Love By Net is a pretty basic dating site, low on the bells and whistles. Free members can only see one photo, not an entire photo album. Free members cannot initiate or read emails. Premium members can send all the emails they want, receive messages from other members, use their Express Match feature, and see members’ photo galleries. The chatroom is available to basic members, but that means the people you meet in there are not going to be very serious about looking for a partner.
Profile Set-Up:
You must choose either M or F looking for M or F. Then you enter your age, body type, height, ethnicity, marital status (includes “dating but nothing serious yet” and “married!”), state, what sort of relationship you’re looking for, headline, and essay.
Then you say who you want them to introduce you to: people interested in what type of relationship, age range, and located in which state. And then you write a greeting. Your profile gets immediately accepted. You can add a photo, a WAV audio file. You can edit your profile and check whether you want then to notify you by email when you receive a message.
Features:
With the “Who’s Online?” feature, you can sort by gender (in which case all the females come first, I guess it’s alphabetical, which is annoying), state, member name, type of relationship, or age. And you can see their headlines, which for most people are really lame. A camera logo means they have a photo, and a beating heart means they’re new.
Searches can be done by body type, age range, type of relationship desired, state, or username. They come up in a chart with no photos; you have to click on the profile, then click again to see photo. I didn’t like that. Chemistry is everything. You should be able to see everyone’s photos right up front, if they have them.
In the chatroom, if you want to chat with someone privately, you just click on their name and boom – you and they are in a private chat window. This means that people can initiate private chats with you without your consent. I don’t like it. And then even if you say goodbye and close the window, they can IM you again and make the window open up on your screen. The people in the chatroom, in general, seemed very juvenile. Many of them wrote in ALL CAPS, a breach of Netiquette that I really thought had been stamped out some time ago.
By the time I'd been a member for about two weeks, the system said "180 members have sent you letters." I couldn't read any of them, since I did not pay the premium membership fee, but I think that number must be inflated somehow. I know I'm good-looking, but come on.
It's easy to delete your profile, but if you're a premium member, you have to contact the billing company separately to stop the automatic rebill.
Member Opinions
I chatted with I.M., a 27-year-old bisexual man in Nigeria, who has been a member for five months. He says, “I joined to meet and make friends, share ideas and find love.” I asked how his experience had been thus far. He replied, “Really not that encouraging, since the trust and reliability isn’t there within people. It takes special courage to get to accept someone...a stranger.” I asked him if he was a paid member and he said no. I suggested that might be a good first step. He thought I might have something there. “I have to say, I’m glad to be a member, still, and I hope people will chat and build trust. I am a lively person, and I love to meet people.” I asked if he’d found many members were from Nigeria. “Yes, we are much in here and I’m proud of that.” Hmm! Who knew?
Then I spoke with L.B., a 33-year-old hetero woman in PA, who has been a member for two years. She too was a basic (free) member. She says, “I joined to meet people and make new friends. This place is cool. Not sure if I would date from here, but hey, it was worth the experience.” She gave all elements of the site a perfect five stars, so I asked her if there was anything she felt could use improvement. “We need to keep trolls out.” I asked her if that was a big problem, and she said yes. I guess it’s one of the risks you take when you have a totally free chatroom. She wasn’t able to tell me specifically what the trolls do that’s so disruptive. Anyone from there have any examples?
If you've used this site and want to tell me about it, email me!
