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Reviewer Guest
This refers to UK users, just in case.
It seems to be marketed as a companion more \\\"serious\\\"
to the main datingdirect site. Customer service, in a minor query
told me that they are focused on confidentiality. I sense that indeed
the members are more serious, and i did get messages and responses,
and so forth. So far so good.
But I have some serious complaints that really annoys me to the
extent of trying to warn people about:
The whole model of how we interact with others doesnt work for me.
I explain: you cannot see a pic of short profile of sb without creating
a \\\"visit\\\" in the others. When you get search results,
get a visit or a message or any other alert, you get a plain result
or email, without any pic or description, so you need to go and
check out. That cycle can become repetitive if you have a bunch
of visit and you just want to go through again. And the lady does
the same, gets a visit, and checks it out, then I get a visit and
may check it out. (after a while all those nicknames look the same)
Then the \\\"interested\\\" feature also creates an entry
in the \\\"fans\\\" club in the other. I would like to
have my favourites without needing to advertise. Ok I can understand
it is to encourage interaction, but I wonder how many actually want
to expose like that to every single contact you feel it might be
worth writing.
As you are basically stumbling into people all the time and there
is no easy way of knowing if there was interest or not (in match.com
you have sort of a preview, so if you visit, you are already interested
a little bit), there seem to be encouraging a workaround for women
to express interest subtly, they dont show the picture by default,
so you just bump into profiles without pictures, and if they like
yours they \\\"show the picture\\\". I find it frustrating,
in the end you just have to wait for the ladies to bother to show
the pic, which happen quite often I have to say, but I am not yet
sure if that is that when I receive the alert is always because
she shows the pic to me or to everybody.
Amazingly, when you blacklist somebody it actually sends the person
a notification and you need to provide a reason!!! wth, who was
the genius or drama queen that implemented that feature!, i wonder.
If I want to block sb, most of the time I don´t want to make
a scene, basically they are discouraging that completely, which
goes against the confidentiality values. The fact that you keep
getting visits because the whole system is geared to make you click
every time to see who was that person, unless everybody is consistent
in using \\\"not interested\\\", makes me want to have
a quick blocking feature whereby that user will not see me again,
thats it, I am actually saving her time.
At a risk of sounding sexist, I suspect they take more feedback
from women or there are women at the helm, and it does feel a bit
not capturing how men wants to operate, I ve went through a couple
of dating audiobooks and the strategies they suggest may find it
a bit difficult to implement here.
-Quite a lot of spam, badly written first messages already including
funny email addresses, so I suppose an army of nigerian or eastern
europe fraudsters are posing is nice girls.
-What else, the \\\"not interested\\\" button is slow,
requires two clicks.
-Using in mobile phone is ok, iphone copes with it well.
- Updating the profile is not very quick, for a paid site, I ve
been in match.com (UK) and here it does drag a bit.
- As for the recurring billing, i ve havent had issues but what
I do is to immediately cancel the subscription a week after enrolling,
so I ensure that by the end of the 3 or 6 months it will be definitely
over. That said I had one very concerning experience, when the first
cycle ended, towards the end I was having tons of visit, and one
day after the expiration I got a message, which funny enough was
an email from the dda team, recommending me to contact some random
user!!! the b... they never have sent an msg like that, they can
send me alerts via email (which I disabled anyway), but not a \\\"message\\\"
I complained to the CS and their answer was woolly referring to
rotation of users and some bsht, coincidences could happen, of course,
but I remain quite convinced that they really push it to try to
hook you back.
Then some of the personality profile . like the question if I like
my body, or how I rate myself (style: casual, sophisticated, attractive,
sexy.), what are you supposed to put there? They provide 3 levels,
so it is either cranking up everything, or putting a noncommittal
average. Totally useless.
The other profile stuff is unimpressive, but I guess it more or
less the standard. As for the matching-suggestion features, I had
them on for a while and really wasn't getting much value, but again,
this could be me.
No idea of number of users (they could do some marketing there,
but they don't seem to be bothered, so I suspect it is not great),
but it does feel that there are a decent number of of new users,
and the search does provide contacts, even if mostly do not show
the pic :(
So overall, I think it obviously can have results, but it am not
overly convinced, you may want to give a try but don't overcommit
and at least you will know what you get
Hope it is useful and not too unfair
Rating :: 2
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