Dating Blog by AspNetDating

Spam prevention for your dating site

2009-06-23T14:58:00.003+03:00

All dating and social sites are victims of new annoying type of spam. Unlike the e-mail spam here the messages are sent by actual people and are not automated. The senders are almost always from Nigeria or Senegal and they always find a way to register to your site and send messages like this one:

Goodday dearest i so much like your profile, I must say that am just new at internet dating, been single and friendly in nature. My name is anna,am 24 years old . please i will love it most if we get more acquanted with eachother because am seeking for a long term friendly affair build on a concrete foundation with a family oriented man of your kind who knows what it means to love and be loved (anna_77utazi/@/ya/hoo/dot/co/dot/uk ) (*** ) please contact me at the below e mail address a n n a _ 7 7 u t a z i at y a h o o . c o . u k Thanks and take care, hopping to read from you soonest, best regards anna.

The above example is an actual message caught by the AspNetDating spam detection system on our live demo site. There are several ways to protect from such messages:

Block IPs from Senegal and Nigeria. 99.9% of the registrations from those countries is for spamming purposes.
Prevent automatic registrations with CAPTCHA or other anti-bot measures.
Manually approve the first few messages for each user. This is by far the most effective method. Spammers will always start spamming right away so you can catch them from the first message. If the first 3 or so messages are fine then the user is most certainly not a spammer.
Allow users to report spam. Your users are the best spam detectors.
Catch users with multiple repeated similar messages. In most cases a spam account sends multiple messages with the same or similar content. It is a good idea to put on hold those users until you verify them.

With the industry leading dating and community software AspNetDating you can use some or all of the above methods to fight spam.

How to make money from dating and social sites?

2009-02-26T15:23:00.004+02:00

How to profit from your new dating site? Our successful customers always run their sites in free-for-all mode until they get the initial users base they need. Promotions such as "first 5000 users will receive a free lifetime account" help as well. After you have a few thousand users it's time to make some money! Here are a few ideas:

Ads. There are plenty of sites making money by offering their services for free and placing revelant advertisments. You can easily include AdWords on your pages by pasting the code in the corresponding file. With AspNetDating 6 you can do that directly from the admin tool as well. The ad supported model is suitable for social networking sites, community sites and sites where the users are looking for casual dating and will probably not pay for subscription if there was one.
Monthly subscription. This is the most common approach and it offers a great revenue stream if used properly. Ideally you should be able to customize every aspect of the subscription process and that's why we've made everything customizable in AspNetDating. You can set which areas are available to free members and which require paid subscription. You have the option to give free trial, set free-for-women, set whether free members can reply to paid ones, create daily, weekly, monthly, yearly subscriptions with different levels such as silver, gold, platinum and each level can have different features and limits - e.g. 20 photos for silver, 40 photos and 5 videos for gold. The subscription approach is suitable for sites where members are actively searching for a partner - such as marriage sites, russian brides, etc.
Credits. This is an alternative approach where the user does not pay for a monthly access but rather for a specific action. For example you can charge 1 credit per message or per contacted user. The functionality can be easily extended to charge for other actions such as viewing video, viewing explicit photos, etc. The benefit of this approach is that the users do not feel that they are wasting money if they do not use the site for a while. Rather, they are confortable that they can take their time and use the site whenever they want and pay only when they actually use it. The result is more loyal and more returning users.
Extra services. Once you have your user base you can use your site to advertise additional services. Some multi-language sites offer translation services, others have shops where members can order flowers or buy ringtones. There are many possibilities depending on the location and general interest if your users.

At AspNetDating we are always open to ideas and do what we can to help you succeed! Do you know other revenue streams? Feel free to share them

User assisted administration with AspNetDating

2009-01-27T19:07:00.001+02:00

Here's a question that we get a lot: "How to ensure we have a clean site without spending all day moderating it?". And it's a good question! Here's what we've done with AspNetDating to make sure your site is as clean as possible with minimal effors from your side:

User assisted face control. If you're running a highly targeted site (e.g. Fitness singles or LA Blondes) you will have a hard time filtering all the users who are not fit for your site. The user assisted face control feature solves this problem for you by letting your users decide if a candidate is a good fit for the site. Here's how it works - a new user registers to your site, fills in a profile and upload some photos; when that is done the profile is put on hold until the existing users approve or reject it. Each of the existing users will see an "Approve profile" link where they can see all new candidates and give their opinion. Eventually a decision is made based on the majority of the votes. There is a complex algorithm that looks for patterns and removes the option from users who reject everyone (haters), users who approve everyone and users who are simply against everyone else. It is a good practice to enable the voting only for users above certain level so you know that they have spent some time on your site and they know what to do.
User assisted photo approval. Same process as above but with photos. Users can approve/reject photos and a decision is made based on the majority of the votes. If the results are close to 50/50 then the photo is marked for manual approval by administrator. Users who are often making wrong choices will soon have the option disabled for them and users who are helping the most can participate in the "Top Moderators" chart. The chart is a good way to motivate the users to assist you and you can throw a bonus for the top moderator for extra motivation.
Report abuse. AspNetDating allows your users to report abusive photos, profiles and messages. The site administrators and/or moderators can review those reports from the backend and take the appropriate action (ignore, delete abusive content, delete user, warn).
Auto approval based on user level. If a user has been on your site for a while then they probably know the rules by know and the chance of inappropriate content is very low. If your site maximum user level is 20 then usually you can safely enable auto-approval for all levels above 10.
Auto approval based on billing plan. Paid users usually don't make mistakes and risk losing their profile. It is a good idea to moderate the free users and enable auto approval for the paid ones.
Automatic spam check. The feature tracks users who send multiple similar messages and puts their account on hold until verified by administrator or moderator.
Bad words list. The regular expressions support makes this feature very flexible.
Desktop administration tool. The standard Windows interface is usually quite faster than the Web one. AspNetDating provides a Windows application for easy photo and profile approval.

It's the attention to the detail that brings our dating and community software AspNetDating above all other on the market.

Plentyoffish.com

2009-01-25T15:14:00.000+02:00

Plenty of Fish.com has recently become one of the most in demand free dating websites. It is a completely free, fun website where you can search for a mate. Its creator was a businessman who was tired of being ripped off by other websites who charged a hefty monthly fee, but never produced any results. He set out to change that by creating plentyoffish.com, where membership is always absolutely free. The site however is ad-supported and the owner reports profits up to $10 million per year from using Google Adsense.

For anyone inclined to daydream about a Web business that would all but run itself, two other details may be of interest: Mr. Frind operates the business out of his apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia, and he says he has net profits of about $10 million a year. Given his site’s profitable advertising mix and independently verified traffic volume, the figure sounds about right.

Spending time at Plenty of Fish is a visually painful experience. Wherever a row of members’ photos is displayed, which is most pages, many of the faces are elongated or scrunched because Mr. Frind has not taken the trouble to write the software code that would automatically resize frames or crop photos to prevent distortion.

Are you looking to create a site similar to Plentyoffish.com? The dating software AspNetDating got you covered! (visually painful experience not included). The software supports free-for-all mode and you can easily insert your Google ads right from the admin tool.