Match Group

One of the world's largest free online dating sites, PlentyOfFish.com, has been hacked. The site released the following official statement:

On January 18th, after days of countless and unsuccessful attempts, a hacker gained access to Plentyoffish.com database. We are aware from our logs that 345 accounts were successfully exported. Hackers attempted to negotiate with Plentyoffish to "hire" them as a security team. If Plentyoffish failed to cooperate, hackers threatened to release hacked accounts to the press.

The breach was sealed in minutes and the Plentyoffish team had spent several days testing its systems to ensure no other vulnerabilities were found. Several security measures, including forced password reset, had been imposed. Plentyoffish is bringing on several security companies to perform an external security audit, and will take all measures necessary to make sure our users are safe.

In an extremely strange and rambling blog post, PlentyOfFish CEO Markus Frind tells his side of the story. He describes the event as an "an incredibly well planned and sophisticated attack," and says that the man responsible, a 23 year old hacker named Chris Russo who allegedly also hacked the popular torrent site The Pirate Bay, harassed his wife and blamed the security breach on "the Russians." According to the post, Frind's wife received a call from Russo saying that PlentyOfFish had been hacked, and that "Russians have taken over his computer and are trying to kill him, and his life is in extreme danger and they are currently downloading plentyoffish's database." Frind says that he was listening in the background, closed the security breach, and immediately ordered an investigation.

Frind goes on to say that Russo demanded that he fly to either Argentina or Washington, D.C. in order to stop "the attacks from the Russians," who supposedly had access to their bank accounts and were looking to steal $30 million from a string of dating sites. According to Frind, Russo also claimed that 5 or 6 other dating sites had been breached, and then gave Frind the administrative password for eHarmony.com to prove the validity of his claim.

Reactions to the hack have been strong. Dave Evans, an analyst who follows the online dating industry, told CTV News that Frind is "a self-made millionaire who's a total hardcore geek and has built most of the site himself." He continues to express disappointment, saying that Frind "hasn't spent evidently any time on securing passwords" and calling his actions "a lack of respect for your members."

In the same article, PlentyOfFish forum user fnord is quoted as saying "The site owner didn't think it was important to notify the users...but did find it important enough to go off on a crazed diatribe on his personal blog. Despite claiming to have plugged the security hole, Plenty of Fish is still sending out passwords in plain text, which is just this side of just posting them on the Internet for everyone to see." User QuasarDJ adds "I have grave concerns about the security of my personal information on the Plenty of Fish site and I've yet to see even the most simple updates to guard against these problems."

While the convoluted story has yet to be completely confirmed, it's clear that a hack of PlentyOfFish has occurred and that it's in the best interest of all members to change their username, email, and password combinations, particularly if they are also used on other sites.

For more information on this dating site you can read our review of PlentyofFish.

"If someone doesn't think you're hot, the next best thing for them to think is that you're ugly."

It's a wild claim, but it's the conclusion drawn by OkCupid's latest study, "The Mathematics Of Beauty." We reviewed the data gathered from the experiment in two previous posts (you can find them here and here), so let's get straight to everyone's most burning questions:

"What on earth is going on here? And what does it mean for me?"

The first question can be answered using game theory. We're presented with a paradox: when some men on a dating site think a woman is unattractive, other men are more likely to message her, and when some men consider a woman "cute," other men show less interest in her.

Game theory explains the paradox like this:

• A man who is interested in a woman has less competition for her affections from men who are not interested in her.
• Believing that other men are not interested the woman, the man will begin thinking "Perhaps she's feeling lonely and unappreciated because men aren't pursuing her. I have a greater chance of connecting with her because my competition is so weak."
• That man would therefore have increased incentive to send her a message, because the odds of it being received positively are higher.

• On the other hand, a woman who is universally considered "cute," but not "hot," is likely to appear more in-demand than she actually is.
• To the average man, she is attractive enough to create the impression that many other men are interested in her, too.
• Some men will decide to take their chances and send her a message anyway, but many will think that the competition is too strong and will chose to move on to someone else they think they have a better chance with.

