Dating Direct www.datingdirect.com Review

Overall Rating

This refers to DATING DIRECT ****AFFINITY***** COMPANION SERVICE, in the UK

(Admins: perhaps you may want to create a separate section for this)

It seems to be marketed as a companion more "serious" to the main datingdirect site. Customer service, in a minor query told me that they are focused on confidentiality. I sense that indeed the members are more serious, and i did get messages and responses, and so forth. So far so good.

But I have some serious complaints that really annoys me to the extent of trying to warn people about:

The whole model of how we interact with others doesnt work for me.

I explain: you cannot see a pic of short profile of sb without creating a "visit" in the others. When you get search results, get a visit or a message or any other alert, you get a plain result or email, without any pic or description, so you need to go and check out which is a pain, you have to browse there, needless to say, you probably cannot check that at work as normally dating sites are (should) be blocked.

That cycle can become repetitive if you have a bunch of visit and you just want to go through again. And the lady does the same, gets a visit, and checks it out, then I get a visit and may check it out. (after a while all those nicknames look the same)

Then the "interested" feature also creates an entry in the "fans" club in the other. I would like to have my favourites without needing to advertise. Ok I can understand it is to encourage interaction, but I wonder how many actually want to expose like that to every single contact you feel it might be worth writing.

As you are basically stumbling into people all the time and there is no easy way of knowing if there was interest or not (in match.com you have sort of a preview, so if you visit, you are already interested a little bit),

This flaw (imho) seem to have created a modus operandi for women to express interest subtly, they dont show the picture by default, so you just bump into profiles without pictures, and if they like yours they "show the picture". I find it frustrating, in the end you just have to wait for the ladies to bother to show the pic, which happen quite often I have to say, but I am not yet sure if that is that when I receive the alert is always because she shows the pic to me or to everybody for a while, etc.

Amazingly, when you blacklist somebody it actually sends the person a notification and you need to provide a reason!!! wth, who was the genius or drama queen that implemented that feature!, i wonder. If I want to block sb, most of the time I don't want to make a scene, basically they are discouraging that completely, which goes against the confidentiality values. The fact that you keep getting visits because the whole system is geared to make you click every time to see who was that person, unless everybody is consistent in using "not interested", makes me want to have a quick blocking feature whereby that user will not see me again, thats it, I am actually saving her time.
At a risk of sounding sexist, I suspect they take more feedback from women or there are women at the helm, and it does feel a bit not capturing how men wants to operate, I ve went through a couple of dating audiobooks and the "strategies" they suggest may find it a bit difficulty to implement here.
-Quite a lot of spam, badly written first messages already including funny email addresses, some from US, some from eastern europe, a lot from netherlands.
-What else, the "not interested" button is slow, requires two clicks.
-Using in mobile phone is ok, iphone copes with it well, but the to and fro from email to website and then back is annoying.
- Updating the profile is not very quick, for a paid site, I ve been in match.com (UK) and here it does drag a bit.
- As for the recurring billing, i ve havent had issues but what I do is to immediately cancel the subscription a week after enrolling, so I ensure that by the end of the 3 or 6 months it will be definitely over. That said I had one very concerning experience, when the first cycle ended, towards the end I was having tons of visit, and one day after the expiration I got a message, which funny enough was an email from the dda team, recommending me to contact some random user!!! the b... they never have sent an msg like that, they can send me alerts via email (which I disabled anyway), but not a "message"
I complained to the CS and their answer was woolly referring to rotation of users and some bsht, coincidences could happen, of course, but I remain quite convinced that they really push it to try to hook you back. Btw, everytime i contacted them, even within a thread I was dealt with another person, so it is not "ticket" based but you just get a random agent to respond, which is somewhat frustrating.

Then some on the personality profile like the question if I like my body, or how I rate myself (style: casual, sophisticated, attractive, sexy ), what are you supposed to put there? They provide 3 levels, so it is either cranking up everything, or putting a noncommittal average. Totally useless.
The other profile stuff is unimpressive, but I guess it more or less the standard. As for the matching-suggestion features, I had them on for a while and really wasn't getting much value, but again, this could be me.

No idea of number of users (they could do some marketing there, but they don't seem to be bothered, so I suspect it is not great), but it does feel that there are a decent number of new users, and the search does provide contacts, even if mostly do not show the pic :(

So overall, I think it obviously can yield results, but it am not convinced, you may want to give a try but don't over commit and at least you will know what you get
Hope it is useful