What the heck is Plenty of Fish doing advertising on SPCR? Plenty of Fish is a known scam site. There are complaints all over the internet about them and their fake ads and random deletions of accounts. I'm shocked.

What is the policy for ads on SPCR?

afaik pof is one of the more honest dating sites, as up to recently it was a totally free site so they had no real reason to try and extend your membership like other pay only dating sites do. I have actually met some quality folks on pof and have not run across any fake profiles...yet.

If it helps pay SPCR bandwidth costs, i dont care if they run adds for viagra.

While SPCR needs the add revenue, if the adds are a problem for you -psst...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

If more members donated to SPCR than the adds could probably go away all together.

Nope:
http://www.daterater.org/General-review ... ew373.html
"The Plenty of Fish Romance Scam:
To the person who hypothesized, "Is Plenty of Fish a Romance Scam?" After several months of finding duplicate stolen pics on POF, I tested the question you posed, and in my opinion as a professional Private Investigator, the answer to your question is a 100% "yes." I base it on the following: 1. There appears to be thousands of POF profiles that use multiples of the same stolen pics (remember, POF says that romance scammers will be deleted). 2. Within 24 hours of reporting a pair of romance scammers to POF (and also informing the romance scammers that they were caught), my profile was deleted (remember, POF says that romance scammers will be deleted, but if you turn them in, then you, the one with legitimate pics gets deleted, while the romance scammers profiles remains intact! Why, because the romance scam profiles generate a mega numbers of hits, and if all the romance scam profiles were deleted from POF, then POF would not make the millions it makes off of advertisers, like what that person said about Google for example. 3. Ok, so I tried to make a couple of fake profiles using stolen pics to test the system, and bam boom, within minutes my fake profiles were deleted. What a minute, then how do all those fake profiles keep from getting deleted. Only one explanation. Only the fake profiles that POF appears to posts are the ones that don't get deleted! Disgusting. Its supposed to be free, but unsuspecting legitimate users pay the high price of wasted time! 4. Just for example (out of thousands of examples) check out these two POF members: Both 34-year-old POF " Rodeo Queen " and 27-year-old POF " blueyedgirlnextdoor " appear to be using stolen pics from the same victim! Ok, so what if they are romance scams, but I think POF is the one that posted them because if you tip them off that you know they are scammers, then your profile will get deleted, and if you report them to POF then your profile will get deleted! (I bet if POF reads this then they will delete them to hide evidence) In the history of the Internet, I believe that POF in terms of number of victims and number of romance scammers/spammers, POF could be the largest scam site ever. I guess if POF started receiving a five thousand dollar fine per romance scam (hey, these are the same as spam), then maybe POF would not be such a waste of valuable time. If I had the time, I'd start a website for victims of POF romance scams, dedicated to bringing a class action lawsuit against POF, but at this time, I don't have the time. Anyone else have the time?
Submitted by: Private Investigator
29 year-old :: Male Reviewer :: Salt Lake City "


http://www.complaintsboard.com/complain ... 39241.html
http://www.complaintsboard.com/complain ... 80965.html
http://www.jimslists.com/agencies/plentyoffish.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlentyofFish
http://dating.about.com/gi/rating/revie ... fpof%2ehtm
http://www.daterater.org/General-review ... ml#comment
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/4 ... 415747.htm
http://ripoffreport.com/reports/0/436/ripoff0436671.htm
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/3 ... 353147.htm
http://pofsucks1.wordpress.com/2008/01/ ... xperience/

Even on positive stories about PoF, there is a never ending litany of complaints: http://www.commoncraft.com/plenty-fish- ... disruption


If you have no ethics, maybe Mike C does, if he were made aware of the PoF scam.



pssst. I wasn't complaining about the fact the ads were pop up. I don't give a shit if they're pop up.



I don't mind the ads, or the fact that there is advertising. What I mind is legitimate sites like SPCR supporting the ads of shady businesses/organizations.

Assuming you use (or can use) Firefox, just use Adblock Plus. I started using it because I thought I was going to get epilepsy or something with some of the worst flashing ads around... they weren't just annoying but rather they were preventing me from easily reading the content of some sites and giving me headaches. I understand that sites need ads but when it comes to my eyes/head hurting, that's just too much.

