MeetFighters News

Hi Everyone,

In an ongoing effort to improve the site, I have made some changes to the Browser and Flash chat.

• The last 10 messages are shown when you join a channel.
• Join, leave and quit messages are no longer shown
• There's no automated greetings.

This is largely an experiment at making the Chat less "noisy" and better for conversations. As always, your feedback is appreciated!

There's some other minor fixes and enhancements on the rest of the Site. See if you can spot them all :)

– Admin

Dear members,

First of all, some happy news: MeetFighters.com has reached 12,000 active members! Thanks to everyone who helped make this happen. Huge thanks to the Support team, they answered over 5000 requests for help over the past few years. Also thanks to our translators and everyone who has contributed to making this page what it is today!

Second of all, some more happy news: I am happy to announce a new site feature: MeetFighters.com branded e-mail addresses. What this means is that if your username is, say, "SuperFighter99", you can now have the e-mail address <[email protected]>. Think of it as your MeetFighters.com vanity address. :)
This address is actually an alias; it will simply forward all e-mail to your regular e-mail address, the one you used when you registered at our site. For now, this new feature is limited to members with 10+ past opponents and donors.

Please note that this feature is highly experimental; I await your feedback on how well it is performing for you.

– Admin out.

About two months ago, I asked you if MeetFighters should move away from the Flash video format. The question was largely directed at those of you who have uploaded videos already, but I got a lot of good responses from everyone. I thank all who took the time to respond!

I am happy to announce that web streaming is now here! In fact, if you are eligible to watching videos, you can try it right now! For the most part, I am quite happy with how well it is working. Streaming seems fast enough and seeking in streams is working a lot better than it did with Flash.

I also took the opportunity to make some major changes to the site's video encoder. (Video encoding is still more an art than science. There are too many weird formats out there.) The encoder should be much better now at handling some formats that were problematic before, including but not limited to Windows Media Video files and certain files with variable frame rates. If you had trouble before uploading your video, now might be a good time to try again.

If you do not want your video to be made available through web streaming, you can turn it off. Go to your video editing page, edit your video, and uncheck the box next to "Make this video avaiable on mobile devices". That should do it. In fact, and went ahead and checked this for everyone who voted no to web streaming. I'm very accommodating at times.

– Admin out.

Yes, it was an April's Fool prank. I've never played a prank on so many people at the same time. It was a unique and lovely experience.

Big BIG thanks to everyone who posted a comment, you guys made my day!! Enjoy what remains of the fool's day and your weekends.

In unrelated news, you can now organize your profile galleries into folders. Just go to your photo editing page and rearrange your photos into folders to your liking. I have some more cool features coming up soon.

– Admin out.

This news post is primarily for members who have uploaded their videos to MeetFighters, or planning to do so in the near future.

I am considering switching the streaming technology on MeetFighters from Adobe Flash-based streaming to Web-based video. This has a number of implications, and I want to get your feedback before I make this decision. Here's a breakdown of the differences between each technology:

Adobe Flash is going to die. It is installed on a lot of computers for sure, but the technology is slowly made obsolete by new Web technologies and even Adobe no longer sees it as future-safe. Notably Flash is not available on iPhones and iPads because Apple hates you.

On the other hand, Flash has better rights management. It takes a lot more to steal a video that is flash-based than a video that uses web-based streaming. In fact I know of no instance of a video being taken from MeetFighters and posted on another site. This is good news for you if you don't want that sort of thing to happen with your videos.

Web-based video is a new-ish technology but is already available on >90% of devices. It is now the default playback method on major sites like YouTube. Unfortunately the technology does nothing to prevent the downloading of video files from the site; this is part of how it operates and cannot be fixed or worked around. There are tools out there that will download such videos for you from just about any site.

So now the question is this:

Should MeetFighters switch to Web-based Video?

Voting on this poll is limited to members who have uploaded videos, but everyone is invited to comment on the topic.

On a related note, I plan some enhancements to the video service, such as offering related videos, list of top videos for each category and similar goodies.

– Admin out.

Update 2016-02-28: I would like to thank everyone who commented on the issue. I just realized, and I feel a bit stupid about it now, that I might have presented a false dichotomy (flash or HTML5). There IS a third option: it should be entirely feasible to support both technologies simultaneously, and let the video owner choose to allow HTML5 or not.

Some commented that the level of protection afforded by our technology is somehow moot. I disagree. While "if it displays on your screen than it is technically possible to steal it" is true, the difficulty of doing so matters. The present technology on MeetFighters renders most of the regular tools ineffective and the other tools would be out of reach for regular users. Sure, power users can still take our shit, but 90% protection is better than none.

On a related topic, there is a new page now showing the top videos for each category. Enjoy it! Another experiment I'm running now is showing links to "related videos" after one finishes playing. Let me know if you find that useful at all.