Thanks for your feedback. I totally understand that you want the fundamental chat features fixed, and as you can see from this thread we are working on this. There are some niggling issues that are proving difficult to replicate and fix, such as the chat leaks, but hopefully we'll get there. We're also working on new chat features and have already had some positive feedback about the 'why are you in chat' options.

I'm finding it hard to fix this issue, since the code a least seems to work properly. If a user leaves chat and they are in your friend list (listed in grey at the top of the user ta, then their status is shown as 'offline' (the little round coloured icon turns grey). If a user leaves chat and they are in the online list (listed in white, below any grey listings in the user ta, then the listing is removed.

Could it be that users are leaving the browser open with the chat application running, but then going off for a few days?

I'd like to hear from regular chat users, whether from their experience they think this could be a likely scenario.

The chat has been tested on this setup, so you're almost certainly experiencing a caching issue. Go into your browser settings and clear the cached web data to resolve the problem.

For any iPhone users still having problems try the following:

For Safari (built-in browser):

Open Settings
Scroll down and tap Safari
Scroll down and tap Advanced
Tap Website Data
Tap Remove All Website Data
Confirm by tapping Remove Now

For other browsers:

Chrome:

Open the Chrome app
Tap the three dots (⋯) in the bottom right
Tap Settings
Tap Privacy and Security
Tap Clear Browsing Data
Select what you want to clear and tap Clear Browsing Data

Firefox:

Open Firefox
Tap the menu button (three lines)
Tap Settings
Tap Data Management
Select what to clear and tap Clear Private Data

Note: Clearing cache will log you out of websites and remove stored preferences, but it can help fix loading issues and free up storage space.

You need to 'hard refresh' the chat page. On Windows, open the page in a browser and type Ctrl + F5.

The video issue should now be fixed. Thanks for pointing out this bug. If you come across any videos that are still not playing properly please let me know below in this thread.

I can only see errors for the two videos linked above. If you can seeing errors for all videos, please could you state your device type (e.g. iPhone 12) and browser below (e.g. Chrome), and I'll look into this.

If girlcrisis doesn't have a copy then unfortunately it seems that the story may be lost. It's not reasonably practical for us to recover it, even if it still exists in backups.

It seems like a good time to recommend that users keep their own backup of any content they do not wish to lose (albeit, it's a bit like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted).

Sorry but it's not that simple to bring back individual stories, since they're linked to accounts, thumbnails, comments, views, likes etc. We hold backups for emergency use, but these aren't held in a format that can be easily searched.

I realise that sometimes it can be hard see that this website is being updated, because so much of the work we do is on the back end. As admins, we probably don't shout enough about website updates, but then, if it's on the back end it's probably not of that much interest to members. Anyway here goes:


Registration/Account Blocking:

We have spend a temendous amount of time this year on improving the registration validation process, to stop bots and spammers creating accounts. We have over 20 validation checks, written by AI, that automatically block the majority of them.

For those that do manage to create accounts, we have new scripts that check the uploaded content to highlight spammers which we then immediately ban.

We're never going to be able to keep out all spammers on a site like this because we want to make it easy to sign up for genuine members and also protect your privacy. Therefore we haven't gone down the phone verification route. We've also learnt that most of the spammers we get are not bots, but people sat in data centers in the far east who do this for a living.


Member Blocking Feature:

This stops blocked members from contacting you but it doesn't stop them viewing your content. The maxmium number of blocks is 100, which we believe should be plenty on a 'community' website. After all, what would be the point in joining a community site, and then blocking hundreds of members?


Chat:

Chat was completely re-written this year as part of the streaming feature (still in beta), however the visible functionality hasn't changed, so it would be difficult to tell as a user. However, with nice clean chat code we're now in a good position to do a major overhaul of the front end at some point. There's a number of possibilities here, including perhaps building the video streaming into the chat?