TeenSpot

TeenSpot.com, usually abbreviated TS, is a United States based online community for teenagers. TeenSpot houses a variety of content, such as email, music and movie reviews and interviews, contests, profiles, chat rooms, and message boards. The site provides its services free of charge, and is funded through use of banner ads. TeenSpot.com boasts a membership of over two million users.

Features

Features of TeenSpot.com include:

• Chat - The hallmark feature of the TeenSpot site are its chatrooms. A select list of rooms available include:
  • Advice - Peer advice to and from teens.
  • AfricanAmericans - Hangout and meet new friends!
  • AsianTeens - Meet new friends or just hangout!
  • Australia - Room for teens living in Australia and New Zealand.
  • Cafe - Sit back and have a cup of joe in the cafe!
  • Canada - For Canadian chatters.
  • Christian - Discussion for teenagers of the Christian faith.
  • Dorm - Room for older teenagers preferring more mature conversation.
  • Flirt - For flirting with other teens around the clock.
  • Gaming - Chat about The New XBOX 360, PS3, Wii, or whatever else you are into.
  • Hangout - Hangout with friends and just kick back.
  • Hottub - Have fun and relax in the hottub. Everyone's welcome.
  • Lobby - A general chatroom for every type of teen.
  • Lounge - General teen chatting; meet a new friend or just waste time!
  • Movies - Chat about all of the latest flicks!
  • Party - Where the party is always taking place.
  • Park - Clean and moderated fun.
  • Roleplay - An interactive RPG battle.
  • RPG - A secondary roleplay room for those who like it a little less crowded.
  • Singles - Room for chatting with other single teens.
  • Sports - Whether you play a sport or enjoy watching, talk about it here.
  • Trivia - Three trivia rooms. One for competitive play, CASUAL play, and team trivia.
  • UKTeens - Chatting for teens in the UK and other parts of Europe.
  • Holidays - Holiday rooms like Christmas and New Years Eve rooms have been initiated in the past at the correlating point of the year.
  • GayLesBi - A room for those with an alternative LifeStyle.
  • Zone - Get in the zone of chatting! Fun for all...
• Profiles - Since late January of 2007, the site offers profiles for all of its users.
• Boards - Another prominent feature of the site, TeenSpot message boards provide an environment for extended conversation between users. Prominent sections include:
  • Main - General discussion forums. Section contains the General forum, Newbies, Picture Rating, Gibberish, and World Affairs and Politics.
    • Sub-boards - Sub-forums included are the User Threads, Surveys, Board Games, and Past News.
  • Arts and Entertainment - Section contains the Music, TV and Movies, Automotive, Gaming, Sports, and Comedy forums.
  • Creativity - For the posting of personal works of art. Includes a forum for Visual Art and a forum for Poetry and Literature.
  • Life and Living - For forums discussion Fashion, School, College, Technology, Religion, Fitness, Science and Environment, and Food and Cooking.
  • Teen Issues - Hosts forums on Advice, Relationships, Gay and Lesbian, and [...] Questions.
  • Regional forums - Forums for various regions of TeenSpot users including Canada, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom.
  • Support - Where users can receive technical support or make suggestions on the site.
• Private messaging - Email-like messaging that can be sent between TeenSpot members.
• Real Life -The site hosts a number of writers in its Real Life section who write about a number of topics of interest to teens. These topics include Entertainment, Music, Current Events, Sports, and Gaming. This area was brought back in March 2007 after a long hiatus.
• Music and Movie Reviews and Interviews - In addition to its regular writers (including Aaron Kalsnes, Mike Brede and Gary Lancaster), it hosts reviews of albums and movies, as well as interviews with music celebrities.
• Contests - TeenSpot members can enter to win free prizes. Prizes are often related to popular culture.
• Trivia - The site offers a trivia on such topics as music and movies. Each member's scores are kept in their profile.
• Shirt Shop - Introduced during the summer of 2006, TeenSpot now offers a custom shirt shop on their site.

Notables

• Drastic changes have had a history of driving "oldbies" out of the TeenSpot community (including The Merge between the original "TeenSpot" and "NeonTeen") and the major profile updates of 2007.
• The site regularly garners 5,000 teens at any point during the day, with some periods reaching 10,000 users.
• A semi-updated thread called "TS Top Posters" gives a list of all users who have surpassed 5,000 posts on the site's message boards.
• At one point, the site had a monthly poetry contest, and a weekly one; both started by different users.
• An occasional part of the message board community is the "slambook" in which users are given a list of members who have either met time or post requirements. With the list, the user purveys his or her thoughts on each of the users either slamming them or complimenting them. Sometimes, however, the posting of a new slambook can be "slammed" in itself, especially if the previous months has only recently been made or is still on the first page.
• During Summer 2005, a Religion board was made, along with a Picture Rating forum, due to large corresponding interests with these topics from users.
• The site has recently upgraded to include TeenSpot profiles available for all TeenSpot members. The new profiles include pictures, comments, the ability to add or remove friends, and other features.
• On the site's second anniversary of its merge with NeonTeen (1-26-07), it upgraded the site layout from a teal design to a more colorful and vibrant one. Also included were the new profiles in the update with several other features.
• When the site upgraded, along came a highly-requested forum for the homosexual community of TeenSpot entitled "Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual."

Issues with TeenSpot

Downtime, speed, and stability

Due to high traffic and constant new registrations the TeenSpot website had regular problems with site operation that included slow operation and downtime. Drastic improvement on these problems have recently been implemented.

Age

When registering on TeenSpot, users are asked for their birthdays. If they enter a birthday making them less than 13 years of age, or older than 25, a cookie is sent to that computer disabling them from ever registering. Simply deleting the computer's cookies overrides this, and allows the user to register again. Once registered, the user may then change their profile to correlate with their actual age. Efforts are taken to remove these users from the site, but it still presents a continuous problem.

However, many well known members who are above the age limit have been allowed to surf the site Unhindered due to their being on the outskirts of the demographic and their appropriate behavior.

Sometime in September 2007 TeenSpot limited the member search to not go below 16 for members over 18.

[...] predators

Dateline NBC has mentioned TeenSpot as a tool used by [...] predators to find, meet, and stalk young teenagers1. This is typically the result of the victim displaying personal information and not taking into account their potential audience. Though the Dateline report named competitor site MySpace as the abundant source, it still remains a possible concern for TeenSpot. In concern over this issue, TeenSpot has made a Safety page giving guidelines on how users can keep themselves safe while on TeenSpot and the Internet2. TeenSpot has also been subject to criticism on ITN News for lack of safety for teenagers on its chatrooms3.

Controversy

Starting before the NeonTeen-merge, the Something Awful website has used screenshots from posts of TeenSpot's forums to ridicule the writing styles and views of TeenSpot members4. This led TeenSpot owner Mike Brede to strongly request the removal of the content from Something Awful; Something Awful subsequently posted Brede's email on its site. This led to Something Awful users flooding onto the TeenSpot site and harassing TeenSpot users and staff.

Other controversies and attacks similar to the Something Awful incident have been launched against the TeenSpot site, motivated either by simply wanting to ridicule teenagers or as a form of revenge by prominent malicious users who had been banned. However, these attacks were substantially smaller in scale and in effect.

The merge with sister site NeonTeen was also a widespread controversial matter in which many users from both sites disliked users from the other. This led to, after the merge, many notable users leaving the community from both sides.

External links

• TeenSpot.com