It's difficult to make a change to your overall level of attractiveness, but this theory can be used to your advantage in other ways. The key to success, according to this study, is to create variance, a difference of opinion regarding your attractiveness. In Christian Rudder's words: "Take whatever you think some guys don't like - and play it up." Think of the Suicide Girls type - tattoos and piercings aren't for everyone, but some people love them. People with body modification know that it makes them unique, show it off, and don't are if some people don't like it. And it gets them lots of attention.

You don't have get "Mom" tattooed on your bicep or pierce your eyebrow to get dates, but the principle is the same. Browse through the profile photos of any dating site, and you'll see countless pictures that are taken to hide a trait that is supposedly undesirable or unattractive, like a angle that disguises a large nose or a cropped photo that only shows the face of an overweight person. But if the OkCupid research team is right, "we now have mathematical evidence that minimizing your 'flaws' is the opposite of what you should do." Display the mole on your face or the embarrassing tattoo you got when you were drunk with pride! The men who aren't into your look will increase your chances with those who are, and the ones who do like will fall for you even harder.

To find out more about this online dating service, you can check out our OKCupid.com review.

Kristen Bell is universally thought of as good-looking.

Megan Fox is frequently considered super hot, but is also regarded as unattractive by many.

And how do regular OkCupid users stack up against such famous competition?

To explore how mathematics can determine a man's reaction to a woman's appearance, the OkCupid research team found users willing to submit their photographs to scrutiny under the site's 5 star rating system. Woman A had an attractiveness rating of 3.4/5 stars, and the number of messages she receives per month is 0.8 times the site's average. Woman B had an attractiveness rating of 3.3, and the number of messages she receives per month is 2.3 times the site's average. Though their star rating is very similar, the number of responses these women receive is very different. The pattern of votes that determined their attractiveness rating is also very different: for Woman A, there was a clear consensus, while for Woman B, there was a split decision. In simple terms:

Recipient of Gold
Match.com

Recipient of Silver
eHarmony

Recipient of Bronze
Zoosk

We closed the 2010 Dating Sites Reviews Single's Choice Award poll earlier this month with a total of 798 votes from visitors. The poll really was popular this year and it received over 10 percent more votes than last year while being available only for 3 months when compared to 5 months in 2009. I had hoped to start the poll in August or September but it wasn't online until October. Next year the plan is to have all the awards finished up by the end of December instead of running into the new year like we have always done.

It's interesting to see how the results vary from year to year in the Single's Choice award as the dating sites compete to be number one with singles. This award is sort of like the "Best Director" award at the Oscars, it is the most important. The reason the Single's Choice award stands out is it is decided by the public with votes, and not us. With our Editor's Top Pick awards we try to make an unbiased selection but, when you talk dating sites everyday sometimes the decision may not be as clear as we would like.

For 2010 we listed the top ten dating sites for you to vote on. The three dating sites which received the most votes will get an award, Gold for first, Silver for second and Bronze for third.

The recipient of the Gold 2010 Single's Choice Award is Match.com. Not surprising, this is the fourth year in a row that this dating site has won the Gold Single's Choice Award. Match.com continues to lead in the dating industry and this year they received over 37 percent of the votes. This is a huge eight percent increase over last year which shows Match.com is gaining in popularity and continues to be the one to beat. Match.com was also the winner of the Editor's Top Pick - Overall award as well.

The recipient of the Silver 2010 Single's Choice Award is eHarmony. This is eHarmony's third year to win this award and their popularity remains about the same at 20 percent of total votes. eHarmony is designed for singles with long term relationships in mind so it is not for everyone. With them winning Silver it shows just how popular and effective they are especially since they do all of the matching for you.

The recipient of the Bronze 2010 Single's Choice Award is Zoosk. Zoosk is a relatively new dating service and it is the first time they have appeared in the DSR Choice awards. This is a great accomplishment for them to receive an award this year let alone a Single's Choice award which is decided by votes. Zoosk received 94 votes which is almost 12 percent of the total vote.

