Dating Services

I had a bit of a laugh today when I was reviewing a few senior dating sites. What do these 3 pictures have in common?

Senior FriendFinder

Senior People Meet

Single Seniors Meet

That's right each one uses the exact same photo of a senior couple! Single Seniors Meet and Senior People Meet actual used the photo at the exact same time back in 2010 before they switched to different photos. Also Single Seniors Meet has gone through a few name changes which is a little confusing. They were called Prime Singles at one point and are now called SilverSingles.com. The site is also run by Spark Networks who also owns Christian Mingle.

I was surprised to see Senior FriendFinder join in on the party and use the same photo of the couple (it is at least a 3 year old photo). There is either very few good photos of happy couples in their later years or ... heck I am not sure why they are using it ... 🤔

OkCupid has always been known for its cutting-edge approach to online dating. That edge became even more cutting earlier this month when The Coinbase Blog made an exciting announcement:

We're proud to announce you can now find true love with Bitcoin by using OKCupid! This is one more step forward for bringing Bitcoin to the masses - one date at a time.

That's right, OkCupid has just become the latest company to accept the controversial digital currency. The site's 4 million active members can now use Bitcoin to pay for "A-List" extra features, making OkCupid one of the largest sites to accept Bitcoin in the world. The real price will continue to be displayed officially in dollars on the site, and will be adjusted for Bitcoin users in real time to reflect the present exchange rate from Coinbase.

Coinbase is a Y Combinator startup that calls itself "the simplest way to buy, use, and accept Bitcoin." The platform to buy and sell the digital currency will keep a 1% transaction fee from all dealings with OkCupid.

OKCupid CEO Sam Yagan spoke to Ars Technica about the company's big news. "Our plan is to liquidate our holdings daily and turn them into US dollars," he said. "There's an open question as to how much liquidity there is. I think there's going to be a tremendous amount of volatility. One of the reasons why we want to be early in the mix is so we can learn."

OkCupid users had shown little interest in incorporating Bitcoins into their online dating experience - the number of requests for Bitcoin integration barely reached double digits - but Yagan is determined to keep OkCupid ahead of the pack.

"There's no question that these digital currencies are going to be the future," he said in a quote on Forbes.com. "Whether it's actually the form of Bitcoins or evolves into something else, we want to be out in front. We want to be the ones who have the experience. There's a lot to learn."

It is, without a doubt, a move in an interesting direction. There's certainly a degree of irony in an online dating site - where trust is a big factor and users are often concerned about scams - adopting an anonymous currency as a payment option. But it's a massive win for Bitcoin, which has already been enjoying a boost in mainstream attention and legitimacy.

OkCupid users: How do you feel about using a digital currency to pay for A-List subscriptions?

eHarmony's free communication weekend in May is happening right now for the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. It is running from today, Thursday May 23rd to the end of day on Monday May 27th (Happy Memorial Day!!! 😊).

During this free event eHarmony allows users not only to use the guided communication process for free but to send and receive email messages as well. This makes it an ideal time to try out this dating service to see if it is the right fit for you. All you need to do is become an eHarmony member by creating an account and answering the profile questions. This process will take you about 30 to 45 minutes to complete. Remember to answer the questions truthfully since eHarmony uses their complex matching algorithm to send you matches based on your answers. There is no cost to become a member of eHarmony or communicate during this FCW event. Features not included are photos, secure call (calling members through the site from your phone) and skipping the guided communication process to go to straight to mail.

To find out more about this dating site and to read user comments about the service you can take a look at our in-depth review of eHarmony. There last free communication weekend happened in April (see Story).

For singles in the UK (who also have a Holiday weekend) you can read our eHarmony.co.uk review to find out more information, as the site is a bit different from its North American cousin.

A concerned visitor sent me an email the other day asking what has happened to the Plenty of fish forums? Did they shut down? I was like oh no not again, they have done something to the forums on POF. I still noticed the forums coming up in the search results so I visited forums.plentyoffish.com directly and was greeted with a nasty server run time error.

Now I know a bit about web servers and this is a Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) error. This is not good (see the full explanation below) because it indicates to me that the files for the Plenty of fish forum website has been removed. After further investigation it looks like this may have happened at least a week ago, since visitors have been searching our site about the Plenty of fish forums being removed for that long.

I am surprised that POF hasn’t addressed the problem. They must know about it as I am sure a large number of people have already complained about the issue as it has been a week now already. Also the POF forums are still very popular even though they are not directly linked to the main POF.com site anymore (I think POF wants to slowly kill the forums). What has me puzzled though is if they had plan to stop providing the forum, why not remove the website and domain record all together or at least display a nice message about the situation and the reason for the removal (which would take 2 minutes to do). Displaying a runtime error isn’t very professional. Heck even a redirect to the main POF dating site would have been better.

Update: After checking the POF forums off and on for the last hour it appears that this is an intermediate problem. About half the time I get a runtime error, about a quarter of the time I get some other one line text error and for the other quarter of the time the forums actually work. As I said before this has been happening for at least a week since others have reported on it.

I have a thought, let’s start a campaign to see if we can get Plenty of fish to fix the forums. I am going to tweet about this story on Twitter using the hashtag #FixForumsOnPOF. If you want POF to keep the forums alive like I do, then re-tweet my tweet or post your own using the hashtag. Maybe if POF is listening they will do something about it and fix the problem with the forums. 😊

In the meantime since you can’t use the POF forums all of the time you are more than welcome to post your relationship and online dating questions and observations in our dating forums. We have a number of forum categories you can post in about a whole pile of different topics.

So, what does the runtime IIS error mean that most people seem to be getting? It actually is 2 errors in one. The web server is complaining first about their not being a custom error file in the location specified to display to visitors when an error happens. The second error actually triggered the first error. The second error is harder to figure out since the current error message is all about the first error. The second error is some sort of application error which could be anything from the actual website files not being available to a coding error in the requested web file. Since an error message is displayed it does indicate that webserver is working properly and that there is nothing wrong with the domain record.

If you are looking for a popular free dating site to try and want some more information then you should read our Plenty of fish review.

The Business Insider did an interview with Aaron Schildkrout and Brian Schechter who co-founded the dating site HowAboutWe. The business was launched in Dumbo which is an up-and-coming area for startups in Brooklyn, New York. The dating site launched in April of 2010 with the slogan "Go online to get offline".

To find out more about how this online dating site works you can read our HowAboutWe review.

A eHarmony free communication weekend (FCW) is happening right now in the U.S. and Canada. It started today and runs to 11:59pm PST on Tuesday April 16th. No credit card is required and all members can communicate with their matches for free during this 5 day event.

If you want to take eHarmony for a test drive this 5 day FCW is worth checking out. You get to create a profile, review your matches and communicate with them all for free. This allows you to try out most of eHarmony’s services for no cost and it will give you a good idea of the type of matches you will receive and how the whole online dating process works at eHarmony. This dating site calculates your highly-compatible matches based on their algorithm which has years of research invested into it. The only things not included during this event is viewing photos, skip straight to mail and Secure Call.

eHarmony’s last free communication weekend happened in March (see Story). For further facts on this dating site you can read our detailed eHarmony review. Comments and user reviews are also available from this page.