POF (Plenty of Fish)

With the recent downtime of PlentyofFish a number of members contacted me asking a few questions about the dating site. One of them was:

... can you tell me what happened to the POF Forums/Message Board?

To my surprise, it looked like at first glance that the forums have been removed from Plentyoffish.com. The forums were quite popular on the site with hundreds of posts being added every day. Looking deeper into the problem the person who asked me this question said he found that the forums still existed but the link to them had been removed from PlentyofFish a while ago. He then asked me why? My best educated guess is that the forums were too distracting to members. The owner of POF wanted people to use his dating site where ads are being displayed. The more ads viewed and clicked on by visitors the more money the website will make (this is how most websites and publications make money, including the one you are reading now). Since the forums don't display ads (and therefore do not make money) I figure that is why the link to them was removed. With no link, new members wouldn't find out about the forums and stay just on the dating site while still allowing the older members who knew about the forums to continue to use them.

For those of you looking for the PlentyofFish forums, you can still find them here or, if you like you could try posting in our own dating site advice forums.

While I was checking out the PlentyofFish forum issue I notice that there were a few new features. First off it looks like Upgraded Members (those of you who paid for the Serious Members Badge) now have their profiles displayed to local users at the top of their search results. Originally the upgraded membership was suppose to show your intent to the dating community that you are serious about dating (see Story), that is why it was called the Serious Member Profile Upgrade. As we thought though, this badge has slowly but surely morphed into a full membership upgrade that now even affects the search results. I am not saying this is a bad thing as we knew it would eventually happen, it was just funny how POF didn't originally want people to think they had a paid membership.

A few other new features I noticed included some search options. You can now search for users in a specified zip code who logged in at least once a day. The average user displayed by this search actually logs in 3 times a day to PlentyofFish. The other new search option is a "Will Respond" search. This is supposed to return users who will most likely respond to a message from you if you view their profile. The average user from this search last logged in about 20 hours ago and they are expected to be online again in the next 3 hours. Both of these search options are a great idea!

The last new item I found is a statistic. According to PlentyofFish, every day 1.4 million people use their dating site. In 2009, this number was 900 thousand.

For more details on this popular online dating site, please read our review of PlentyofFish.

I have just started to see some visitor comments being submitted that the free online dating site Plenty of Fish is offline. POF looks to have been experiencing problems for the last couple of hours. The message that now appears when you visit the site is "The service is unavailable". Other visitors have reported seeing Memory errors which looks like it had when POF tried to send some email. Memory errors usually are caused by either faulty software or hardware. I would put my money on this being a hardware problem as I am sure any software used by the dating site is thoroughly tested before going live.

The last time we recorded Plenty Of Fish down was in May and like in other incidents the servers are usually back up and running properly in 5 to 10 hours.

We will update this post when we get more information.

It looks like members of PlentyofFish.com will have another way soon to access the dating site. In a few weeks (July, 2010) an iPhone Application will be released which will allow members to access the dating site directly on their iPhone, iTouch and iPad. No information has been released yet on what features will be available on the dating application but I assume profile editing, searching and sending messages will be possible. I am curious to see if location based dating will be included with this new application.

Since an iPhone POF Dating App will be here soon I wonder how far off an application for Android will be? Android mobile phones are now outselling the iPhone here in the States.

To find out about POF, you can read our review of PlentyofFish.com.

I've noticed a few comments lately on our site (see Comment) from visitors about chatting on PlentyofFish (and Dave's blog post as well). This was a bit of a surprise to me since back in April 2009 IM was dropped without notice, much to the dismay of many members (see Story). Well, I had time to confirm it tonight, and it does indeed look like the old instant messenger is back.

The reason given for the removal of the IM functionality initially was that it reduced the page impressions on POF by 10% or more. The reason for this was people were chatting and not surfing the site (and clicking on ads). I guess all POF needs to do now is update their Help FAQ since it still says "Plentyoffish doesn't have an IM.".

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

We just got word and have confirmed that Plenty of Fish is currently down at the moment. It looks like it has been offline for at least the last hour (6:30pm EST). If you visit the dating site now you will receive one of the following server error messages:

• Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)
• Server is too busy

It looks like the server is accessible (hence the available error message) but the web service (IIS) is down.

We will update this post when we get more information.

Update #1: As of around 12:00am EST (May31) we have had reports that POF is back up. Though it still appears to be down for us.

Update #2: As of 7:00am Plenty of Fish is back up again. Not sure what happened but everything seems working normally. According to our estimates POF was down for approximately 10 to 12 hours.

For more details on this free dating site, check out our review of Plenty of Fish.

Markus, the CEO of Plenty of Fish, posted on his blog with word that they have updated their Chemistry Test. They now use a new and more advanced predictive statistical model which now will give you a list of 30 matches that you are most likely to end up dating and falling in love with. He mentions that they spent year's collecting dating from POF members of who they dated, who they broke up with, and who married. With this information in hand, Plenty of Fish used it to create a model which generates better matches than before for the average user.

As with the older test at Plenty of Fish, the new Chemistry Test still measures 5 dimensions of personality. They are Self-Confidence, Family Orientation, Self-Control, Social Dependency and Easygoingness. These factors were determined by POF to be essential for building a successful long-term relationship.

To find out more about this dating site, read our review of Plenty of Fish.