MeetFighters News

:This is a longish post, but please read it as it might have far-reaching consequences about this site as we know it.

In the roughly one and a half years that AllFighters has been up and running, we have grown from a dozen guys whom I have invited personally to a radically larger community. I never actively advertised the site, other than posting a link to some of my youtube videos, because I was, and still am, in favor of organic growth: word of mouth. I still remember the first times someone has signed up that wasn't a friend-of-a-friend, and thinking: "how the hell did this guy find us"?

Since then, google has picked the site up, and now you can find us easily with some well-crafted search terms. This has led to a steady growth in membership, and brought on problems that a purely organic community never experiences: arrogant fakes, entitleds and other weird folk. Some of these problems can be mitigated with careful tweaking of site features, including listing of past opponents, recommendations, and the like, but they cannot be eliminated entirely.

One of the issues that I feel is concerning is the growing number of incomplete profiles. Let me stop for a moment to explain what I think makes a profile complete: correct height/weight, some styles selected, an introduction and at least one profile photo. Some of these are obvious: since this is a wrestling personals site, the most important thing a lot us us will be looking for is compatible guys, compatible being defined as those who share similar styles to us and are comparable in size. (There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, but it should be clear that missing information in this department is detrimental to the usefulness to the site!) An introduction is important for conveying personal information and preferences that cannot be expressed with the styles and interests fields of the profile, and also the mere fact that you spent five minutes writing a few lines helps establish a certain degree of commitment.

Finally, a photo is important, and I cannot stress this enough. The database indicates that profiles with photos receive 500% more initiated communication (challenges and messages that are not replies) than profiles without. This means that you can increase the site's usefulness to you roughly fivefold by posting a single photo!

Unfortunately, the percentage of incomplete profiles has increased with the site's growth. It has reached a level that is detrimental to the use of the site. A short analogy: The stock market has "liquidity consumers" (traders who buy or sell at the present "best price") and "liquidity providers" (traders who buy or sell at a price that they set themselves). The providers are who make the stockmarket work by setting stock prices, and they take a certain risk in doing so; the consumers are at less of a risk, always buying/selling at an optimum. If the volume traded by consumers outstrips that of providers, the stock market has serious problems. To counteract this, most stockmarkets charge a little bit extra to the consumers and give it to the providers. They create an incentive to provide liquidity. (I know this is oversimplified.)

In a similar fashion, members here with complete profiles bring content to a personals site; people without are going to be browsing through that content and taking their picks. Clearly, for a healthy site, the providers need to be in larger number than the takers. For this reason, I intend to make some careful changes to the site to encourage the completion of profiles. Nothing as radical as banning incomplete profiles; just some adjustments that would create incentives to finally write that damn introduction.

What I have in mind is quite simple: if your profile is incomplete, you cannot initiate contact. You can still reply to challenges and other messages sent to you, but in order to seek out other members, you have to show us something first.

In recent days, I have Chatted with some guys with incomplete profiles, trying to get hear out their reasons. Here are some of the reasons I heard so far:

• "I don't really know what to write as an introduction." This one is easy: think of a reason why anyone would like to wrestle you, and write about that. Write about what you enjoy about wrestling, what connects you to a site like this, or what you are seeking primarily.
• "I have relatives / employer / friends, and I don't want them to find my photo on this site." You can make your photos restricted, so only other site members can look at them. Also, some members have been very creative at cropping or blurring their faces on their photos.
• "I don't have time to do the photos and introduction." But you have time to write and reply to messages? Come on.
• "I am technically challenged, I don't know how to make and upload digital photos!" Fair enough. But we live in a century where camera phones, webcams and the like are everywhere. Ask a friend to help you out. In fact, most places that develop films can scan them for you.
• "I have photos on another site." That is great for that other site, it's this site that I'm concerned about.
• "I can send photos by e-mail." Great, so you have no problem sharing your photo? Might as well upload it, or wait until someone who already has done so contacts you.

I am sure there some with a very valid reason for not uploading a photo. For instance, I have been chatting with a guy claiming in his profile to be from Germany, who was actually Chinese. So I get it: oppressive government, concern for personal safety and freedom, etc. But let's be frank for a moment: how did he expect to score a meet if his location was off by half the globe? Hurts me to say it, but my site just might not be useful to someone in his position...

So, here we are. Thank you for reading all this. I would love to hear your thoughts about all this, so please leave a comment.

Hi AllFighters,

Since last week, I have made some changes to how the World Map is generating the map markers. The markers are now hopefully laid out better. Previously it wasn't uncommon for some markers to appear in the oceans, these anomalies are hopefully gone, or at least, much less frequent. The markers also show the photos of members now.

Behind the scenes, I have done some work on detecting malicious users registering on our site. Unfortunately there is no way to eliminate this possibility entirely, but the new measures will help mitigate it. Your common sense is still required in detecting fakes. For instance, if you see "Fake Profile" on someone's "Recommendations" tab, maybe it's best to steer clear :)

Please vote about webcam chat!

– Admin

Hi AllFighters,

It's been a hectic week, and there are many updates, some more visible, some less so.

First, those who have been frequenting the Chat probably noticed that there have been problems and outages with the flash-based chat about 2 weeks back. It seems these problems have all been resolved now, and chat service should work as before. The lightirc guys were very helpful in trying to solve the issue. They had some serious hardware problems and had to issue a new version of their software to make everything work again. To all the guys who messaged me about chat problems: thanks for your patience and I hope everything is OK now.

