What would you look for in a new dating site?

[Niki]

What would you look for in an online dating site? Is it a must that it is free, or do you rather want to pay for more options? Is profile matching old skool, or should it be more advanced? Any ideas, suggestions, etc welcome

Thanks for all the suggestions.

[JimC]

Profile matching is good. Payment is ok.

What I would really like to see is more preventive measures on fake profiles and porn ads. Porn companies will sign up and send mass messages. Then there should also be some kind of way to ensure that the person is who their profile picture says they are.

Other than those, the best features of any networking site is stability. Make sure the functionality of the features work well and fast (matching, searching, messaging etc...)

[JimOfferman]

I don't trust paid dating sites anymore - I tried a few, but every time most of my matches turned out to be either fake or non-paying members who could not contact me.

The one exception was a site where, if I was a paying member, my matches could mail me back regardless of having a membership themselves.

Another great improvement over (many) existing sites would be if you could somehow guarantee that members will get an answer from the people they contact. Nothing is more frustrating then making up a hundred different "hi, hello" messages and not even getting as much as an "hey! how are you?" back...

Keep it balanced somehow. A 100:1 ratio between men and women isn't going to do your site much good.

[Niki]

Originally Posted by JimOfferman

A 100:1 ratio between men and women isn't going to do your site much good.

While that is true,I can't think of a way to force users to reply on every message. (but I will try to find a way to implement this fairly.)


I'm implementing a very good spam/porn report system so that users can do a one click report of unwanted profiles. But this isn't fail proof of course.

[Brutha]

You can have different prices for man and woman to turn the 100:1 ratio a bit more in the direction of one-one.

[Restrikted]

I have an idea, why don't you limit the number of men and women who can register? Like, if the number of men who are registered exceeds the number of women registered by 20, then no more men can register until that number goes down. It may suck for the people trying to sign up, but it also almost guarantees that whomever signs up really wants to sign up. It's a win win. Sort of.

[Niki]

Maybe the best way is to implement this is to say, no difference more then 10%. I'm going to need different calculations for straight people and gays, but that's easy to implement.

Very good idea!

[SmartAlx]

Don't ignore the importance of appearance.

Let people search by weight as well as the other things like height, hair color, etc. Athletic, Average, Curvy are too open to interpretation.