Posted by oodlum at 12:17PM, 30/May/07.
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Hi founding members - welcome to FlingFinder! Those of you who have been following my... space will know that this site has been a two-year labour of love for me, so today's a pretty big day.

I created this site because I've noticed some dissatisfaction with the other dating sites out there; major imbalance of genders,  misrepresentation of member numbers (a billion members but only a tiny percentage who are actually active, counting members that haven't logged in since 2002...), an abundance of fake profiles, members getting hassled by people who don't match their preferences... the list goes on.

Here are a few ways I hope to make this site useful:

K.I.S.S - Keep It Simple, Stupid

I've made this site as simple and clutter-free as I know how. Access everything you need with one click from either the top bar or your members' menu on the right.

We don't run advertising so we don't need to make the site difficult to navigate in order to generate more page views (i.e. more $$$).

Encouraging real, verified profiles and photos

The purpose of the $5000 holiday competition is to entice members to add photos, verify their profiles and flesh them out with descriptions of a meaningful length (as all these things are required to qualify for the prize).

Members will also be encouraged to contribute to the community by researching their ideal holiday destinations and packages, which you'll later vote on to decide the final destination.

As the site grows, I hope to offer a new holiday prize every month.

I will verify the validity of profiles in other ways too, but I'll keep those under my hat for now.

Giving members the control of who contacts them

If you're logged in at the moment you'll see a section under Your Preferences labelled Auto-Filter Settings. The auto-filter lets you decide which members can contact you based on the personal preferences you've listed in your profile.

For example, if you activate the age filter and your profile says you're interested in people aged 25 to 35, messages and flirts from anyone else will go directly to your Auto-Filtered box.

It's like a junk mail box. You can still read the messages if you're having a quiet day, but they won't clutter up your inbox, and will be  automatically deleted after 7 days. Also, you won't receive an email alert for a filtered message.

... and who sees them

Members can list their sexual interests, but choose who has access to that information (I've just had a thought - I should add the ability to hide personal physical information too. Hmmm).

There are also a lot of other privacy options.

... and so on

FlingFinder has a lot of other cool features like the Photo Contest and flash Chat Rooms but this post has already grown much longer than I intended so I'll talk about those another time.

Enjoy!

oodlum