With popularity brings spammers for any internet startup company.  Spammers have automated everything on big social networks like Myspace because the developers are too busy lining their pockets from  advertising dollars.  Unlike them, we at Datepad are all about bringing the community the best possible site.   With that being said, we have had a few spammers try to abuse our  website, and they have had their accounts permanently terminated.

The staff at Datepad have implemented many features that will thwart  spammers.  Due to the nature of the security fixes, we cannot tell you  what they are, but they are working behind the scenes so you can avoid having a mailbox that is full of spam.

Another major component or getting rid of spammers on Datepad is through  our community.  We have a feature that allows you to report every spam  message that you receive, which will be forwarded directly to one of our  Datepad staff members who will asses the request and remove the spammer at the click of a button.  We hate spam as much as you  do, so we recommend that you report any unsolicited private message you  receive from a spammer.  In addition make sure that you never give out your personal  details or your passwords to anyone that you do not trust.

Unlike most community sites, Datepad has a team of 3+ people  checking the backend of the site on a daily basis to ensure spammers are  terminated before they get out of control.  This is one of the big  things that our competitors are missing, and by reading a lot of their  blogs and forum posts, they are slowly killing their own websites.  The  power is in the people, and that is why Datepad strives to make your  experience in online dating the best it can be.

At the end of the day, we have a ton of security features in place to  lock down the majority of spammers, but as a community we rely on you to  report any suspicious activity that you may see for the benefit of  everyone else.  Happy Dating!

We here at Datepad want to provide the world’s best free online dating service, but we know as well as you do that we are not the only website in our industry. We believe that by showing you everything our biggest competitors have to offer, you can make up your own mind as to why Datepad is the best choice.

With that being said, here is our first dating site blog review.

The first online dating site that I am going to be reviewing is called DateHookup.com. Datehookup is an older online dating site, having been launched way back in July 2002. Since the site is a lot older than most of the other websites in this industry, it has had a lot of time to rank well in search engines and receives a lot of visitors every month.

The site offers all the features you would expect from a free online dating site, you can get your own profile, there are forums, as well as date ideas. They tote that they are better than everyone else, but let us look into their claim and see if they can stand the test of time.

On their About page, tthey have a detailed list of everything that DateHookup offers, but one thing I found a bit unprofessional was that while listing the best features that their website has, the bottom one says, “Other stuff I can’t remember.” If the developers of the website do not even know what their website does, how is anyone else supposed to?

Aside from that, the site looks well established. The site is monetized with a strip of Adsense ads on the right side. This is an excellent way for them to make money while not annoying the users of the site. The majority of free online dating users would prefer a free site that has advertisements rather than having to pay a monthly fee. Free is the way of the future for online dating.

A very prominent feature on DateHookup is the forums, with some of the bigger categories reaching 7000 threads! Dating forums are generally the hardest part of a site to grow, and it looks like they have that on lockdown. That is due to many years of promotion and slow exponential growth, and they are now reaping all the search engine traffic from it. It will take a while before Datepad has a forum that is that active, but all in good time. Congratulations on that DateHookup!

What do you guys think about DateHookup? Leave your feedback or any experience you have had with DateHookup.com in the comments below to have your say! After a little research, it seems that there have been quite a few complaints that you can read about here.

Ever since our public launch on March 1st, the Datepad team has been hammering nonstop with new features, new articles, new viral marketing strategies, and much more.  It looks like that hard work has been paying off as we have just had our 500th member join the site yesterday.  There are many dating startups that launch on the web every month, but few have the potential to survive long term and really grow into something.  Luckily for us, Datepad is one of those diamonds in the rough.

We will now be striving to reach the 1000 member landmark, and at the rate that Datepad has been growing I do not think that it will take very long.

To our success, and to you finding your soulmate through the internet’s first social dating website - cheers!

The winner of the 16GB iPod Touch is Bingwui Ng from Malaysia!

You can see his blog entry here.

Congratulations Bingwui, and Datepad wishes to thank everyone that entered our blog contest!