This article's does not adequately key points of its contents. Please consider expanding the lead to of all important aspects of the article. Please discuss this issue on the article's. June 2015 Chatroulette is an that pairs random users for. Visitors to the website begin an online chat text, audio, and video with another visitor. At any point, either user may leave the current chat by initiating another random connection. Chatroulette The Chatroulette website was created by Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old high-school student in. The site pairs its users at random, and allows them to type messages to one another while watching the other user's webcam. The site initially had 20 users, and then it doubled daily for a period, according to Ternovskiy in 2010. He discusses that he did not advertise or post his site anywhere; in fact, people starting talking about the website and knowledge of it gradually spread by word of mouth. As the number of active users grew, Ternovskiy has had to rewrite the entire code to cope with the load, the management of which being the most challenging part of his project. Despite the expansion of the service, he still codes everything on his own. Ternovskiy sought help from his longtime friend Vlad Kostanyan, who helped him with his side projects. In early November 2009, shortly after the site launched, it had 500 visitors per day. One month later there were 50,000. The site has been featured in , , , and on , in the , , and. In February 2010, about 35,000 people were on Chatroulette at any given time. Around the beginning of March, Ternovskiy estimated the site to have around 1. As of March 2010 , Ternovskiy was running the site from his childhood bedroom, assisted by four programmers who were working remotely, and the site was supported through advertising links to an online dating service. The site uses several high-end servers all located in Frankfurt, Germany. According to New York Times, the site is intensely addictive. On average, in sessions showing a single person 89% of these were male and 11% were female; 8% of spins showed multiple people behind the camera. About one in three females appeared as such a group, and one in 12 males. A user was more likely to encounter a webcam featuring no person at all than one featuring a sole female. About one in eight spins yielded someone apparently naked, exposing themselves, or engaging in a sexual act. A user was twice as likely to encounter a sign requesting female nudity than to encounter actual female nudity. The website uses to display video and access the user's. Flash's peer-to-peer network capabilities via allow almost all video and audio streams to travel directly between user computers, without using server bandwidth. However, certain combinations of routers will not allow traffic to flow between them, and then falling back to is necessary. Initially, the site only asked users to confirm that they are at least 18 years old and agree on terms to not broadcast any offensive or pornographic content. Login or registration was not required. However, the website now requires users to register for free before they can use the features of the website. The signup requires a username, email address, and password. Details such as age, gender, and location can be further added under profile and settings. This tab also allows users to write an 'about me' section about themselves, including languages they speak and their taste in music, movies, and games. Users can also upload an image of themselves to add to their profiles. Alert message shown after the user has been reported three times Within a year of the site's launch, Chatroulette received criticism, particularly with respect to the offensive, obscene, or pornographic material that some users of this site were exhibiting. It's a predator's paradise. This is one of the worst faces of the Internet that I've seen. It's disconnecting human relationships rather than connecting them. This is a huge red flag; this is extreme social networking. This is a place kids are going to gravitate to. Some think it is a game, others think it is a whole unknown world, others think it is a dating service. I think it's cool that such a concept can be useful for so many people. Although some people are using the site in not very nice ways -- I am really against it. Some users dress in costumes to entertain the viewer the site pairs them with, while others play music or host dance parties. In 2011, artists presented random Chatroulette users with a staged view of a man who had apparently hanged himself, and recorded the reactions. Parody shows such as and have lampooned this aspect of the service, and nudity has become an established part of the site's notoriety. A complicated legal environment surrounds Chatroulette with respect to the sexual activities that occur frequently on the site. These activities may be illegal, but who is liable for such content is uncertain due to the level of anonymity of the users. Users who experience harassment or witness illegal, immoral, or pornographic activity may report the offending user. If three users complain about the same participant within five minutes, the user is temporarily banned from the service. Chatroulette later changed their terms of use, making it a requirement that all users sign up before using the service. An algorithm was developed to successfully filter out large quantities of obscene content on Chatroulette, considering that as much as 30% of the 8. This has led to a higher proportion of female users accessing the service due to the cleanup. The algorithms automatically flag users broadcasting sexual content. The filter works in a manner that it identifies excessive amounts of revealed skin while simultaneously recognizes faces as appropriate. A 20,000-user-based sample study proved that the algorithm is able to filter out nearly 60% of the offensive material along with ads on the site. While the video streams are transmitted in a peer-to-peer manner, without passing through the site's server, Chatroulette does periodically take screenshots of the users' video content. Humans then check the screenshots flagged by the algorithms and proceed to block the offending users for a period of time. We now have around 100 moderators who are all monitoring all webcam feeds and marking inappropriate ones. The combination of filter technology and moderation results in the banning of 50,000 inappropriate users daily. Sutter, John February 24, 2010. Retrieved 19 March 2013. Retrieved 19 October 2015. Retrieved 19 March 2013. Retrieved 24 November 2014. Retrieved 19 March 2013. Retrieved 20 March 2013. Retrieved 20 March 2013. Retrieved 19 March 2013. Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder.
