Security and safety
Almost all dates are fun and friendly and our members are equally
the same. However, security and safety are very important to us.
The following are just some of the areas where we focus our
efforts.
Trust rating
We have pioneered a new concept for online dating.
Our Trust rating lets you assess who is genunie
and who may be not. Along side every profile
we display a chart. If members report a profile
then the trust rating is reduced. If our monitoring
systems detect eratic usage then the trust rating
is reduced again. You can click on the trust system
and read a summary of the report card.
When a members reaches 0% they are automatically removed.
This open system is ideal for you to make your own
judgements on each profile.
System monitoring
Our site has many background system running that you will never know about but they are there
for your security. For example, when you open a members profile we read the text with a program
and look for patterns that have been used by people that have been deleted for abuse. Offending
users have their trust rating automatically reduced.
We also know which countries have more spammers than others. This is due to local governments not
taking cyber crime seriously. For example, some countries in Africa have teams of hackers
and spammers working on social networking and dating sites. Anyone from these regions auotmatically
has a trust penality emposed on their accounts. The same is true for users hiding behind proxy servers.
Regular users don't even have to think about any of this, which is how it should be. You swap messages
and go on dates and we look after all the code and software to make the experience the best
it can be.
Encrypted URLS
This one is a bit complex to explain but let's just say it works the same
way as your online bank. We make important information that is sent from
page to page into a string of random characters, then decode it back later. If
you want to know why we do this then read one. We find it quite exciting, but
we are computer nerds so we understand if you don't!
Many dating sites don't use encryption and you may have seen this in action.
Imagine you're sending a message to another member, you may see in the address bar
of your browser something like, sendmessage.html?user=77. This means that you're
about to send a message to the user with the ID number of 77. This is no big deal
to any user but to a spammer this is an open door. They can write their own program
to send a message to user 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 all the way to 1,000,000. This is
a simple way for them to spam 1,000,000 people with a much higher read rate than
normal email. In our system we add a secret codeword into the URL and then
encrypt it so it looks something like, sendmessage.html?action=JGG7865GHGHGH7875HGHGHGFGFAQ.
The spammer could try and guess the code word but it would take many years to find it.
In the mean-time when they make a mistake we record it and any user who has too
many mistakes in a set time period is deleted.
Over time the spammers will learn that they are wasting their time and move to
another dating site this is less secure. We believe we are one of the leaders in
online dating security and we hope it gives you more confidence to use our site.
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