This brings me to the second order of business: A webcam feature for the chat has been requested (and denied) repeatedly. However, with the new server infrastructure, it has now become a possibility. As with all things, there is a cost involved. I am not willing, at this time, to compromise the site's original purpose with a product tie-in or advertising, and therefore would like to continue to rely on donations. In the interest of encouraging donations, we are now accepting donations in British Pounds and U.S. Dollars, in addition to Euros. So, if there will be enough donors, I will make this webcam feature!

Would you be willing to donate for webcam chat?

Moving on, a lot of work has gone on behind the scenes to fight and prevent spammers. Long-time members might remember a few incidents about "lovely girls" registering and soliciting e-mail addresses from members, mass mailing hundreds before I could ban them. I am happy to announce that I have implemented a preemptive filter that, since its deployment 3 weeks ago, has caught another "lovely girl" from Senegal and a Nigerian scammer.

Other news:

• Thanks to wfszczecin we now have a Polish edition of AllFighters.
• Tracker/2010-04-02: There is now a login form at the top of the screen for convenience.
• Tracker/2010-04-19: There is a weekly newsletter with new profiles, blogs, etc. You can opt out by visiting your preferences.
• Tracker/2010-03-31: You can now quickly search for new profiles in your area, under the "What's new?" menu item.

That's all for today,
Admin out.

Last week was a busy one here at AllFighters HQ! Please read on and comment.

First, we finished relocating to a new data center. AllFighters is now hosted in London, and is hopefully faster, has better network connection and will have fewer outages than before. This is made possible by a few donations we've received in the past months. Thanks everyone.

The move went pretty smoothly, but like all big changes, there were, and probably still are, some issues. I am fixing them as soon as I'm aware of them, so please, if you encounter a site error, drop me a note!

Second, there's a new feature that notifies members of certain things, such as favorites logging in or somebody inviting you to Chat. Personally, I hate popup windows that appear on some sites, so I chose a relative visible but unobtrusive floating panel with a red dashed border.

Finally, I'd like to ask for your input regarding another site matter. As you (probably) know, AllFighters has a very simply worded Terms of Service. It's much less legalese than the Terms of Service on most other sites, and for the most part, it simply says "don't be an ass". One particular term, however, forbids uploading of X-rated photos. There are a couple of reasons for that:

• First it's a legal matter: there are some very unpleasant local laws that adult websites must comply to.
• There are enough dating sites on the net for naked pictures, and there is no need for AllFighters to become one of them.
• Trying to be friendly to members who are don't want sex , or are straight.

The reason why this part of the Terms of Service is problematic is that it is the least intuitive one. Probably some guys are out there thinking, "Well well, nobody has uploaded a photo of their dicks to this site yet! Time I fixed that". Or they aren't, but anyways, about one in every 20 or so new photos is explicit enough to be flagged by multiple members. (Big thanks for those who patrol the photo uploads so I don't have to!!) Once a photo is flagged by enough members, I click a button that makes the photo private and sends a carefully worded warning to the photo's uploader.

Simple, right?

For the most part it is. Usually, when someone receives this warning (and again, it is just a simple warning stating that the photo is naked, explicit or whatever), they just delete the photo and go on with their lives. Sometimes I get a small apology, or even some expression of appreciation for my work on this site. (I like those.) However, about one in every ten, goes into something I call "entitled, angry white thrash mode", explaining to me how they are right and everyone else (especially me) is wrong, and they will tell everyone not to use this site as it clearly sucks, and they will destroy everything I ever held dear (OK, that last part I made up).

My question to you is simple: how would you deal with them?

– Admin out.

Dear members,

Today I am closing one of the long-standing items from the Suggestion Box: the distinction between members who have had cyber/phone matches and members who had real-life matches. This was one of the highest-rated requests in the box, and finally it's implemented.

According to the original request:

:I think there is a need to distinguish between real and cyber in the Past Opponents feature. I had originally presumed that this would only be applicable to real opponents, but I had encountered some guys who had verified others as past opponents on the grounds that they had done cyber with them. I would like to be able to distinguish who had wrestled who for real. Thanks.

So what does this mean? It means that there is an extra category on a profile, right next to "Favorites" and "Past opponents": "Past cyber/phone opponents". I also made a best-effort attempt to reclassify some previous "past opponents" to "cyber past opponents". The way I did it was with an automated algorithm that mined multiple sources of data:

• The Chat for the past few days (i.e. asking for cyber on #allfighters, or visiting the #cyber room on numerous occasions).
• Certain information from profiles, such as "Not interested in cyber wrestling" or "Not looking for live meetings".
• If the member has "cyber" in his name.
• Most importantly, the network effect: past opponents of non-cyber profiles are less likely to be cyber profiles. In the end, AllFighters is a social network site, which is why this information weighed most.

At the end of the day, 350 of 5166 (7%) or all links were reclassified to "cyber", and less than 50 members had more than 2 links affected.

Please, visit your list of past opponents, and check if any of your links are badly categorized!

Both false positives and false negatives are easily possible, which is why I need you to check your links. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Thank you!

Move to a New Data Center

Soon (possibly this week), allfighters will be moving to a new datacenter, hopefully this will help us have a higher uptime, faster connection and better service. The move will make some future enhancements possible, the most interesting of which might be a video-enabled version of Chat. (This is not a promise for video chat, though. It might not be feasible in the end.)

However, the better hosting comes at a modest price. As you know, AllFighters membership is free, and there are no product tie-ins or advertisements on the webpage to offset operation costs. Please, if you can spare a little, donate to AllFighters!

Regards,
:– Admin out.