Dating Website Support Forum - Webscribble

Comments from my customer.....

here is the deal people/Men or females want a good time and for me I like women but when you have 40 men online I'm not interested... A free site is always good and them you get sponsors to pay for the site and make more money your site also needs to be user friendly it took me 20min to register and when I get there it was nothing that I expected ..... I can help you spurce your site up....when you do something do it BIG!!

Here's my response.....


It's pretty typical of any site on the internet to have that ratio between men and women. But our site, showing who is online, reveals that. Other sites don't make it so clear, but it's still the case with them. Most sites only show you the women members, not the members who are online or have been online recently. I've had no trouble meeting women, just like when I went to an engineering college for my BS many years ago that had a ratio of 24/1 men to women.

The site was free for the first year and we had a problem - every asshole in the world joined and sent offensive email to the women, chasing them away. We had more advertising revenue but a lot more headaches also.

I'll look at the registration. What is the problem with it, that there are just too many questions?

I'm interested in your comment that you can help me spruce it up, but I'm broke right now. The site was making a decent income until PayPal notified me one Sunday evening near the end of November that I was violating their terms of service by taking income for an adult site and I was cut off immediately. It took a while to get credit card billing and the revenue now is not 15% of what it was. Losing all the recurring subscriptions is what hurt. We also had problems with the server and with the software and at the same time were banned from craigslist for overposting. We've solved those problems but still cannot post on craigslist at the level we used to. Overall the site is recovering but it's slow and financially it's barely breaking even.

Your comments would be most welcome!

More complaints from more users about how long it takes to fill in the profile information. Somewhere it says 2 minutes and it's more like 20 minutes. People are not patient.

I want to make almost all of the questions optional, make the answers "not specified" if the question is not answered.

Can it be done?

You can make any field you want optional

here is what you do

open the files engine/forms/profile_s1.php

profile_s2.php

profile_s3.php

profile_s4.php

profile_all_step.php

take the field you want to un-require out of the required field array in the beggining of the files.

Code: Select all

      $required_fields = array(
            country => "Country",
            state => "State / Province",
            city => "City / Town",
            name => "Profile Name",
            zipcode => "Zip / Postal code",
            gender => "Your Gender",
            birth_day => "Birth Date - Day",
            birth_month => "Birth Date - Month",
            birth_year => "Birth Date - Year",
            //marital_status => "Marital Status",
            //drinking => "Drinking",
            smoking => "Smoking",
            food => "Food",
      );


in the above example putting the // in front of marital status and drinking make the fields optional

if you want to remove them completely

also take them from the

templates/forms/profile_s1.html

take out

Code: Select all

<tr>
    <td>Drinking Habits</td>
    <td>{PROFILE_S1_DRINKING}</td>
  </tr>

now drinking is not only not required it is totally gone

if you remove fields completely you will also need to modify the

templates/preview_profle_wp.html

and remove

Code: Select all

<tr>
                <td valign="top" nowrap class="small"><font class="ptext"s>Drinking:</font></td>
                <td nowrap class="small">{PROFILE[DRINKING]}</td>
              </tr>

to remove the drinking field from the profile preview page as well

hope you can understand this

I recommend you strip out what you don't want

I actually stripped the entire interest page from a new site I am working on and made it a 3 step profile creation instead of the all-step

Paul

Very good, no that's not too hard. What about making a field optional with "No response" in the preview profile if it wasn't answered?

THANKS!

Thank you Paul.

I think the site needs a redesign. The current index page should be an "about" page.

Who's online should be the index page with some modification. Like most sites the men members greatly outnumber the women members and most of them don't want to see a long list of other male members. It makes them think it's a gay site and they leave.

When people view this page they should view:

default is all women displayed in random order
choices are:
women members displayed in random order or by last visit time
men members displayed in random order or by last visit time
all members displayed in random order or by last visit time
who's online

the search would narrow the view of what members are displayed, including a "seeking" option, as in women seeking men.

A cookie would remember the option and search criteria and it would be used automatically on the next visit.

Any comments?