Munch, thanks for straightening out my link.
When I first joined match a few months back, I had the typical “romantic guy”, “flowers & candy” type of description for myself. The “my match” section was equally as bland, “sense of humor”, “cheery disposition” type stuff too. After playing the match game for a couple of months, I hadn’t had a single reply. Periodic checks on the mail I had sent indicated that my letters (30+) had been sent, but not read or received.
Once this thread started, I started reading both my prey and my adversaries threads to see what was working and for whom. After all was said and done, I thought fuck it, just go over the top for shits and grins. I spent a few hours writing it up, and when I went to put it on Match, I realized that I had to break it into 2, 2000 max character pieces. I hadn’t really written it that way, but I tried to split it into 2 parts, my description and their description. I also had way more than 2000 characters in each section too. I whacked at both sections to make them fit, including paragraph and dialogue breaks.
When I was done, I submitted my profile and was given a nice little response that I had been on too long, so the nice folks at Match had logged me off to protect my privacy. I didn’t hit the back button right away, and ended up losing the work. I redid it all, this time I C & P’d the parts as I went along so that I had a back up. Once it all fit again, I backed it up, logged off, logged on, and resubmitted it.
It took 4 days for the changes to be approved and made. At first I expected to get an e-mail from them explaining that they weren’t a blog for nut-jobs, but most of what was entered was accepted. I was confused as to the parts they had yanked or twinked. What really pissed me off though was that they had removed my paragraph and dialogue spacing. Now it reads even more nonsensically than was originally intended. There isn't even an indication that the first section is the "myself" portion, and the second is the "you" portion.
I haven’t written another letter to anyone yet, so I don’t know if the new profile will make a bit of difference anyway. I’ve already kind of resolved to myself that it is just as easy to be ignored by women in real-life as it is in cyber-space.
I’m dredging up this month-old thread to say…elmwood is right.
I put up my profile on match a couple of weeks ago. I really only put it up for practice, and because it was free to do so; I wasn’t expecting anything to come out of it. So…yesterday I got a wink. I opened it to find that the lady who winked at me:
is 20 years old. I say in my profile that I’m looking for 27- to 35-year olds.
lives over 300 miles away. I say in my profile that I’m looking for someone who lives within 50 miles.
says absolutely nothing about herself other than that she’s 20 years old, 5’6", and “if you want to know more you’ll have to e-mail me.” I think if match.com would have let her, she wouldn’t even have said that.
Nothing at all about who she wants to date. Her profile is just a line of blanks.
One night, in a bitter haze of unfulfilled sexual need and personal angst, I changed my profile on nerve.com to say, in the section “why you should get to know me”, “Because I’m a fucking prize.”
Three emails from women the next day. Not just winks or smooches or whatever–actual messages that they paid to send.
I encourage you all to stretch your legs with a bit of attitude. It helps.
I do, by the same handle as here. And I’m definitely not average or generic.
sigh
I am an unfortunate bridge between the geek world and the party world. I like topology. I can make joke involving Unix commands. O’Reilley once bitched out an ex boyfriend for me. I play Scrabble, I adore logic puzzles, and I have traded many sheep for bricks while dodging the Robber.
OTOH, I can hold my liquor. I like dancing. I brush my hair and don’t wear pants to my arm pits. I like to do weird, nifty things, and have urban adventures. I am very outgoing, social, and also hang out with an equal number of people who have no idea what a “d10” is. I like baseball games. I like parties. I find the Three Stooges hillarious.
I’m not looking for a pretty boy/girl. I don’t like dates that look like I won them at the county fair. But I’m out of my “nerds are hot” phase.
I have been able to find people on both sides of the gap. But I’m still hoping to find my fellow “bridge person.”
And the fact that Match.com demands you choose only one sex to seek out for dating doesn’t help much. grumble.
I was pretty fed up with Match until the last message I was planning to send out got a reply. I’d gotten replies before, but most never amounted to much. I met one woman, but she misrepresented herself tremendously. Lets just say my criteria for a woman’s size is: If I can bench press her weight then I don’t have a problem with her. In her case, I would have had to do it a leg at a time! She seemed rather nice otherwise, but we really didn’t hit it off.
The last message I sent was really going to be my last. I was fed up with typing out long custom messages to fit the miniscule profiles printed on Match and getting no response. Those who did respond wanted either to move in right away, or never told me anything about themselves. It is kind of hard to hold a conversation by yourself. Then there were the women who had in their profiles, “Looking for my equal”…Yep, babe, you sure look really good in your pictures, but I am reminded of a song called, “She ain’t pretty she just looks that way” by the Northern PikesShe ain’t pretty . Stupid bitch. Or, the women wearing way to much makeup and sporting what looked to be a mink coat looking for a guy who made $150,000+!! Uh, lady, you look like a poodle and from your profile I’d say getting a poodle made more sense than putting up with whatever shit you’d likely bring to any relationship.
Anyway, I sent the letter to this women who sounded interesting. She didn’t have her picture up on the site, but her profile, while minimal, looked interesting. I guess at the time when I wrote it, I really didn’t hope for anything. I just wrote what I wanted to emphasizing what my interests as opposed to stating what I was looking for. Also, reading the message afterwards, I think I was more confident and didn’t come across as if I wanted to tell her everything in one shot while still giving her what I hoped would be some information she would be interested in. In other words, .
Well, after a couple of dates I had already asked her to come to Hong Kong with me over Christmas because I couldn’t stand to be away from her for 3 months at the start of our relationship (work-Hong Kong-work-home: 3 months). We had a great time. That was a year and a half ago. On the 30th we get married!
It was, I suppose, what I first thought of, Skip. Sigh–even on a dating site all I get is spam.
'Course, there are so many other ways to harvest e-mail addresses, the idea of a spammer having to go through a dating site in the hope of bagging a handful of them one-by-one just seems too time-consuming. I think my money’s still on “clueless real person.”
The last batch of ‘eligibles’ that I received from match had quite a few attractive young ladies all from the Evansdale, Indiana area. They didn’t seem too picky about the age range they were looking for. I had this same scenario happen at nocheaters. They were bots. I would get the exact letter from different ads. Some of them sent links to pron sites.
To tell the truth, Duke, and to take in account what byter just wrote, the bots that user to infest the Yahoo! and Match.com sites not only collected your e-mail address, but tried to lure you to a porn site where, “Gosh! This place was the only place I could find to host my naughty pictures. They use wacky user names, so I’m #44562778. Come on by and see if you like me!!”
And, of course, you had to pay to get in to see your newfound friend (or had to give out a credit card number to “prove” you’re old enough).
In the past, Match.com and Yahoo! attempted to put a stop to those, but I’m not sure if they ever succeeded.
I’m not sure, if that’s the case, that they’d get too far. Since I haven’t paid match.com anything, I can’t send e-mail to anybody on the site anyway. What I received wasn’t an e-mail either, just a “wink” that links to a profile. The only way I can possibly think this could be a come-on to a pr0n site is if there was a website address or something similar in the “match”'s profile, but there is none. It’s the equivalent of a Zen e-mail.
Now, there was a site I once put a profile on–I think it was date.com–that had a number of profiles that matched the description you describe perfectly. They were easy to weed out–without fail the “match photo” always featured a woman in a swimsuit.
I guess you’re right that it was a bot (not that I really cared if the person was real anyway, it wasn’t going to entice me to pay anything), but I can’t see how this was expected to work.
Seriously? I loved his profile, such a breath of fresh air after slogging thru tons of “I’ll open the door for you,hearts and flowers, looking for The One” BS.
.