MeetFighters News

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.