RapiDating OnLine Dating

Singles Greeks seeking connections may want to check out Eligible Greeks. The site runs smooth under your fingertips so you can get down to the business of finding connections. One of the strongest features of Eligible Greeks is the way they have set their profiles up. Many sites will allow you to enter a name, title and a handful of other basic details and you’re in and online in seconds. Here, they make you think about the process beforehand.

EligibleGreeks.com asks a number of questions designed to help fill out your profile with enough info, so other members have a well-rounded understanding of you as a person. Sure, questions can be answered randomly, but since they have to be answered one way or another, most profiles will have more accurate details than not. Strong sites are built on quality profiles, so single Greeks have it good on this site.

“Niche dating sites like Eligible Greeks face uphill battles when it comes to membership levels.”

Search options are limited before upgrading. It seems that when we first visited Eligible Greeks that wasn’t the case. Currently, they only offer only the basics until you pay for advanced options. That’s unfortunate, as the free searches do not narrow the radius of results to any closer than 150 miles. When you upgrade, you can get to within 20 miles of a given postal or zip code. All of the dropdown menu fields that were mandatory when you signed up to fill also come into play after you pay.

Single Greeks who are just looking to poke around will find that the site falls in line with most standard online dating sites on the Internet, allowing you to send signs of interest and receive email from members without having any costs associated with it. You can also review full profile info, including the last login date, to give you some clue to how active a potential match on EligibleGreeks may be.

Niche dating sites like EligibleGreeks.com face uphill battles when it comes to membership levels. It’s not as easy attracting large numbers of visitors from a smaller group of potential surfers – in this case, finding single Greeks versus finding any eligible person. Unfortunately, according to the latest independently obtained stats on numbers of visits to the site, it seems to have lost ground in its popularity battle in the last year-and-a-half since our first visit.

Counterintuitive to this small decline in traffic is that the price, which was top of the normal range in web personals pricing, has actually increased by about 15 percent. It continues to offer paid instant messaging and free member forums. However, now, costing more than most average sites, Eligible Greeks has lost some of its initial appeal. Yet if your search for other singles online has Greek men and women in mind, this is one of the few choices you have to ensure most other nationalities are weeded out.

RomanticPlanet.com offers a quirky appearance. It reminds me of store-bought greeting cards that try to pass themselves off as homemade and hand drawn — a folksy gesture sold to the artistically challenged. Its simple design bordering on “too cute for kittens” could mislead you to think that the site is equally simplistic.

In actuality, it’s full service all the way, just like any other major online personals site. I appreciate when still waters run deep and that despite not being bombarded by advertising and quick links, I can discover a website that has as much to offer as louder, more aggressive competitors.

“RomanticPlanet.com is a surprisingly down-to-earth example of what an online dating site should be.”

Romantic Planet has six pages of info to fill out for your free profile, but you can skip a fair amount of the questions. However, it cautions that its patent-pending compatibility system, Match Mind, will be most effective if details are as complete as possible. They claim that their proprietary matchmaking software took three years to develop and beats out one rival’s famously advertised duo-two-way matching system.

Free searches are extensive with loads of detailed criteria to select, as well as narrowing the locality down to within five miles. There’s isn’t a live chat room, but there is instant messaging, which even includes a video option. Emails are sent to your offsite email account, but the real email addresses are always masked in communications between members to protect their privacy.

Before starting to message someone, first you need to send a prewritten introduction epostcard or greeting. Once the other person says that he or she is interested in talking more, his or her profile is moved into network of connections. At least one of you will need to be premium RomanticPlanet member though for open communication to be possible.

If you want to be able to send personalized communication to a member that interests you, you do need to upgrade to a paid membership. I find it refreshingly honest of the site to have made it clear that to initiate customized messages requires only one of the two members to become a paid subscriber.

Beyond the one-on-one stuff, there is a community section meant to bring together members to discuss all kinds of topics, as well as online dating, too. For example, there are sections devoted for men only to discuss diverse topics with other guys, as well as the same sort of private board just for women. Some members give online dating tips, even specific to RomanticPlanet.com.

Overall, by requiring that the introduction step be completed before allowing open-ended communication between two members ensures more quality connections are made and less time is wasting on disinterested prospects. RomanticPlanet.com is a surprisingly down-to-earth example of what an online dating site should be.