My browsing is so much more comfortable and civilised without all that rubbish.

I can only speak from personal experience and from the feedback of my friends...

I have been on the site for~ year, as have other friends both male and female, and none of us has run in to any of the problems you list.
Markus is easy to get a hold of contrary to the reports.

I bet markus pisses a lot of big pay sites off and probably gets ripped on by IT review bashing a fair amount.(that 'private investigator' might have even worse grammar than I do-:))

As its mainly a free site it attracts all facets of life. Scammers, attention whores, and some good people too.

There are some positive comments in your links too...

I can't say how mikes add revenue works, but often times you dont really have any say in exactly what banner adds will show up on your site.


can't believe people can surf with out it.

I can also speak from personal experience ...it's a scam.



I'm happy for you. Not everyone has had a bad experience. That fact alone, however, does not make the site any less of a scam. PoF is one of many online dating sites that have numerous legitimate complaints against them. Some of them, including Lifemates, are on the verge of having class action law suits brought against them.



Again, I'm happy you managed to get through. I guess everyone else must be lying about not getting any responses from him.



Frind may piss a lot of people off, not just those who run pay sites, but actual members of PoF. I've repeated the experiement by private investigator, and came up with more or less the same results. Lots of fake ads run by the site, randomly deleted profiles, etc.



The scam is in the way the site functions, not necessarily its members. They waste a lot of people's time through random profile deletions, and posting fake ads. They skirt privacy laws, and claim ownership over the site's content (Facebook has run into the same problem recently). And now with the new pay features, many people are getting seriously ripped off having to pay for a year when they signed up on a monthly basis.

Sites like PoF, eHarmony, match.com, Lifemates and numerous others should be shut down, and Mike should not be accepting ad money from any of them.

Cool, I can respect your personal experiences. and I agree totally about the other sites.

The problem is, I dont think mike hand picks this site's banner add content.(i think i read that here-or was that another forum? dammed memory loss.)

Fwiw- there are tons of adds on pbs now, even ones i don't agree with, but i still give to my local station affiliate.

edit: just for fun i just turned off the addblocker and was bummed to see HP adverts on spcr. talk about a scummy company! shame!
btw i clicked every add so mike would get more $. (isn't that how they work?)
still no pof adds for me yet tho-.

Google and other ad agencies (which is what they really are) rent banner space on all their publisher sites, and sell them to the advertisers, who choose from a complex mix of keywords, site content, specific sites etc. When a publisher page shows the right mix, then the banner ad of the advertiser seeking that mix is displayed. Sometimes, when a targeted ad isn't available, then they display a general ad.

In other words, I have no control over most of the ad content on SPCR.

A small handful of advertisers come directly to SPCR, and their ads get served up from the SPCR server, but this is limited to highly targeted silent-oriented products and companies. There really aren't that many, and it's more convenient for advertisers to deal with someone like google who can place ads on dozens or hundreds or even thousands of sites. The catch is google takes a big chunk of the $$ the advertisers pay -- no idea how much, but it's a plain fact that google is by far the richest company on the web, and most of that revenue comes from advertising.

Well, it's deeper than that. The ad companies (specifically Google) will target you based on your lifestyle and browsing habits; browsing habits that they monitor from your search history and tracking the sites you go to that they also serve ads to. So if you're seeing singles ads it means that Google thinks you're in the market for that sort of action, probably because you're frequenting websites that are frequented by other people who are in the market for such.

SPCR don't have any control over that, as MikeC said.

Thanks for the explanation, Mike.

So, the ads that I see on the SPCR site appear only to me on my computer? (And everyone else will have a slightly different assortment of ads showing on their computers?) Is that correct?

As someone who absolutely detests ads (why I listen to public radio) and who is sensitive to an overload of visual content/noise, using Firefox in conjunction with AdBlock Plus and Flashblock enabled me to take control of my internet again. I realise ads pay for the site but I cannot visit and contribute to it if I am made ill.

Ad sellers, marketers, fraudsters, scammers, G__gle -- some of the lowest forms of life there is.

Too bad the world relies so much on people buying rubbish from those selling it.

This applies to the "Ads by Google"-tagged ads.