I think, I can safely speak for most people on MeBeam when I say, we have had just about enough of the guys who have nothing better to do, than flash everyone. We're serious, give the girls a chance too.
Okay, okay - flashing in public is a serious problem online, especially when almost anyone can jump into a room. What you do in private with your girlfriends, partners, teddy bears, is completely your business, but when it comes to the public, it's ours.
I have just released a new feature, along with a pre-alpha of the next version of MeBeam, called 'Democratic Booting' - When you move your mouse over some ones video you will see a red box in the top right corner - If you click on this, it will increase the persons boot count by one - when a certain number of people boot you, you will be banned from the entire network, but will be allowed to return after a short period of time.
Each time you get banned the time to return will get longer and longer. Deleting your cookies or going through a proxy wont save you this time. It's out of my hands now - let the public decide.
See democratic booting and preview of the next release of MeBeam
in the test rooms
this is a ridiculous feature. many of people who use the internet are not the sharpest crayons in the box. how do you guys plan on preventing the "randomly going through rooms and clicking peoples' orange boxes to boost their boot count?" please explain.
Posted by: Jen | January 13, 2008 at 09:47 AM
yes, I agree the way you put it, sounds
completely ridiculous.
Firstly, you only can kick a certain number of times per session.
second, if you kick too much in a room,
where you happen to always be the only
person, or the first person who kicks,
also taking into account, how soon after
entering a room did you click, also taking
into account how many kicks you have had
against you,
and by those people how many
times they had clicks against them, -
anyway to anwer your question - its a bully system - you keep bullying people, mebeam will either make you weaker, or the public will gang up on you with more strength and/or your penalty time in
the ban-box will be longer.
btw: I've made the new feature immune
to those coming in on proxy.
Posted by: Ashod Apakian | January 13, 2008 at 02:04 PM
OK, how about to make really public rooms, make public list of them, where can do everybody almost everything, another official rooms - little bit censored and private rooms with password, not shown in list?
Posted by: wrtulak | January 14, 2008 at 11:16 PM
I cant see this becoming a great feature, I'd prefer to see an ignore feature for general users, that blacks the offensive cam out.
Admins still need a ban feature or it will become chaotic in any popular room. Yahoo was a good example of a chaotic system overrun with bots and spammers.
On CitizenX.com we now utilise a new flashchat system that alows us to ban users from our chat, almost moderated, would be nice to choose which cams we look at.
Posted by: Rich | January 15, 2008 at 02:55 AM
I think it's a fine feature, though perhaps more legal measures could be taken - which is a (pricey) bitch, I admit.
The criticism about unfair blocking is something I only partly agree with. If most of the chatters think you should be gone, you probably should be. If someone is really spending his or her time randomly 'voting' against others, it would be easy to get protection against that as well.
Posted by: DWizzy | January 15, 2008 at 12:21 PM
I spent about 10 minutes wandering around in the public chat rooms trying this out, voting to ban members for inappropriate conduct, and all I got was getting booted out of chat rooms by other members. Of course that might have been because I didn't agree to have cybersex with them… Fortunately for me, I'm not wedded to using a public chat room, so if I were to get permbanned, I wouldn't be totally upset.
Posted by: Batshua | January 18, 2008 at 07:54 PM
i really think that this feature can get innocent memebers booted or banned from mebeam becuase of random people clicking the red box or cybersex people like dwizzy mentioned would boot them because the victoms didnt want to comply with the sexual request. why not just replace boot with ignore, so when red button clicked the screen for their cam leaves room or blacks out but only on the ignor'ers computer, just like how yahoo chat rooms have
Posted by: jess | January 19, 2008 at 01:08 AM
please do ignore instead of booting i get kicked out because i wont show penis
Posted by: bones | January 19, 2008 at 06:13 PM
mhb
Posted by: muhammet | January 19, 2008 at 08:46 PM
One of the problems with the booting system is that you can open multiple windows in the same room and gang up on anyone to kick them...
Posted by: Bruce | January 21, 2008 at 09:56 AM
I think the 'Democratic' principal MIGHT work in public rooms, but If I should create a 'private' room, I would want control over the access for that room.
A room password for entry might be the way to go. A control panel for the ROOM CREATOR would be ideal.
When I wish to chat with friends or hold small meetings, people may guess the room name and enter. (I normally do not create easy to guess room names) The ability ro remove users based upon the roomname would be nice. Room data would be preserved and the creator IP information could be used to verify the person entering the room was in fact the creator of the room.
Example roomname ZoomsRoom
Easy to guess IF the room is up. An allow list would be very cool, but that would require a login procedure.
Abuse is hard to prevent. Just some ideas.
Posted by: Zoomshorts | January 21, 2008 at 08:55 PM
This site is getting whacked by some asshole who has managed to find a way to Democratically Boot everyone in the room by exiting and entering the room repeatedly. His screen is identifiable by the Slash Film he uses as his display. Please find a way to stop this bastard. It could mean disaster for your sites!!!!!!!!!!!
Posted by: Michael Thomas | January 22, 2008 at 02:50 PM
MeBeam was a good idea. Great for seeing the people you're talking with in a Skypecast (etc). Its cool to just be able to jump into a video room w/o having to sign up or D/L anything.
I'm not sure if its this new feature but I can't even log into a mebeam room anymore - I just get thrown out after a few seconds. Changing to the original style no longer works as it once did.
Now with this "booting" thing - WHY?? From what I'VE seen, mebeam is where you create a room for you & others to talk on camera. So why have a way for some jerk to kick you just for the hell of it? You create a room, tell your friends the name, and all chat together. Only the PUBLIC rooms would even be affected by this so called 'flashing'. Does it really happen THAT often - enough to warrent a "kick" feature? (Don't MOST ppl behave themselves?)
This is already an unstable system. You should work on upgrading the main system before you add features that people will just abuse anyway!
Posted by: guitarBrad | January 22, 2008 at 08:37 PM
The booting system is still not perfect,
and even I have been booted of my own system.
A feature of democrating booting which has not yet been enabled, is to count how
many times you boot someone, which will detect if your just being a 'bully' - in which case you will be banned for twice as long as normal :)
I'm running out of letters in the alphabet and numbers as we are now on version 0.992.s as we head towards version 1.000.a,
considering that many improvements are made during the course of a single day.
Anyone care to make a prediction as to when we should be at version 1.000.a ?
Anyway, the point is , by the time we get to v1.000.a all these issues will be resolved and we should have a perfectly safe, secure and open video chat grid.
Posted by: Ashod Apakian | January 27, 2008 at 05:10 PM
Well don't go on a killing spree or we'll never get to v1.000a
Posted by: alayne | January 28, 2008 at 05:27 AM