CyberDating Network ~ Dating Blog Archives

       ... The following are archives of our older dating blog entries:

Jump to our newest dating blog posts.

What did we ever do to you, Mr. Yahoo?

February 7, 2010

It appears that the folks at Yahoo, and most of the other free web mail services out there, think that we are spammers. I know! The nerve of them! Just because we offer a free service and we are in a business that has traditionally full of spammers and scammers, it doesn't mean that we do it.

In any case, if you are a member of one of the CyberDating Network of dating sites, please be sure to add us to your contact list (here are some instructions). If you don't, your email notifications will likely go to your spam mailbox.

Why should you care if your cyber dating notifications don't show up? It's because you won't get notified when you receive new messages in your Cyber Dating Inbox. I know lots of you check your Inbox regularly, but there are also plenty of our singles who are just too busy to check for new messages regularly. If the messages in your CyberDating mailbox get to be over 45 days old, we delete them.

That brings me to another related topic. People occasionally notice that their sent messages are not being read by the recipient and they ask us if the member is inactive or fake. The problem is that people are not getting their message notifications and they are forgetting to check their email. They are not dead - they're just dozing.

A couple of tips for creating an effective Cyber Dating Profile.

February 5, 2010

If you were to search the web for advice on how to write an effective online dating profile you'd find thousands of articles explaining the intricacies of how to write the "About Me" section of a singles ad, but the dating experts never give you advice about the more basic parts of the profile. So, here we go with the boring - but critically important stuff that will get your dating profile noticed.

The single most important field on the dating site signup form is your "location". Way too often people fill in the location field with something cute like "Secret" or "Small Town". What's wrong with that you ask. The problem is that much of the matching and searching software inside the dating site rely on your location to suggest compatible singles for you. If you want to meet someone in Toronto, tells us that you live in Toronto; then the datign site software can do it's job.

Also with regard to the location field on the dating site signup form, remember that if you live in a small town and if you want to find a love connection, you need to use the nearest "reasonably large" town. If you live in a very small town, nobody will ever find you because they are searching in larger towns or areas. Just be sure to clarify your location in the "About Me" section. You don't want someone to think you are lying about your location :(

More next time...
Tucker

Somebody recently asked if we review our dating profiles.

January 22, 2010

The short answer is yes - well sort of...

New singles ads are processed in two separate ways. The first is that the software on our servers does a bunch of work - before the profile is made public. The second step is done by a human some time after the profile hits the web.

The first process in activating a new dating profile, the one done by the servers, verifies that the profile is basically filled with useful information and that all of the manditory fields on the sign up form contain information. It also checks that the really important fields, like the person's email address, gender and location contain usable data. The first process also formats some of the information to make sure that things like the person's location does not contain funky characters like brackets that might confuse the searching programs later. We also automatically verify that, if the person entered a Twitter user name, that it is valid and that we can send tweets to that user.

We also programmatically search for offensive or spammy words and phrases and we either remove them or swap them with less offensive words. You'll notice that there is very little swearing on our dating sites because of this process.

Finally we send an email to the new registrant so that we can verify that his/her email address is usable.

Then once all of these steps are finished - usually within less than half a second - the new dating profile is added to our database and the new profile is available on the web for everyone to see.

The second process in processing a new dating profile is done by a human. In this process an operator quickly reads, or scans, the profile looking for problems or inappropriate information. As in the automated process the operator is looking for swearing, contact information, advertising, jibberish, spam and scammers. The operator verifies that any links in the singles ad go to PG rated sites and that the photo meets our standards.

Also, in an effort to weed out scammers, the operator compares portions of the new personal ad against a database of know scammers ads. We even check Google for duplicate profiles to make sure that a scammer has not just pasted in a profile from another site.

The second process could be done any time after the profile was first submitted. Often an operator will review the new profile within a few minutes of being posted other times, when it is really busy or if there are other projects due, the operator will not get to a new profile for up to a day.