This year's standings for the Single's Choice award for all dating sites in the poll are (click the dating site name to read our full review):

1. Match.com
2. eHarmony
3. Zoosk
4. PerfectMatch.com
5. Chemistry
6. Lavalife
7. Date.com
8. FriendFinder.com
9. SinglesNet.com
10. True.com

Once again, we would like to give a big THANKS to everyone who cast a vote this year in the Single's Choice Award.

• Girls who are described as "cute" tend to be ignored by men.
• The more men as a group disagree about a woman's level of attractiveness, the more they end up liking her.
• Having some men think she is "ugly" can actually work in a woman's favor.

These are three of the surprising conclusions drawn from the latest OkTrend's study, "The Mathematics of Beauty." This time, the researchers at OkCupid focused on female attractiveness by looking beyond a woman's profile photo and "into the reaction she creates in the reptile mind of the human male." As always, the data used was gathered from the activity of actual OkCupid users, in this case 1.54 million votes, 596,000 messages, and 64,000 profiles.

It should come as no surprise that the hottest OkCupid members receive more page views and messages than less good-looking users, and it probably also isn't a surprise that men dedicate more time to the pursuit of attractiveness than women do. A beautiful woman on OkCupid receives approximately 4 times more messages than an average woman, and 25 times more messages than an unattractive woman. The OkCupid team examined a sample of 5,000 women, and sorted them based on attractiveness and the number of messages they received during the last month.

The graph, which can be found here in the original article, was adjusted to account for differences in factors like "race, location, age, profile completeness, login activity and so on," so that the only meaningful difference between the subjects plotted on the chart was their physical attractiveness. The graph revealed an extremely wide range of results, showing women with the same level of attractiveness receiving a vastly different number of messages per month.

Armed with the data, the OkCupid team set out to determine what caused the disparities they had found...and the key, it turns out, is in mathematics.

If we rate attractiveness using the classic 10-point scale, a woman who is rated a 7 could be a 7 because everyone who sees her considers her to be one. On the other hand, she could be a 7 because the majority of people consider her a 10, and a few think she is a 0. If all we know about a woman is that she's a 7, we don't know how that number was determined. Writer Christian Rudder uses actress Kristen Bell to illustrate the point: while she is certainly good-looking, she is not out-of-this-world, supermodel hot. Most people would probably rate her as "very attractive," while a smaller number of people will likely consider her "super hot" and few would say she is "unattractive." In the case of Megan Fox, however, many people are likely to rate her attractiveness as extremely high - higher than Kristen Bell's - but a significant number of people will also probably rate her attractiveness as low (lower than Kristen Bell's).

What happens when this theory is applied to real OkCupid users?

We'll find out next time.

Recipient
PlentyOfFish.com

Our poll for the 2010 Dating Sites Reviews Single's Choice Award which we started October 2nd, 2010 had almost 800 people cast their votes by the beginning of January 2011. This is the second year in which we asked our visitors to recommend the best free dating site for the year. A free dating site has to offer most features of the dating service for free. This includes creating a profile, advanced searching and communication by mail messages. Some of these free services may offer a paid upgrade of a membership which gives the user additional features but in order to be considered free by us, a free member should still be able to use the site to find and communicate with their matches at no cost.

The recipient of the 2010 Single's Choice Award for a Free Dating Site is PlentyOfFish.com. This is the second year in the row that they have received this award. In total they gathered 267 votes which is 33 percent of the total and they were recommended 14 percent more than the second most recommended free dating site. When you compare the results to the previous year’s poll, in 2010 singles preferred PlentyOfFish.com 4 percent more than in 2009.

Here are the final results of the poll:

1. PlentyOfFish.com
2. Craigslist
3. OkCupid.com
4. DateHookUp.com
5. Mingle 2
6. Matchdoctor.com

This year's runner up was Craigslist with 19 percent of the vote followed by OkCupid with 18 percent of the vote. PlentyofFish.com had an additional 114 votes (or 14% more) over the runner up Craigslist. Following OkCupid was Datehookup.com with just over 12 percent of the vote. Mingle 2 came in at 7 percent followed by Matchdoctor.com with 5.5 percent.

Read our review of PlentyOfFish.com.com for more information about this online dating service or visit Plenty of Fish directly.