The Pudding Taster's Tips for Selecting a Dating Site

Here are some of the things to look for when you join a dating site, mostly from the perspective of a straight male.

This piece is personal opinion, based upon personal experience.

Does the site tell you when somebody last logged in?

A dating service should tell you when somebody last logged in. This indicates whether the person is active on the site. If a person has not logged in for a long time, there is no point in trying to contact her (or him): this person has left the site, but forgotten to delete the profile.

How hard is it to unsubscribe?

Sometimes, dating sites make it deliberately hard to unsubscribe. As long as you haven't completed the unsubscription process, they can legitimately add you to the number of members - even if you haven't logged on to the site in two years!
If it is hard to unsubscribe, this means that there will be a lot of profiles from people who stopped using the site long ago, and never managed to remove their profile.

How is the male/female imbalance dealt with?

Since there are far more men than women on dating services, women get flooded by messages. For men, this means it is very hard to get a response.
Some services, like PaiQ.nl, solve this by only allowing contact between people matched by the system, thus limiting the deluge of messages towards women.
Another approach, taken by PlentyOfFish.com, is to let users set restrictions on who can contact them - like age range, and "must not have messaged users for Intimate Encounter". Other services, like Match.com, do not seem to address the issue at all.

If it's a paid service: can Free Members write back?

Paid dating services have 'Free Memberships' and 'Full Memberships'.
A Free Member is anybody who ever made a profile in the site and hasn't deleted it.
A Full Member is a paying member; only paying members can contact people.
On many sites, including match.com, lexa.nl and relatieplanet.nl, Free Members cannot respond to the messages they get. The sites never tell you who is a Free Member and who is a Full Member, so as a paying Full Member, you spend a lot of time composing messages that the recpipient cannot respond to until (s)he pays. Depending on the dating site, the recipient of your message may never see more than the subject line!
On a related note, paid dating services like to say that paid dating services are better than free ones. The theory is that people who are willing to pay for online dating are more serious about it. But if that is true, then why don't they tell us who the serious members are?