Friends doesn't exist anymore as a feature. Instead you can now follow members, which will give you a feed of their activity in the shouts section (follow ta. To follow someone, just click the follow icon on their profile.

If you go to the shout page, you should see a new tab at the top called 'following'.

This is available to everyone and replaces the old friends feature which was was part of the Social upgrade.

'Following' allows you to follow the activity of other members on the site, making it into a Twitter-like feed.

To follow members, click on the following icon on their profile, or add members on the 'following' page.

Blocks have not yet been build into the new chat system but it's on my list of things to do.

The videos are known not to work in some Samsung devices (fix pending) but are tested in the latest versions of chrome and Firefox so your browser is unlikely to be the problem. Usually it's to do with network speed. We have a powerful server but even this may slow at busy times (Sunday and Monday evenings), or else it could be network speed in your area. Have you ever managed to view the videos on this site or do they never work?

I've created a new experimental shout feature currently available to members with the Social upgrade.

Go to the shouts page and click on the 'Friends' tab. This page will show all the shouts and activities of your friends on the website.

As usual comments and feedback are welcome

Moved to general forum

Sorry, I've no idea what you're talking about. Please explain further.

Still thinking about this one. The main reason for the change was to try and encourage more user interaction and to bring ff inline with other sites. Many other sites now link to a users activity first, and their details second, Facebook being an example. I'll check the stats in a few weeks to see if the interaction has increased. I agree though sometimes you just want to view the users details, however there are other ways to do this which I'm considering. One way is to display a popup when you hover over a users name, although this doesn't work on mobile devices where hover isn't a thing.

Everybody shown in the 'online' tab is in chat. IN other words, they have the chat page open in their browser and are connected to the chat room.

Whether they are looking at the chat at the time or want to get involved in the conversation is another thing. I've noticed that some users tend to leave the chat open, but appear to be doing other things. Some people tend to leave the chat open while they wait for their friends to come online and then go straight into private chat. I guess from this perspective it's the same as the 'video' chat.

Perhaps an indicator showing time since last chat activity might be useful here.

Sorry for this bug. It should now have been fixed.