Advertising and other news

Several weeks ago a couple of existing members of this website reported to us they tried to access our website, found it was blocked and received a message saying our website was unsafe.

Both were using networks using filtering, rather than a home Broadband Internet connection. One network was the public WiFi found at a train station.

Computer programs scan the words on web pages and try to automatically rate websites. I think one computer program found the word “adult” on our site and categorised us as an adult website. We are a website for adults, but we are not that kind of adult site! A computer file of categorised websites was passed from one company to another. The recipient used software to read it and several other computer files from a number of different organisations and categorised our site as “unsafe or adult”. This was then passed on to yet another company providing software for networks in companies, universities and the like who wish to stop their employees or students accessing certain sorts of websites.

When a web browser tries to retrieve the IP address of our website, networks using filtering instead return the wrong address. This is called DNS poisoning.

It took us hours to figure out who to contact to try to get this problem fixed. Even so, the last reply we received said the problem may happen again as their company passively uses computer files provided by other organisations. Isn’t it lovely when nobody is responsible for anything!

I think this was an honest mistake rather than a deliberate attempt to block our website. This was particularly frustrating at the time, because our website is a part-time venture and due to the high cost of online advertising loses money. We simply can’t afford the time for this.

Twitter halted our adverts for a week due to a policy violation. After several e-mails to them we managed to convince them they were misinterpreting their own policy. This is a good outcome, but again the time to fix these issues takes away time from working on other projects which actually generate money.

Although we have just mentioned two problems, there are a lot of other issues involved in running this site.

For the past few months, we have been advertising this website on Twitter for the USA, Canada, Australia, Western Europe and Scandinavia. A small fraction of people registering with our website tell us we should be a free website. As we get several new people registering each day, we will be told this at least twice a week now. Another fraction of people delete their accounts between one day and a few weeks stating they didn’t find anyone in their city. When we check ourselves we find several people in the relevant cities and we suspect these people specified their desired age ranges too narrowly. The age ranges of people you are looking for can be changed using the My Account page.

We are going to experiment with just advertising now for the most populated cities in various countries. In this way our new members won’t be spread out all over the place and end up deleting their accounts because they didn’t find anyone. We should have thought about this a long time ago!

The issue with this site is that online advertising is expensive and most members of this website don’t pay for a subscription. This means the funds we have the online advertising run out quickly.

A lot of dating websites are designed to keep people on them as long as possible. They make finding someone a game of swiping through photos and hoping to get an elusive double-match. Of course during this drawn-out procedure, people will end up buying bundles of messages and search result boosts etc. Something may start off to be free, but end up costing a vast amount of money. You can compare this to our very low price for a whole year. This is why it is important to have independent dating websites.

Finding someone unvaccinated is not an unsurmountable task. You pays your money and you takes your choice. Online advertising or the old-fashioned way of the public noticeboard in your local cafe, bar or grocery store.