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How JDate discourages freeloaders

You can beat the system by placing your an email address in your personal ad so that people can contact you without having to pay a subscription fee.

I was playing around with JDate today to see if I could freeload. It seems that JDate has a pretty sophisticated algorithm designed to eradicate anything that seems like an email addresss.

It doesn't just elimate Bob51@yahoo.com. The word's "dot com" or even just "com" are eradicated. So is the word "yahoo." "Bob51" is also eradicated; the algorithm figures that any word that's obviously not a real word must be an email address. It doesn't even like the word "internet." In fact, a lot of legitimate stuff that you might write gets eliminated.

However I was cleverly able to suggest a way for people to contact me that JDate's algorithm wasn't able to catch. But probably it will all be wasted effort because, without a photo, it's not likely that any women (yes, I'm a man) would bother.

posted July 21, 2004