News Index: Headlines   <<  Page 4 of 4  >>  June 07, 2008 No more full page ads I spoke to several users today and they expressed their dislike of the "Full page" BlacklabelADS. I don't always agree with users but if they email me and it doesn't start of with "You stupid motherfucker do this or else" I do read it and consider their side. In this case I agreed. I think the full page ads are too much of a distraction and that goes against everything we want to do. We want to get you into a chat room and start having fun as soon as possible. Full page ads stop this or atleast slow it down. Advertising will always be a fact of life. Sites like Chatro need it to supplement all the free chatters we support. We can however control how we present it to you. We have never used Popup,popunders or pop you in the ass methods. Full page ads were a mistake. Yes I made a mistake. I make them all the time. The difference is I admit it and even write about it to preserve the moment for all time. I do this so hopefully I don't do it again. Thanks for everyones input. The users are what makes Chatriopolis so successful.  June 01, 2008 Bringing Back Per-Room Message Boards? After talking to some users last night we all agreed we miss the per-room message boards. The problem is that they were abused so much they became to difficult to manage. I think I may have come up with a solution and your vote on the poll on this page will directly decide this matter. Problem. People post things that create a support load removing the message. We don't want to add registration or post users IP for privacy reasons. So what do we do to have the boards, eliminate the support and reduce abuse. What if we wipe the boards every other day. This will allow posts and messages to be left for people to meet and leave love notes. It's short enough so that abusers really will get no satisfaction from a 48 hour post. My life doesn't get more complicated and we have the boards back! So what do you think? Let us know by voting on the poll on the top of the purple table on the upper right hand side. I'd love to bring back an improved version of the "Room boards". What do you think?  May 25, 2008 IBETBET.COM Site Suspended (UPDATE) Most time talking to ISP's of websites like ibetbet.com result in nothing. I just got done to talking to Selena at Startlogic.com and it was a very good experience. She immediately suspended ibetbet.com's website. For a Sunday on a holiday weekend this is like magic. People are looking for fixes to the ibet.com marketing hack and removing the site is half the battle. But for now it will be the best solution. I assume next week there will be posts on how to fix this malware/hack. But for now the site is gone and they will not profit from inconveniencing users. In my research of this problem it is not only Chatropolis but many sites that use advertising. Several complaints have been on forum type sites. If you have any more information on this problem please let us know so we can let not only Chatropolis.com users but all Internet users know. UPDATE ibetbet.com is using ad networks like BlacklabelADS to do what they were doing. Evidently they were removing the mandatory top frame for people to skip the ads. Adding some cookies and putting you into a circle jerk. Now that ibetbet.com is disabled you now get the full page ad with a way out. You also see startlogic.coms default web page. If you need a great company to host your website I would recommend startlogic.com based on their handling of this matter. I also contacted BlacklabelADS to have them removed as customers. If you are seing this on other sites please let me know the ad network so I can get them banned from ttrying this shit again.  May 24, 2008 ibetbet Abuse of BlacklabelADs (UPDATE) It seems a company/website called ibetbet is abusing the Blacklabelads netwrok. It seems they display a full page and remove the upper portion of the frame so users can't skip the advertisement. They also tag you with some cookie information to put you in a "circle jerk". Using your browser to clear cache and cookies lets you move on. I have contacted Blacklabel and will be working on eliminating this site from the ad rotation. It only seems to happen to users outside the U.S. and using the Chatrosafe Proxy eliminated this from happening completely. If this happens to you please contact us with as much information as possible. The time and on what page it happens. Due to the holiday it may be a couple of days before we can contact the ad network and get this straightened out. Thanks for your help and patiences. UPDATE We have disabled full page ads and inline ads. This will take the ad network a few hours to update. If at 2PM CST you still see full page ads or get the Ibetbet redirection please call us. The numbers are on theSupport Page And we will be answering the phones every day from 5AM to 9PM CST. Please let us know if this fixes the problem.  May 23, 2008 FREE MEMBERSHIP (1 year) and Underground Room We are giving a 1 year membership to Chatropolis w/ an Underground Chatroom, also for one year. We have 15 of these that join our VOIP provider. In addition you will get 2 months of free phone service. The service costts $24.99 per month for unlimited calling in the U.S. Puerto Rico,Canada and some European country's. This is the same service we use for our voice Tech support lines. The system is very flexible and you can actually take it with you when you travel. Once you sign up you can select any state/city you want your primary phone number in. Then you can add numbers in other states and country's. I use it to have local numbers near family members in the U.S. You can also use the service/hardware in other countrys with any high speed Inet connection. I simply plugged in a small device then plugged in a regular phone and poof, numbers around the world. If you want to take advantage of this special membership/2 months of calling free just call my Florida line 352-436-4185. Yes there is something in it for us. A years free service that will allow us to add 8 more U.S. lines and 6 lines in other country's.  May 10, 2008 Get Priority Room Entry Everybody (Well non-members) hate to get that "Room is Full" message. It's particularly frustrating when there are 24 users in a room and a dozen users trying to get in at the same time. Now you can get "Priority" just by simply downloading a small piece of software from Alexa. The Chatservers now will give priority to users that have installed Alexa Toolbar. On Firefox it's almost unnoticeable. On IE it takes a little more space. The big question is why? Well we don't put as much stock in ALexa ratings as some sites but we do like our ranking to go up. So (more...)  May 07, 2008 Spammers Room spammers are being dealt with in a first come first filtered/banned method. This seems to be working but it does take time and help from the users. If you see some sort of advertisement in a room please call support. Unfortunately it is a kind of war of wills. The no talent assholes that do this don't give up easily. But there is a point where it becomes too much work for them. I'm more than happy to bring them to that point.