When creating Datepad, we knew that the world of internet dating, and social networks were full of spammers, and people trying to scam you into elaborate schemes. Have you ever received a message from someone in Nigeria asking to deposit $12 million dollars into your account - but you need to pay a bank verification fee or something of the like? This is a classic scam, and although it sounds too farfetched to be anything but a joke, over 50,000 people fall victim to these scams each and every year. In some cases, individuals lose hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Many new start-ups in the dating and social networking field do not even pay attention to this terrible reality allowing their site to become overrun by illegitimate, thieving crooks - many situated in Africa and the Ivory Coast. At Datepad, we took a different stance. We wanted to make our site the safest, and cleanest for all of our members - on the top of our priority list was dealing with these scammers and spammers.

While there is no effective way to fully eliminate this problem, we have taken some pretty remarkable steps in reducing the occurrences.  Datepad has developed proprietary methods to detect, remove and block unwanted visitors; these methods have proved to be very successful. While I can’t share the entire process with you for confidentiality reasons, I would like to give you some insight into the actions and systems we use against spammers.

Some of the basic steps we take to ensure a safe and clean environment are ways to stop automated programs (also known as bots) from sending out messages to our members. You will notice that when sending a message you are asked to enter a human verification word which effectively eliminates automated activity.

We also have an automated intelligent system in place that scans outgoing messages for known phrases and structure that are commonly found in scam e-mails. E-mails that hit a certain threat level are automatically removed from the system. In keeping with the privacy of our members, this system is fully automated - and not human moderated. We review only the messages that are caught for exception to further increase our matching algorithms.

A third, and very important step that we take to limit the spread of this scam, is not publishing our members e-mail addresses anywhere on the site. All messaging is done internally, and notifications are sent to our members. This adds an additional layer of privacy to all of our members, as they have the ability to easily report and block scam activity, keeping their personal e-mails safe.

While there are many more aspects to our systems used fight the scammers, I will be saving some for future posts. I hope that we can further educate people about scams so that we can save someone less informed from losing money to these crooks. As always, if you suspect a scammer is on Datepad, please send in an abuse ticket so that our support team can address and rectify the situation.

I am guessing most of you are completely unaware that there is a new movie out called Internet Dating. This movie was a straight to DVD release and I am also guessing that you will have a hard time trying to find it. This film tries and fails miserably in its attempt to portray the internet dating world. The movie is based on the site “hitusup.com” which, sadly, is available for sale through godaddy.com. That in itself speaks volumes about the movie as the producers didn’t even bother to register the domain for any type of internet promotion.

I was expecting the movie to show more about what it would be like to either run a dating service or actually use one. This movie fails utterly in both departments.

Internet Dating stars Katt Williams, a fairly well known standup comedian, and Master P who, among many things, has built a rather large record empire. In fact Master P was once on Forbes Top Ten Celebrity annual income list with an income over 50 million dollars in one year. Master P also had a short career in the NBA before becoming a musical and entertainment entrepreneur. His career success and the generous amount of philanthropic projects he is in involved in makes you really wonder what he was thinking when he decided to be a part of this movie. He was the producer of this film and I really question whether or not he actually viewed one single screening. Had he done so my guess is he would have cancelled the project.

On top of what I already said about this film, it insults in many other areas. Women are referred to as “bitches” so right off the bat they lose most of the female market; really smart guys! Then there are the annoying cartoon captions that remind you of the 1960’s Batman shows with Adam West. I am also sure that there was no script and if there was it was written as though it was improv and very poorly at that. The guys from “Whose Line Is It Anyway” could have easily made a 60 minute movie about online dating that would have made more sense and of course have been much more amusing. Then there is the sub shop were the majority of the characters work. During this entire film, even though they are constantly making sandwiches, there isn’t even one single customer that comes through the door.

I don’t write screenplays for a living and normally, regardless of whether I like movie or not, I do have some respect for the talent and time it take to put a screenplay together. That being said I’m positive that in my spare time I could easily put together something much more interesting than this horrible film. Avoid this movie like the plague and save yourself the 70 minutes that the movie internet dating stole from me.

I would like to start off by welcoming you all to a new series of posts that we are going to be doing on the Datepad blog regarding the inner workings of a full featured, free internet dating site. My name is Regan Johnson, and I am the Technical Director here at Datepad. Our goal for this segment is to bring the tech savvy and tech interested crowd a closer look at some programming tactics, design philosophies, and monetizing schemes that are put in place on Datepad.com on a daily basis.

