Happy May! Thanks to everyone for the compliments on the new hangouts. Hope you don't mind the name, but I just thought it was time for the term "chat" to go. I know it was an abrupt change and some people are still a little jarred, and I haven't even made an FAQ for it or anything yet. But thanks to the kindness of Lilynight and other regulars, everybody who was confused was quickly given an explanation and a tour! Thanks guys.

The reason for the change was mainly that the new chat is made from HTML5, and the old one was made with Java--a programming technology which didn't work on mobile devices. Plus the Java was even getting increasingly crappy on regular computers. I didn't program either of these chats (just tweaked this new one for like 4 months). However the new one is done in the same language as UMD is, and I have more access to customize it for us and make it more integrated into the site.

We also host this chat here at UMD, which is better for our privacy than hosting it 3rd-party like we were doing. That also means more strain on the server tho, which I have been compensating for by making other parts of the site less "heavy" on the server. Meanwhile, if the it glitches up, just hang tight for a sec because that probably means UMD is crunching on something, or possibly choking on a bit of code that I fucked up.... :-O

It should get smoother as I get my act together on the backend. After the dust has settled on that, and I finish some work for my buddies Messygirl and Leon and dlodoski, I want to bring the hangouts to some of the virtual sites. I'm thinking perhaps some producers or models would like to host a session or something.

And do producers: quick note about the What's New section: I'm shortening the max characters to 100. We're in a short attention-span, iPad world now. I wanna clean up the looks of What's New and I'd like to eventually increase the font size there.

Soon we will start regularly plugging our own affiliate ads inside of forum posts, with example pics, etc, just like all the other producers do. Everybody else does it, so why shouldn't we! There is a rule against producers promoting any item there more than once. This rule will not apply to us, and you will see duplicates. That said, they all will be specially-marked, so you can easily avoid them if you want to!

Now have a nice, sloppy weekend.
Messmaster