I have a couple suggestions that would improve the personals database.

It is possible to display the date that the record was added? This would help identify people for whom the interest is recent or persistent.

Also, it is possible to require some method of contact when people enter their record? What is the point of a "personals" record that just gives some tantalizing detail, maybe even a picture, but no way to contact? Seems to me that is the purpose of the database. If people don't want to be bothered, then they can create a new email account just for receiving messages from the personal's listing.

I think this gets back to the difference between the new personals section and the old one. The new one is clearly for the purpose of actively making contact with others, and implies a certain immediacy to the interest. The old one was more along the lines of Yahoo's user profiles, where you stated your interests and whatever stats you wished to share. More passive in style, it served as much to simply let others know who you are as it did to make contact. Personally, I liked it better, as I expect that the new style is more likely to discourage women who, necessarily being more concerned about personal safety, are more reserved about putting up a personal to begin with.

Perhaps the solution is to expand the member profiles a bit, and you could even possibly add a search engine by gender, including the various transitional states (though I admittedly have no idea how much work that would be, so if it's too difficult, I apologize in advance). The member listings tend to be a bit skimpy on detail now, but could be made much more comprehensive with only a little bit more information. If photos could be attached, all the better!

My two cents. If this is entirely impractical, I won't be at all offended if the delete button is used on this message.

Hi guys,

Umm. I'm not sure about this. The current personals includes the date the posting was listed and always has the email of the poster. Although the poster themself never enters thier email address, the username is cleared with the vbulletin database every time the posting is viewed. If you are not seeing the date the personal was originally posted then there is a problem with the software that we need to fix. Please let me know if this is the case.

As for the format of the current personals, yes they are set up more for a "lets meet" sort of clientele. But there was a lot of thought and effort put in before we set the new personals up. In fact almost 2 years of trial and error went into developing something that wasn't just a bucket of data.

What we have with this is something that is broken down into categories and is displayed by title. But those categories can be expanded upon. Also the height, weight, and birthdate of every user is asked and that can be expanded upon. This stuff isn't written in stone, rather it was all I could think of at the time.

One thing that folks may not know about email address's. There is an option listed that will hide your email address so when another user wants to contact you, a form is displayed and then forwarded to you without anyone knowing your email.

Looking forward to other suggestions and comments,

talula

Hi Talula,

That hidden email address thing is a good idea; maybe we need a banner headline advertising it!

Again, I'm just concerned about encouraging women to post personals. If there are indeed a reasonable number of women out there who are interested in castration or penectomy, we need to do everything possible to coax them out of the closet.

Keep up the good work!

Talula and all,

Great work on the new personals. My comments at the start of this thread were BEFORE the new personals were available (or at least before I was aware of them).

With the new personals, I do not see why they should expire after 180 days. While it is certainly useful to know how current each personal ad is, I would hate to lose information for people that expressed an interest only six months ago.

I would suggest that a year or even two year expiry would make more sense, especially for infrequent users of the system.

In any case, this is a great improvement.

One bug though: As soon as I posted my ad, it said it had been viewed 610 times!

SD