Our Reviewed Dating Sites and Apps Minimum Criteria

Contributed by: Editor on Thursday, February 02 2006 @ 12:37 pm

Last modified on Sunday, August 23 2020 @ 12:00 pm

This article contains information regarding our reviewed dating services minimum criteria. This means we won't consider reviewing the site and/or app unless it meets most of the objectives of the points below. Once an online dating service evolves enough to pass the criteria, we will commence a review. Of course, this may mean the dating site or app still does not necessarily get added to our review site. If our detailed review process reveals a dating service is below are standards, we will not include it. The points below list the major criteria our experts consider before we review an online dating service:

  1. Our first major criteria is the number of members the service has. This number of course is not set in stone and depends on the dating niche the service is a part of. We would expect a dating site/app that caters to seniors to have fewer members than a more general oriented mainstream dating site/app for singles. A number of new dating sites have complained about this criterion but, we cannot recommend a dating service in good conscience to our readers that can't offer actual matches to their members.
  2. The next criteria we look at is the business practices of the dating service. Some of the "lower class" dating sites can make it extremely difficult to cancel a membership. You can find some of them renewing subscriptions without the expressed permission of the person. These fraudulent sites also will not offer refunds for any reason or within a certain time period.
  3. This criterion is similar to the last one and deals with the number of member complaints found. These complaints are usually regarding; the site not working properly, membership problems, or poor customer service. If you search online, you can find numerous complaints about almost any company or product. We take a look at the scope of the complaints found when compared to other popular dating services. If there are too many and they all revolve around one issue, we then take notice.
  4. Customer Support is especially important. You cannot leave members to flounder about the dating site themselves if they are having problems. Detailed FAQ or Help Center, Email, Online Support Chat and Toll-Free Phone Service are important tools to help members navigate online dating. A dating service needs at least 2 of these tools to even be considered. Hours of service are taken into consideration along with the response time to email and phone inquiries.
  5. Handling of Abuse is another important criterion. Members need to feel safe online and if another member cannot seem to take no for an answer there needs to be ways of dealing with this. From notifying the dating service of this members inappropriate behavior, to ways of blocking members from contacting (email, IM and chatting), or even seeing your profile online. These safety features must be easy to find and use. There must also be a tool to report inappropriate and fake profiles.

This set of criteria will evolve as we re-evaluate our position, and as dating services add in new features in which we will need to consider.

If you do not see a review for a dating service on our site, in most cases it may not be worth joining.

Every year or so we revaluate the services and products we have reviewed. This is done to update the review with any new changes that might have happened including new features, price changes, etc. Over the years some services and products get better, and some unfortunately get worse. Instead of removing the services and products that have declined in quality to below our minimum standards we decided to move them to our Not Recommended category. This can happen in two ways. The dating site or app quality of service could have declined and because of this, stopped meeting one of our criteria above. The second way is we added a new criterion in which the service or product did not meet, and we deemed important enough to move the product or service to the Not Recommended category.

Having a list of minimum dating service review criterion helps solve a couple of problems. Most people when visiting DatingSitesReviews are only interested in reviews of dating services that work and can offer them a good chance of meeting their match. If we included sites we did not like, there would be hundreds of sites on our list and the good ones would be lost in the shuffle. Plus, why waste people's time in reading reviews of services and products that hardly have any redeeming qualities? People rather be reading about online dating services and products that actually work. The only decisions they then need to make is about what type of dating service they wish to join, and what features are most important to them.

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