So, yes we do review our dating profiles. But no, we do not do any background checks of any kind on our singes. We don't have the resources to do that. We are a totally free dating site - after all.

Have a good one... Tucker

"Gotcha" - that's what we are saying to several hundred dating scammers.

November 19, 2009

At CyberDating we have been really aggressively monitoring our new sign ups for fakes, scammers and spammers and it's really paying off. In the last two months we have identified over 500 dating scam profiles and moved them to our "Blacklist" - never to be bothered by them again. But that does not mean they won't be seen.

In an effort to help everyone to identify fake dating profiles, we have made our collection of banned ex-members public. Now, if you see a real profile that looks fishy, you can search the fakes to see if a known scammer has used the same email address, picture or text. Or, you can surf thru the scammers profiles just for fun. You'll be amazed at how many of them say they are "honest" and that their favorite movie is "Titanic"

You can Search Dating Scam Profiles.
Or, just jump right into the list... Fake Profile List.

As always, if you identify a fake profile that we missed, be sure to report it and we'll ban it too.

Happy scammer hunting :)
Tucker, The CyberDating Network

If you can't beat them... Tweat with them!

October 28, 2009

Ah, social networking. You may have read that social networking is killing the online dating industry; well here at CyberDating, we are embracing it. I guess it's not so much embracing those guys, but trying to play nice in the sandbox. Heck you are reading a blog (the first of the social networking venues) aren't you? Anyhow, here's the new news on the social networking front:

Now you can include your Twitter username in your profile so that CyberDating visitors can read your Tweets. A new link will appear in your profile and folks just have to click the link to hit your Twitter home page.

And, for those of you on-the-go, we now offer notification via Tweets when new messages arrive in your CyberDating Inbox. All you need to do is make sure that you give us your username and that you "Follow" us in Twitter - that tells Twitter that you are cool with us sending you direct Tweets. Each time a new message arrives, you'll get a direct message from us. How sweet is that?

Update your profile with your Twitter info now!

Thanks :)
Tucker

Say Cheese - Now quicker!

February 25, 2009

At long last my fine bloggers and dating website lovers, we have finally made it easier for you to post your picture on CyberDating.

After years of procrastinating, we have added the functionality for you to add your own photo to your personal ad. Previously you had to submit your photo which we manually processed. How Archaian - we manually cropped and resized every picture on the dating site (well, we actually used a macro in PhotoShop) and then uploaded them. We did this every week and you can bet that we always dreaded the day. Yes Karl deserves a cookie for his untold effort.

Anyhow, now, with the help of a little javascript that we found on the web, we have made it easy for you to upload and crop your photo in two simple steps. No more waiting - enjoy the instant gratification...

Party on People,
Tucker

How Affiliate Marketing Works

Wednesday September 14, 2006

Last time I wrote here I explained how our free dating sites make money. And, I promised that I would explain some of the unique ways that Internet advertising works that are unlike the TV advertising that you are used to.

Firstly, we do sell advertising space just like TV stations do. We offer advertisers a place to put their ads and then we charge them based on the number of people that see the ad. It's usually counted in cents per thousand impressions (the number of times someone sees the ad).

We also do a lot of Affiliate Marketing. This kind of promotion is a lot like commissioned sales in brick and mortar businesses.

Affiliate Marketing works like this:
Website A makes a deal (Affiliate Marketing Agreement) with Website B to promote Website B's product or service. Website A places coded links on their Webpage that leads to Website B. When a visitor on Website A follows the link to Website B, Website B is able to determine where the visitor came from using the code in the link. Then, if the visitor makes a purchase on Website B, Website B gives a commission to Website A.

In this type of arrangement, Website A makes no money until a visitor makes a purchase on Website B. But, if a website refers highly targeted visitors to another site, it is possible to make some decent money.

We have been affiliates of AdultFriendFinder for many years and much of our revenue comes from their sales to our visitors. Note the number in the link when you mouse over the AdultFriendFinder link. That's our affiliate code.

