1. Advanced Search has been restricted. It requires you to upgrade from Standard (which I was converted to) to Gold member or something. I had the ability to do an advanced search before, and now they want me to pay more! The basic search is useless.

2. Limited Photos – I can see one small photo for a profile, where as before I could see all, and large ones.

I’m so disgusted by this. I was told to call (650) 847-3199, and they WOULD NOT process my refund request, saying they’re confidentiality agreement (with the company they bought!!!) prevents them from viewing my credit card information. I’m calling bullshit on this one. They said I have to contact my bank to dispute this.

Is there a class-action lawsuit against them over this? I’d love to join it.

Why the elaborate title, are you trying to be sarcastic again?

Nerve User says:” I think you still only need to use 200 points. Log on, then view someone’s profile, and you’ll see that under their photo it talks about your options for contacting them, it says you can send an email for 200 points. If that’s right, and the conversion was 200 points for each credit, then the price is exactly the same (although if my case is typical there may be a lot of people whose credits haven’t been converted to points at all yet).”

The pages states: “Use your points to Contact and View Members by filling out the form below. How many Profiles would you like to see? Do you want to contact anyone? 1 credit to view a profile costs 100 pts. But, to contact a member this requires 10 credits. So, to contact a member it costs 1000 points! “

That’s not what it says when I clicked on the “Points” link on my page. Instead, it says:

Redeem your points:

Send an email.
(if you are over your daily limit) 200 pts

And did you actually try looking at a specific person’s profile and checking how much it costs to contact them? If you do, you should see that in the “Send __ an email” box in their profile it says:

You have two options:
1. Use 200 points

2. Upgrade to Premium Member. Our new monthly

I don’t know why your page tells you something different when you go to the points page–try logging into nerve.com’s personals site instead of salon’s to see if it makes a difference, if not maybe one of us has a buggy account or something.

By the way, one incredibly stupid feature of the new site is that you’re forbidden to mention your personal email address when contacting another member, on pain of having your account deleted…hopefully enough people will complain about this that they’ll change it, otherwise I don’t know how they expect people to meet up if they can’t exchange contact info.

Sad that you didn’t know about your advanced search options on the old site.

Why is it “sad”? Now it sounds like you’re trying to be patronizing…could you drop the attitude, please? I asked an honest question, please just tell me how it was that you accessed the advanced search option on the Spring Street site. Personally, I doubt I would have been interested since there aren’t really any basic profile characteristics that would cause me to absolutely rule out a person as a potential date without even reading their answers, except for maybe age which doesn’t require an advanced search.

They trashed my most recent emails, lost all of the credits (points) I had lost. Those have finally been restored after I sent multiple emails and called their customer service line (that was too busy to answer, small wonder). No one ever emailed me back in response to my complaints or returned my call after I left a voice mail.

The Spring Street Networks had a wonderful feature called “Get Matched” it was one of the things that I really liked about their site. Now that it is gone. As someone who has points, and doesn’t pay the subscription model, I can search by state or zip code. I can only do an area if I’m a silver or better member. And I only get to see one picture at full size. They’ve taken away a number of the things that made this site useful and workeable.

They also changed my login without telling me. That was annoying.

I’m pretty upset but haven’t made any decisions about leaving the site yet.

premium membership costs about $20/month and a $20/month supplement to allow non-premium members (over 90% of the profiles) to view your profile;

while FF may not have taken away the ability to contact other members, they have quintupled the price for those using existing credits and limited the ability to even view a profile beyond the picture, age, location, and tag line;

Nerve User says:” I think you still only need to use 200 points. Log on, then view someone’s profile, and you’ll see that under their photo it talks about your options for contacting them, it says you can send an email for 200 points. If that’s right, and the conversion was 200 points for each credit, then the price is exactly the same (although if my case is typical there may be a lot of people whose credits haven’t been converted to points at all yet).”

Do this: click on the “Points” link on your personals home page, and then click on the Redeem link.