When starting to develop Datepad, we had many team brainstorming sessions on the topic of how we could offer more features all while keeping the site easy enough for even the most novice user. This is one of our core goals when adding any new feature to Datepad - ease of use. Everything we have done has been meticulously thought out and calculated from our comprehensive business plan, to even the smallest of features.

The result is a site that rivals even the most expensive paid sites on the internet in terms of features and accessibility. A lot of planning went into the mechanics of each system (messaging, nudges, photos, articles, forums, etc.) and how they interacted with other systems. Since our initial plan, there have been many additions and tweaks that would have been a nightmare to implement without such a strong initial blueprint.

It has been said by many analysts that you will see a strong decline in fly by night web businesses that don’t have a solid business plan. It is always important to work a new feature out a few steps ahead, and take into consideration all of the possible outcomes or future feature implementations. Even if you decide not to include a specific function at the time of launch, having a solid framework that can support this feature down the road will save many hours or days of development.

In further posts, I will be discussing topics such as our picture upload system, the constant war against spammers (and what we are doing to stay on top), our advanced search techniques, our proprietary matching technology and much more! I look forward to bringing our users a more intimate and closer look at Datepad!

Recently launched downtoearth.com is backed by some very big players in the internet dating market; specifically match.com. That’s right, the paid internet dating people are joining the free dating highway.

Match.com, which we reviewed earlier this year is a global internet dating giant, and it’ll be interesting to see how their foray into free internet dating plays out. I’m curious to see the reaction of match.com subscribers when they realize that what they’re paying for is now being offered for free.

The Good Stuff

The downtoearth.com home page is easy on the eyes and well laid out with nice soft colors and good font size. It gives a quick overview of the site’s mission (100% real people. 100% free to use), and they really push the “honest, accurate and free” aspects of the site. They’ve taken the step of opening this site only to Americans and Canadians. It is believed that by limiting the site to Canadians and Americans only, there will be a reduced risk of inviting unwanted scammers to join. This conveys a false sense of security as most scammers make American or Canadian profiles when trying to scam other members. Staying on top scammers requires high end IP tracking technology and a team of administrators managing back end databases. Moreover, the last time we checked, Match.com’s largest market was Spain and Spanish America.

Sign up is simple, with easy to follow drop down boxes and button selections. Once you’ve entered your basic information, including your username, password, gender, birthday and location, you’ll be able to tell the world all about yourself by completing the rest of your profile, including photos.

I have to admit, I loved the photo utility, it’s pretty slick! Rather than dragging or moving handles to edit the photo, you end up doing the opposite by positioning the photo within the frame so it appears exactly as you want it to. You can easily zoom in or out on your photo to show as much or as little of it as you want. Each photo that’s uploaded has to be check marked “recent and accurate”. I don’t know how far that will go in actually ensuring photo accuracy though. It’s also unfortunate that you can’t caption or otherwise place a comment on your photos.

If you change your mind about anything in your profile, it’s easy enough to change, so there’s no need to worry about making mistakes!

Other pluses on downtoearth.com include an easy to read (if a bit sparse) help section, easy access to the privacy policy and terms of use.

The Bad Stuff

Where the site falls woefully short is in the search feature. If you’re not American, forget about it. For Canadians it’s totally useless, and I would imagine extremely frustrating. If you’re going to open the site to people from certain countries, then the site features should be accessible to them. Frankly, the inability of the site to service its Canadian customers is dishonest, and not in keeping with the site’s slogan.

The site cannot be accessed prior to creating a profile. In other words, you can’t test drive it before giving up your information. Free or not, I want to be able to discover what a site has to offer before joining.

Why, oh why, do site administrators still send confirmation emails that contain both the username AND the password you used to sign up. It’s simply not in keeping with security best practices. Even the password reset tool is a simple email, once again containing both username and password. Ugh!! It’s easy enough to code a proper password reset tool, so why not take the time to do so??

Like match.com, this site offers nothing, absolutely zip, in the way of additional features. There are no forums, no articles, no advice. It’s simply a matching system. With the additional features that are offered not only by Datepad, but also by other free internet dating sites, downtoearth.com has a long way to go before it’s up to par.