Knowledge is good!
Cheers,
Tucker

How To Make a Living on the Internet

Wednesday September 7, 2006

For those of you who are skeptical about free dating sites, here is a quick overview of how we make a living on the Internet.

We make money the same way TV companies do. Here is a tutorial for those of you who have never thought out the logistics: TV companies provide a venue where consumers (TV viewers) have the opportunity to see TV shows for free. In exchange for seeing the free content the viewers are forced to watch commercial advertisements. In the end the TV companies make sufficient money to produce and show the content and the viewers get to see the content. A marriage made in heaven. Remember that there is also PayTV in many parts of the world which allows you to watch content without the bother of commercials - but remember, it'll cost ya.

The same thing happens here. We provide consumers (You) the opportunity to see personal ads for free. In exchange for the free dating profiles we force you to view advertisements.

For an explanation of the different types of advertising that we can do on the Internet that they can't do on TV... Tune in next week...

Same bat time, same whatever.
Tucker

The Nigerian Issue

Wednesday August 30, 2006

We've got a problem. In the last few months the incidents of African scammers has totally gone through the roof. We are now seeing as much as 30% of our message traffic from African countries and, unfortunately, the majority of that is from scammers.

Up until now we have only banned individual email addresses from our network, but it seems that we are going to have to ban all IP's from Africa. It is commonly known that virtually all the other large dating sites have already banned not only Africa but also China and India. The thing is that we have always had the philosophy that our site should be totally available to anyone. We have always been free, we have always been accessible using older web browsers, and we design with the impaired visitor in mind, but it seems like we are going to have to start keeping people out. That stars with a total ban on the Africans.

Before we get a ton of complaints from people that say we are painting all African people with one brush, I would like to say that we fully understand that the vast majority of you are honest people. The problem is that some of the African people who use our site have ruined it for all of you.

Please accept my apology and understand that our site is really designed for the North American visitor and I'm sure that it is not the best place to find an African mate.

Sincerely,
Tucker

Why all the Old Profiles?

Wednesday August 23, 2006

We get lots of inquires asking why there are so many old dating profiles in our database. Some folks even think that we do this to inflate our membership numbers by keeping old profiles around, but it's not true. Let me explain...

It's really simple. Since we are a totally free website we have no reason to remove profiles from our database.

If we ran a pay dating service, at the end of a member's payment period, if the s/he didn't want to renew and pay again, we would zap their profile and they would be history. But with our free dating sites we only remove a profile if we find out that it is no-longer valid. Usually that means their email address is no good.

Another contributing factor is that, since our site is free, some people post their profiles and then forget about them. When these people find relationships they don't bother to remove their profiles. So some of the folks are already hooked up - we just don't know about it yet.

Of course, if someone tells us that they are not looking anymore we remove their profile. And we periodically prune our database by reviewing older profiles and sending the member an email.

I hope that clears things up.
Tucker

We're Back...

Wednesday August 16, 2006

It's kinda funny; about 5 years ago we took down a webpage that had a running commentary about what was "new and news" about CyberDating - an online diary of events. It was pretty popular for a while but eventually noone wanted to look thru the chronological entries that we wrote, so we trashed it and moved on.

But, the Internet continues to evolve and eventually weblogs (Blog) became all the rage. And suddenly, a running commentary in chronological entries is totally where it's at. Well, holly cow - we were doing that before it was cool! So needless to say - we're back with our new "BLOG"!

We hope to do two things with our new Cyber Dating Blog:

Firstly, we are going to recreate what we originally blogged about. Whenever we make changes to the Cyber Dating Network of sites that is either important or interesting, you'll be able to read about it in this blog. We are always making changes that affect you members and it's good for you to know where to find out about them.

Secondly, there is a ton of misinformation on the Internet about dating sites and especially about totally free dating sites like ours. So, I'm hoping to try to help quash some of the myths out there. CyberDating has existed for almost 10 years now and we've seen a lot. It's time to blog about it and explain some of the behind the scenes stuff about Cyber Dating websites.

Cheers and Welcome,
Tucker