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1. Registration & Your Account |
| 1.1. What do I do if the country is incorrect? |
| This site attempts to determine your country from your IP address and in your case has determined your country to be the United States. Occasionally, our records may be incorrect, especially if you live near a national boundary. In such cases where you are trying to register and your country is not actually the United States the site will offer you a drop-down list of alternatives, but this will only appear if you have scripting enabled.
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| 1.2. Why is it saying that my timezone is incorrect? |
| As an extra form of verification during registration, once you have entered your country (or accepted the default country given) we check your timezone against the range acceptable for that country. For example, we expect users in New York to be on Eastern Time and those in the UK to be on GMT or BST. This helps prevent users in Africa, for example, pretending to be Americans or those in Eastern Europe pretending to be British. You must therefore register in the country you are in, so if you are an American living in Thailand you must enter your country as Thailand.
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| 1.3. What's the difference between my account being 'verified' and 'approved'? |
| Verification is the process of proving that your email address is valid. Once you've done this you can access most of the site. Approval is us saying that we're happy with your profile and you can now be seen on search listings, send messages and use the chat page.
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| 1.4. How long do I have to verify my account? |
| Once you've entered your details you should receive an email straight away containing your verification code. In some cases, where your email service provider perceives it as junk mail, this email may take a day or two to arrive or may not arrive at all. If it hasn't arrived within two days please contact us.
When you've received your verification code, you have 90 days to enter it on the registration page. Any accounts that are not verifed within 90 days are automatically deleted.
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| 1.5. Can I disable my account? |
| You can only receive messages from people on your list of contacts, so if you no longer wish to receive messsages from a particular person you can simply remove them from your list. However, the only way to avoid being seen on searches is to delete your account whilst logged in via the registration page. You can always register again at a later date.
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| 1.6. What happens when I delete my account? |
| Many internet sites retain your details for a period of time after you delete your account. This can be just in case you're "not sure" and want to come back, or simply for technical reasons where there is information linked to your account seen by other members (such as messages). However, this site is designed so that your information is deleted immediately with the exception that, provided you've verified, we keep a record your screen name, email address and IP address. We remember your screen name so that we can avoid confusion and stop anyone using the same name in future and identify any articles, reviews or comments that you've written on the site which will remain. We remember email and IP addresses so that we can stop spammers simply deleting and recreating accounts once we have identified them as fraudulent.
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| 1.7. Why don't you allow registration in my country? |
| Our aim is to provide a good level of customer service. We simply do not have the resources to provide this in every country of the world. From our own past experience, some countries have a disproportionately high number of spammers and scammers, that is, people who try to register with poor quality or fake profiles. This simply wastes our time as we need to spend time reading and rejecting them so we have made the decision to concentrate on a core set of countries. We are sorry if this disappoints you, but we feel sure you'll be able to find another site that will help you.
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2. Use of this site |
| 2.1. How do I send a message from the 'Messages' page? |
| You can only send a message from this page in reply to a message you have already received or as a continuation to one you have already sent. The primary way to send messages to someone is to find them on the search or contacts page, click on their photo to take you to their profile, and then send a message from there. You need to be logged on, of course, and messaging is only available once your own profile has been approved and once you have exchanged contact requests with the person you want to communicate with.
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| 2.2. What information is divulged when I send a message? |
| When you send a message we just put it into the recipient's inbox on this site. We then send them an email (from us) so that they know their inbox has a message in it. At no point do we tell them your real email or name - in fact, we don't even hold your real name unless you've made your screen name similar to it.
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| 2.3. What types of photos can be uploaded? |
| Our upload page supports gif, jpeg, png, wbmp, wxbm and bmp files. Unfortunately, other types of image cannot be uploaded so you'll need to convert to one of these first. Please be aware that photos are reduced in size and resolution to fit on the site, so if you have a particularly large photo you might be better off reducing it in size with a local application first, especially if you have a slow internet connection as it will then upload faster.
Portrait, rather than landscape, photos will fit in their places on the site better, but this isn't a restriction as photos are automatically cropped to the correct shape.
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| 2.4. Why has my photo not been approved? |
| We usually won't approve any photo that:- is obscene or contains nudity
- is irrelevant to the profile such as a photo of a film star, landscape or plant pot!
- has a watermark, stamp or other writing on it
- is a duplicate or near duplicate, ie. where two copies of the same photo have been uploaded
Further, whilst we may occasionally be flexible, the main photo must:- be a photo of the person registered
- show you on your own
- be a close-up of your head and shoulders
- be in color, not black and white
- have been taken recently
- be clear and in sharp focus
- not show you with red-eye
- be taken with your eyes open and clearly visible (no sunglasses or hair across your eyes)
- be of you facing forward and looking straight at the camera
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| 2.5. Why are there some photos that I can't click on to get a larger one? |
| When people upload an image, we store the main photo together with a thumbnail of it. The thumbnail is then the image that's displayed during searches or when viewing a profile. On the profile page, we offer the ability to click on the thumbnail to get a larger image. However, if the quality of the uploaded image isn't that great and offers no more detail than the thumbnail we disable this feature as there would be no benefit in viewing it.
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| 2.6. What post/zip codes work on the search page? |
| You should generally enter the full code, although in countries where the code has two parts you can get away with just the first part (e.g. M4C for Toronto, Canada, or SW1 for London, England). You can also enter post towns so you can find, for example, people within 200 miles of 'New York'. If you're not sure of the code you want to search near, you can leave it blank and the search will just use the other criteria that you've typed in.
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| 2.7. Why are the distances shown less than I would expect? |
| All distances are as-the-crow-flies as they are worked out from latitude and longitude derived from the postcode. As such, they will be less than the distance it would take to drive between the two points.
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| 2.8. Why have I been logged out? |
| If you find you've been logged out and returned to the home page it may be because of your first use after a prolonged period of inactivity. During busy periods, your session may time out after 20-30 minutes of inactivity.
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| 2.9. How many people have registered? |
| This site is new so please be patient and support us whilst we build up our database. It will take time to build up our membership and, in the meantime, we apologise to those of you who are unable to find any suitable matches and hope you will come back to visit us again.
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| 2.10. What happened to favorites and blocking? |
| We used to operate a system of favorites whereby users could keep a list of people they liked which others could view. Similarly, we gave users the ability to block people from contacting them. So our default operation was to allow communication between two people until proven unwanted.
However, this allowed anybody who had registered and been initially approved to at least have one attempt at contacting any other member, resulting in the occasional mis-use of our messaging system. We therefore decided to change to a system that does NOT allow communication between two people until proven wanted. Any two members must now become "contacts" before they can send messages to each other. The list of contacts has replaced the list of favorites. Furthermore, members can specify criteria to narrow people down before they even ask to be a contact.
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3. Other |
| 3.1. What pays for this site to operate? |
| This site is completely free from the user point of view. It is funded from advertising revenue.
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| 3.2. Someone has copied my details (or those of someone I know) from another site and used them to create a fake profile on this site. What should I do? |
| We do our best to review profiles when they are created or amended but occassionally the odd spammer slips through. We apologise if this has caused any inconvenience but don't hesitate to contact us with a brief explanation. We'll then investigate and remove the profile if appropriate as soon as possible. Remember, though, that some people register on several sites so, although the profile may look similar to one on another site it may be completely genuine.
If it looks as though we've missed some piece of evidence or in hindsight the profile is obviously suspicious we'll usually suspend it straight away. In any case, we'll send an email to the holder of the profile and if we don't receive a satisfactory reply in a timely manner again we'll suspend the profile. Whether or not we receive a reasonable reply, we'll reply to you with the outcome.
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