Dating Direct www.datingdirect.com Reviews

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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

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HELP. HELP HELP I have signed up to Dateline, and yahoo, and I have lost both, for some reason. I must of pressed something I shouldn't, although I have paid for 3 months @£59.00, I can't figure how to get into either of it, and I've only been on it a week.
Im hoping someone from Dateline reads this, as you can't telephone them How ridiculous is that. why do they make it so damned easy to take your money, and so difficult to let anyone contact them.

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I signed paid and joined dating direct, was conned into an affinity test which is dating direct affinity and requires much more money to do what i already paid for and is most definitely not being delivered. Im not interested in reading weasel words about different companies and search engines websites when i try to find out whats wrong with service. As a senior member of two national single parent bodies i will be advising them to avoid you at all costs if they are contemplating dating sites.

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I subscribed to Dating Direct for 3 months and found the site easy to use and navigate. I had numerous men winking and emailing me and I went on several dates. However, the stupid lies told by the men in their profiles was ridiculous - from lying about where they lived to their age - especially their age, I've got eyes and a brain I can tell that you are older than you said and your photo. Dating Direct can't be held responsible for that.

What Dating Direct can be held accountable for is t ...

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The new Dating Direct site is rubbish. As previously stated
1.Few women put a photograph on site.
2. There is no way you can 'hide' your profile (as you can on Telegraph Kindred Spirits for example).
When I eventually found out how to contact the help desk they didn't even bother to read my query and sent me a reply rambling on and on about something completely off the point!
I desperation I telephoned and was greeted with a very surly woman. I asked how I could hide my profile and was greete ...

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As a man viewing, I find that the majority of women do not put up any photographs. I can view a page of 12 women and see only 2-3 photographs. This can occcur on several search pages on Dating Direct.

To me that is not value for money and I am not going to give my email address to everyone just to see a photograph.

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You cannot know who has subscribed, and therefore who can reply to you or read your messages to them.

Dating Direct told me this after I had asked their customer support if there was a way to know if another member was subscribed or not:


I am sorry to inform you that it is not possible to see which members have subscribed or not.


I think this is the case for several pay dating sites.
With free sign-ups, one wonders just how many of the millions of users that these sites claim to have have p ...

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Dating Direct has moved very much downmarket when they changed their website a year or two back. Definitely quantity rather than quality.

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Dating Direct is a fairly good dating site there are lots of options you can use while browsing through the site, I especially like the fact that it doesn't Spam you too much when someone views your profile it automatically will detect how many views you have had in a certain time and will stop giving you emails about it until the next day same with when you are getting too many emails. Also compared to other dating sites the price isn't too bad.

What I don't like about the site is the fact tha ...

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God after reading the other reviews i have to say i agree totally i noticed that at the end or near the end of my membership all of a sudden lots of women were interested in me and when i signed up to Dating Direct again they all disappeared.

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I think it is best summed up by a lady who contacted me. "It's rubbish" The dating direct web site is...Sloooow, emails go missing, lapsed members are shown, no way to contact support, often cant log in, You cannot tell who are paid up members, so you may be trying to contact people who cant reply. It makes what should be a pleasant and rewarding experience a very frustrating ordeal. By the way if you read older reviews you will find it was OK. I was a member some years ago and it was great the ...

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I wouldn't recommend Dating Direct to anyone. Very expensive and over complicated site. Most contacts were well out of my age range.

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The majority of woman haven`t been online for months which to me means they haven`t renewed their membership, muggins me did!! You cant contact Dating Direct directly, if you forget to cancel your membership they take the money.

When my membership was due to expire I had loads of contacts, renewed it they stopped. It's not `sour grapes` but usually after a `wink` a couple of mails thats it.

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Too much to say, I don't have the will, but let me tell you, if you want to find someone you would have more luck going to the beach and putting a note in a bottle, then sending it off to sea!
Dating Direct is the pits!!!!

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I have been using this site Dating Direct (on and off) for 6 years! Although I have met a lot of girls, and had a couple of longer relationships, mostly, girls I contact hardly reply. The contacts I do get are not in my age range or don't match my "wants" list in other ways. Also I seem to get a lot of "spam" contacts from other countries. A lot of the girls on there seem to be time wasters looking for their "perfect" mate. Having said all that, the nearest rival is Match, who seem to have all ...

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It's absolutely useless. I live in West London which is probably one of the most densely populated areas in the UK and yet when I do a search within a radius of 20 miles and an age bracket as wide as nine years, it only brings up three pages of results. Out of those mere three pages, how many of those profiles are paid up members? Probably only a small percentage. Needless to say I had a look but didn't think it'd be worth a monthly subscription so I'm not signing up to it. Internet datin ...

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The www.datingdirect.com site offers matching based on a test which on the surface appears like a good idea,members are matched according to compatibility. I have used the site as a fully paid up member and have had less than a handfull of responses .I notice that scores of my e mails have not been opened which possibly suggests that the matches are just people completing the free affinity personality test. The site also doesn't give you an option to pay monthly and stings you for a full 3 mont ...

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I joined and paid for subscription for 6 monhts, BIG MISTAKE for me.
Website is very slow in my expedrience, doesnt work properly with OPERA browser, often is impossible to log in. Therefore I do not recommend datingdirect.com

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The key points which I liked about this site is that the actual layout of the website is fairly well laid out. Doing a profile search is also a straightforward process and the profiles themselves provide one with plenty of information about the potential match (dependant of course on how much information has been submitted by a person).

The site does seem to have a significant weakness of loading speed on the login page for me. Normally just to enter my password takes about 20 seconds which is ...

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Unsatisfied customer. Watch out that you don't sign up for recurring payments - I got caught on that one. Some of the emails I sent arrived blank at the other end and weren't able to be read for a good week or so! When I reported this the advisor argued that I was wrong - I don't think so - several people told me my emails were blank.