Could anyone recommend a good free online personals site? That is, a site where it’s free both to post and reply to personal ads?
I don’t know if anywhere is good AND free. Having to pay to post or send messages tends to weed out at least some of the real nutcases. And it sure is nice to have to deal only with the cream of the nutcase crop.
I think the day of the good free personals site went away about 4 years ago. I recall having a very nice free ad service with Yahoo that got completely run over with phony sex ads. Assuming you’re a guy, there’s not really any option other than going pay. If you want to keep expenses low, try a “pay per note” service like Nerve.com or Lavalife.com rather than the “pay per month” service like Match.
It’s still a tough go, online dating isn’t any less a jungle than the bar scene, but it does come through sometimes.
I recently discover this site which appears to be free (I haven’t been charged for anything yet!), there are over 800 questions that you can answer to improve your chances of being matched
I like their method for matching on that site… but it looks like 95% of the people there are 19 or younger. I’m 30 and my closest match is 18? I don’t think so. They need to adjust their algorithm just a little bit there 
There’s www.plentyoffish.com – I’m on there and while I haven’t met a massive amount of people I did make one friend (we just can’t be dating-friends, just wouldn’t work, but friends is good). It’s all free.
I’m 49, so you can imagine how delighted I was. You can go into “my settings” and set age parameters, though. With those in place, going to “local,” I got three (count 'em, three) matches.
Ah well – the questions are fun.