MeetFighters News

Hello,

Meetfighters is 10 years old today. Our site officially launched on December 11th, 2008.

We’ve grown a lot since then. We currently have 17,198 active users, who’ve uploaded a grand total of 331,230 photos and 1910 videos to their profiles. 20% of our community are donating members. 650 users are logged on in an average hour. We want to celebrate these achievements with our whole community!

Today, every single one of our 17,198 profiles will be awarded Bronze donation status for one month. You don’t need to do anything for this, the donation status will be added automatically. This means that for one month all of our members get to experience the perks donating members enjoy, such as higher resolution for photos and access to videos. If you’re already a donating member, an extra month will be automatically added to your current donation. If you haven’t got a profile on Meetfighters yet, this is the time to create one! All profiles registered in December 2018 will enjoy free Bronze donation status until January 12th 2019.

And that’s not all. A redesigned and improved Search page will go live on Christmas Eve.

Thank you for being a part of Meetfighters’ first 10 years. We look forward to the next 10!

– The MF Team.

Here’s an update about some work that has been going on behind the scenes.

• We’re accepting Events again for our Events listings. All Events are reviewed by our Support Team before they’re listed (or rejected, as the case may be.)
• We’ve revised our video reviewing process. If the content in question is deemed suitable, newly uploaded videos should be visible within hours rather than days (as used to be the case.)
• On top of that, you can now embed YouTube videos in your profile – provided you own the copyright of the YouTube video in question. Embedded videos will also be reviewed by our Support Team.The same rules that apply to videos uploaded to the site directly apply to embedded YouTube videos. Copyright ownership will be verified as part of the process.
• There's a helpful new Admin page full of useful links.

Watch this space for more announcements coming soon.

Longtime member omr24 pointed out that the "I am willing to host" label in profiles under the "Travel" section was ambiguous. This checkbox was intended to indicate that you are willing to provide some place to sleep for visiting members, like couch surfing. However, due to the way it was phrased it could be interpreted as "willing to host a match".

This has now been remedied; the checkbox is now labeled "Bed and Breakfast". If you have put this in your profile with the interpretation that you are hosting matches only, please remove it and select "I have access to mats" or "I have access to a ring" under "Interests".

Additionally, I have posted a new page titled "Bed and Breakfast" that helps you quickly search for such.

In other news, I regret to inform you that we are not accepting new submissions to the Events page pending a review of how to proceed with that feature.

As part of our efforts to preserve the privacy of our members, the site's Privacy Policy has been updated. Please review it! Ours is a fairly straightforward document, no thick legalese. I would like to take this opportunity to thank grappleruk, Ironbull and our wonderful support team for helping with the initiative!

Additionally, our Terms of Service page has been amended with the following items:

10. You must respect the privacy of other members and never disclose their personal information or correspondence without their express consent.
11. MeetFighters is for private and personal use only. You may not use the site for the purpose of collection or aggregation of data for any reason, be it commercial or non-commercial.

Both changes are going into effect immediately. We strive to make these changes as painless and agreeable as we can. It is our hope that you find the updated Privacy Policy or Terms of Service to be acceptable. However, if you don't then please delete your membership on the Settings page.

Map Feature

As mentioned previously, as part of our privacy initiative, MeetFighters decided to stop using Google Maps for certain features. Work on the new map integration is ongoing; unfortunately replacing a service as huge and comprehensive as Google Maps is not an easy task. If you experience difficulties, please let us know.

Update 3rd July

Big thanks to everyone who commented! On most days our team is dealing with members who have some sort of complaint, so it feels good to get some positive feedback now and then. :)

We have deployed a new version of the "reverse geocoding" (map coordinates to city name) service, this time based on a service called "gisgraphy" instead of OpenStreetMap. Gisgraphy uses multiple data sources, including OpenStreetMap, and hopefully does a better job of finding the right city names and addresses. My preliminary tests show improvements, although not perfection.

@scottimike asked about threats to the site. At present time I am not aware of any big ones. The team behind MeetFighters is always busy providing help and support and improvements to the site, but the foundations are strong. We have a good community here, and ultimately that's all that matters.

Dear Fighters,

As part of ongoing work on the site's user privacy, I am announcing two important new changes.

New Map Integration

Until recently, MeetFighters was using Google Maps for various functions, most importantly the World Map page and profile location editor page. As part of a larger initiative with site supporters to enhance MeetFighters protection of members privacy, we have also reviewed recent changes to Google Maps privacy policy and found them to be incompatible with our principles.

As we have found no possibility to enhance privacy and at the same time keep Google Maps, we started shopping around for alternatives and came to OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap is built by a community of mappers that contribute and maintain data about roads, trails, cafés, railway stations, and much more, all over the world. In many ways OpenStreetMap is the Wikipedia of map data.

As with all replacements go, especially when you try to replace a service as comprehensive as Google Maps, there tend to be problems along the way. While OpenStreetMap is awesome in many ways, we have found that its reverse geomapping feature, the ability to translate map coordinates into addresses, leaves much to be desired. Please check your location data, displayed directly in the user menu (the dropdown near the top right of the screen that shows your primary photo). If you find that your country or city is not correct, please contact site support and tell us about it.

We are exploring many alternatives to OpenStreetMap reverse geocoding, but have yet to find one that is reasonably priced and has worldwide coverage.

Blog Entries

Until now, your blog entries were "world readable", which means that unregistered visitors and search engines (think Google or Bing) could find and read them. This is in many ways desirable; your blogs have led many new members find our site through their web searches on certain topics, which in turn has helped our site grow.

However, if you feel that some of your blog entries are too personal for general consumption, you now have the option to restrict them to registered site members and hide them from search engines. To do that, go to your blog, click to modify the individual entry and check the box that is marked "Hide this post from unregistered visitors".

– Admin out.