today. Oh well, there's plenty more! :)

– Admin out.

So today I was working on the traveler feature, when I did something incredibly stupid.

I deleted all the photos.

What I wanted to do was delete the photos from the test database to make it a bit faster, what I did instead was that I deleted everything from the live database! OK, don't panic. You've got backups, right? Right?

Wrong! The backup (which is supposed to run every midnight) had some issues which has caused the database not to be backed up since... well, the 20th of April. Ooookay... So next thing I know is I have spent 2 hours writing a script that parses through the site log (half a million lines at this time), and re-trace every upload, every image visibility change and every primary image change.

I think I managed to get it right, for the most part. At least, all the photos are restored. What might be wrong, under certain circumstances, is the primary image settings and the visibility of certain images. I would ask every member to check their photos to make sure they are all OK.

Apologies for the inconvenience!

– Admin out

P.S. Yes, I fixed the backup system too.

Hi everyone!

A quick update: We have passed the 800-member mark yesterday. The site now has

• 1758 photos
• Delivered 31000 messages
• 4317 favorites
• 788 past opponents
• 93 blog entries

Next stop: 1000! I will keep fixing and improving the site in the meantime...

– Admin out

Greetings,

I've made some small, incremental improvements to existing site features:

• On member profile pages, you can click on a link next to member's location. The link will show both you and the other person on the World Map of All Fighters.
• You can now search for online members. At the time of writing, there are 17 members online.
• The system will not let you message a person twice within a minute. Apparently some members liked to double-click the "Send" button, causing their message to be sent twice.

Coming up next: multiple locations (up to 5 per member).

– Admin out.

Probably the most frequent complaints about the site have been about Chat. It was well deserved, too: the chat was a rush job. It worked, barely, with some problems:

• Some users just couldn't connect. Maybe it was the java applet verification, maybe something else. I could never figure out why.
• You couldn't look up member profiles from the chat window itself.
• Creating rooms, switching between channels was not very intuitive.

Thanks to Mibbit, we have a new site chat that solves all the above problems. Please visit your preferences to select which site chat you wish to use. Also, the site now includes instructions about how you can connect with your own chat software. The advantage of using your own software instead of Mibbit or java are many:

• Better usability than anything browser-based.
• You can log your conversations.
• You can customize font size, colors, use plug-ins, etc.

If you can do without these, Mibbit will hopefully fit you just fine.

Also, when you are logged into chat, you will get instant messages whenever you receive a new message here.

– Admin out.