I find this to be no more useful than a forum.

I've purchased vld in a couple of days. It's great, but I found it more like social engine, than a dating site.

Of course, this is not bad

This is where it gets to be a challenge. As the person above says, now the software is attempting to be a social network and not exactly a dating site. Personally I'd rather it stick to what it did best instead of adding these things. Groups are totally worthless, IMHO, for a dating site. To begin, if you have a forum integration that is where people will interact. Second, nobody on a dating site is going to invest all their time putting up stuff like what you are talking about when they have myspace, facebook and others where they will put their stuff in. Dating sites people want to put up a basic profile, meet other people and let them know only as much as they want.

This is just IMHO and not meant to offend anyone. I just think that the more VLD evolves into an SN the less useful it may become as a dating site software, even though there are similarities. Improvements need to be made to the events and calendaring before any of this stuff such as better sorting, adding of new fields, searching events by location/date, etc

Whole I-net becoming social oriented and if we can enable additional feautures without decreasing perfomance and give users more comfortable and interesting project - it's undoubtedly better that we will trample under restricted functionality without any evolution of our sites.

There are differences. You can't master everything. Better to master what you do best than have a flexible script that is mediocre for everything. Most of us have dating sites and its all about personals. As it stands right now, the script looks, feels and acts like most dating sites.

I can add several more must haves:

1) Ability to have any edit in text fields require approvals. So many will get a profile approved and then put in their spam later.

2) Ability to have private photos, not just albums. This is especially important if you just run it like a simple site - user has the ability to just add photos to their profile. 99.9% of dating sites don't use folders because it's another step to confuse users and is unnecessary. Maybe 1% of users will upload more than 8-10 pictures. It's not social networking.

There are several more, including somewhat of a better chat (perhaps even java or other technology) that works well. Chat used to work decently but right now is a liability to a certain degree, which is why I also got cometchat.

No offense, but what are you talking about?

If this was meant as a way of educating us on what powerful dating sites use, perhaps you could use a course in the basics. As I said, look at ANY successful dating site. The largest DO NOT use albums and there is a very good reason why they don't.

Shoving 200 features into software doesn't mean it helps and, in many instances, it hurts. Right now VLDP is coming close to suffering from "featuritis" and it should just concentrate on mastering those things that the most popular sites do well. I've learned from the biggest and been at the biggest so I know what I'm talking about. Look for yourself. Requiring albums for every set of photos is far too much. It then requires every time a user uploads photos to make an album and then stick the photos in there. And for the 90% that may not use adult/private photos, it makes viewing photos an incredible confusing hassle. I've reviewed some of your guys' sites and it's click click click to finally view photos instead of "click photos and see the photos."

The best way to do a dating site? User gets one album to upload all photos and that is standard. Any photo can be tagged as the users main profile photo. Easy, simple understandable. Right now it still is confusing to users to have to upload a main photo in another area and upload photos in a second area. I've hacked the UI to make this less confusing. The "old style albums" is the way all major dating sites run. If you want flexibility, great, but might as well model what works best and the reason for why it works best.

Regarding turning features off, a lot of the questions here are because of people not knowing where features are kept - including myself. There are still plenty of basics that really need to get done, including the ability to do the following:

1) Approve all users pictures, including profile pictures, without having to go into their profile and turn on profile pictures if it is set for admin approval of all pictures.

2) Require approval of all text fields before publishing, making edits required to be approved before publishing.

That's the problem - a profile should not be deactivated just because someone changed one word on their "about you" section. The section should not appear until it is approved. if a profile was deactivated every time then you'd have a torrent of angry users whose profile won't appear for hours just because they corrected a misspelling.

I had hacked this feature into an earlier version of VLDP but it became a hassle to try to keep doing it on the back end of every update. Essentially the field that was edited said "awaiting approval" until the administrator approved.

With regard to the profile photo, it should act the same way as any other photo. User uploads photo, it goes into the big bin for pending user approvals and it appears when approved.

--> THE BIG ONE

This is a HUGE omission, at least as far as I can see. There is no messaging that states "your photo has been approved" or "your profile has been approved" etc. right after an item is approved. Either it should be automatic or there should be a button next to the item that allows the admin to send a message after approval. I was going to hack something in but it's a PITA. Essentially it's about creating a user template and then trying to trigger it elsewhere if I can. Manually having to go to another area in the admin panel and paste that user's ID in and then send a message is an unnecessary pita.

I was going to ask him to do the same although I have another important mod for him to do and I think I have figured out how to wedge a button in there to do the same on all the approval areas for content, not just pictures. But regardless, my point is that this should NOT be a hack!!! This was standard on the crappy dating site script I used 5 years ago and is what brings your users back tot he site and prevents you from having to answer "is it approved yet" questions forever.

I personally think, that just dating is not more. Now people want more. Socialdating?
I would like if there where groups.

+ One

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