General News

ChistianCafe.com is a popular dating site for Christian singles and has been for over 10 years now. Earlier this year they helped host a singles event called "Bash for the Unattached" with the C3 Newmarket Church located in Ontario, Canada. The event was designed for Christian singles to meet together in a fun and friendly environment. Hundreds of singles showed up for the bash and the speed dating event. Here is a video which highlights the event:

Note: Unfortunately the source to the video and/or image which once was displayed here has since been removed by the authors for an unknown reason.

For more on this dating site you can also read our Christiancafe.com review.

It looks like the dating site Plenty of Fish is currently down. It appears to have gone offline sometime late July 6th PST. No official information is available at the moment for the dating site outage. When you try to access POF.com or Plentyoffish.com visitors will receive some sort of “Service is unavailable” message (depends on your browser).

A few people have also reported to us that they have received a database error message. These messages seem to indicate a server problem and not a DNS issue. These problems could range from a hardware or software failure to some sort of denial of service or hacker attack (seems unlikely at this point).

If you have any new information on why Plenty of fish is down, please post a comment. This article will be updated when we receive any more news on why Plenty of fish is down and when it goes back online.

Starting Independence Day, eHarmony is having a free communication event for 4 days. It will run from Wednesday July 4th, 2012 until Sunday July 8th, 2012 (US website only).

To participate in a free communication event (FCW) all you need to do is sign up as a member on eHarmony.com and create a free profile. Filling out the profile will take you about 30 minutes. Your answers to the profile questions eHarmony asks you are then used by eHarmony's matchmaking system to give you a number of matches right away. With these matches (and all matches you receive during the promotion) you can then communicate with for free. Features not included during free communication events are photos and Secure Call. No credit card is required for this promotion.

eHarmony's last FCW happened in May (see Story). By our count this promotion will be eHarmony's 40th free communication event for the US site.

To find out more about this dating site and what it can offer people looking for a long-term relationship, you can check out our review of eHarmony.com.

One of the United Kingdom’s fastest growing dating services is Cupid plc. Two of their more popular dating sites includes Cupid.com and Flirt.

In February of this year they surpassed 100 million unique visitors. Last year during the same period they had only 15 million. The United States accounts for about a quarter of their traffic with the rest coming from Europe. Cupid reports average monthly global sales of around $9 million USD.

Cupid.com also just recently launched a HD iPad app. They already have native apps for both the iPhone and Android devices.

For more on the story you can read the press release and to find out about the dating site you can check out our Cupid.com review.

Online dating: it's great, except when it isn't.

The latest cautionary tale involves Skout, a social networking app designed to link up adults with other users nearby. Skout got its start as a Foursquare-like location check-in service, but didn't hit its stride until it transformed into a location-based flirting app. The company now attracts millions of new users a month and received $22 million in financing from Andreessen Horowitz, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, earlier this year.

After discovering that minors had gained access to the app, Skout created a service designed specifically for 13- to 17-year olds. Safeguards were put in place, but they may not have been safe enough.

3 men have now been accused of raping children they met through the location-based app. In each case, the men reportedly posed as teenagers in the Skout forum for underage users. In one case, a 15-year-old girl from Ohio said she was raped by a 37-year-old man. In the second, a 24-year-old man is accused of raping a 12-year-old girl in California. In the final case, a 21-year-old man in Wisconsin has been accused of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy.

Skout's founder, Christian Wiklund, responded in an interview, saying, "I'm disgusted by what's happened here. One case is too many. When you have three, it looks like a pattern. This is my worst fear." He has decided to suspend the service for minors, who made up a significant portion of Skout's member base, while he works with security experts to put better safeguards in place.

"We're seeing more of these cases," said Lt. Craig Carter of the Escondido Police Department in California. "Parents need to be aware that their kids could be on these Web sites." Many social networking services forbid minors from using them, or separate minors from adult users, but it's nearly impossible to control who ultimately uses the service.

Wiklund has contact law enforcement officials involved in all 3 cases and offered to aid in their investigations. The company has also suspended the app for teenagers and banned all devices registered with the app that belong to minors. Skout is also working with a task force of experts to improve security, age verification, and other company practices.

"I thought we were doing a lot, but obviously we have to do better," says Scott Weiss, an investment partner with Andreessen Horowitz. "This is a five-alarm fire. The entire company is re-evaluating everything it's doing."

This Canada Day weekend eHarmony.ca is having a free communication event which will run from Friday June 29th, 2012 until Monday July 2nd, 2012 (Canadian site only).

Holiday weekends are always a busy time for dating sites. If you were thinking about trying out eHarmony, this 4 day event is a perfect opportunity for you. As always it is free to sign up and create a profile on eHarmony. You also are allowed for free to receive matches and check out their profiles. What free communication weekends allow you to do (as the name may suggest 😊) is communicate with those matches at no cost to you and with no credit card required. The only features not available are secure call, photos and skipping the guided communication process and going directly to email.

To find out more about how this dating site works and what features it offers when compared to other services, please read our review of eHarmony.