The pages states: “Use your points to Contact and View Members by filling out the form below. How many Profiles would you like to see? Do you want to contact anyone? 1 credit to view a profile costs 100 pts. But, to contact a member this requires 10 credits. So, to contact a member it costs 1000 points! ”

Here is the link. I apologize for the interminable URL.

http://personals.salon.com/p/points.cgi?dcb=personals.salon.com&who=UmFuZG9tSVaj97bUSBVSb/W9yi5lM1B0jemwPDGLzZgnf8J6FQrACixeGvr6GovS4oVJ7HZEZK1NCvb_lQzk1UF/Kczi34hrTQ5coe9bBJxnfTYqxaGlr0exIRGr55Vh/mbXIm3o60evW6RQopIN1huRDS6FhVSVS/O5oFKuagCnW81MTsoTacD51_XIqZpJI8g0wwWC3Y5zE2evLd/BBpfbL/8FRRW3tesbX0yuQ7TubapVBghd40SeEna/timdpbigp663kr4pkteintblAF2iXlHpduD_BcwrkURq9yPHlt0KA6sD0e3kocRNBGks3zK9kjwExwC0beAuuOOdKT4ww_dDFd3jBc9w5cgg64c-&m=1719307_31635&type=batchviews&action=collect

Sad that you didn’t know about your advanced search options on the old site.

Chill out dude–all I did was correct some incorrect information in your post, along with complaining a little about the credits->points conversion, and that’s enough for you to sarcastically paint me as “joyous user”? Everything’s not so black and white, you know–one can be slightly dissatisfied with the changes and yet keep them in perspective without becoming a cheerleader for “The Man” all of a sudden.

A standard member can only view one photo (that too not full size). I did not claim that you could contact members for free (read my earlier post), you paid a $1 (one credit) to do so. Now you need to use 1000 points.

I think you still only need to use 200 points. Log on, then view someone’s profile, and you’ll see that under their photo it talks about your options for contacting them, it says you can send an email for 200 points. If that’s right, and the conversion was 200 points for each credit, then the price is exactly the same (although if my case is typical there may be a lot of people whose credits haven’t been converted to points at all yet).

And to me, it did sound like you were saying Spring Street let you contact people for free. Read what you wrote again:

Friendfinder has taken away the most basic of personal’s features from the newly designated “Standard” members, i.e. anyone who was on the site before the acquisition — viewing profiles and contacting people. To call this an upgrade is laughable. A lawyer would call this a breach of contract.

To me it doesn’t make sense to say they “took away” the feature of being able to contact people if the old Spring Street version didn’t let you do that for free either–no one would ordinarily say that raising the price on something that already cost money to do counts as “taking it away” (and as I said, I don’t think the price has been raised). And the implication that they used to let you do it free was reinforced by the fact that you listed it alongside the feature of being able to view profiles, which was (and still is) free. Maybe you didn’t mean this implication, but if not, you didn’t express yourself very clearly.

Also, standard members can only email Premium members who have purchased the ability to get email from Standard members.

Well, that just indicates that getting Premium membership without adding that extra fee to let people contact you free is kind of a waste of money, and personally I think the cost for both together is way too high. But this isn’t taking away from what we already had on Spring Street, it’s just adding extra, overpriced options.

The standard search basically only allows you to search by distance, no options on education, kids, keywords etc etc. The list goes on — all the features that we considered basic, are now available only to subscription members.

I don’t remember Spring Street allowing you to search by anything other than age, sex and distance–maybe the option existed and I just never noticed, but out of curiosity, how did you access it? Was there an “advanced search” option or something?

Glad to know that there is a happy minority of joyous users out there. So you feel that all is well, and you have all the features you used to have?

A standard member can only view one photo (that too not full size). I did not claim that you could contact members for free (read my earlier post), you paid a $1 (one credit) to do so. Now you need to use 1000 points. Old credits are being converted at the rate of 200 points for 1 credit, so you need to spend at least $5 to contact someone. Also, standard members can only email Premium members who have purchased the ability to get email from Standard members. The standard search basically only allows you to search by distance, no options on education, kids, keywords etc etc. The list goes on — all the features that we considered basic, are now available only to subscription members.

Check this page out (even though it gives only a partial view of how messed up things are for legacy users)

http://www.fastcupid.com/p/page.cgi?p=member_status&

There is something you can do besides just leaving the site: you can call and at least get a promise of a refund.

Various Inc (parent company of Friend Finder)
445 Sherman Ave., Ste. C
Palo Alto, CA 94306
Phone: 650-847-3100
Fax: 650-324-9379
Email: billing@friendfinderinc.com

They claim they are processing a refund of my unused $25.

Write Salon, The Onion and Nerve and let them know how messed up things are. If these partner sites walk out Fast Cupid won’t have a lot to talk about.

What are you talking about? I’m a standard member at nerve.com and I can view profiles, as long as I’m logged in. And the Spring Street personals didn’t let you contact people for free, you had to spend money to buy “credits”, while the FastCupid system requires you to buy “points” to contact people if you don’t want to pay a monthly fee to be a silver or gold member (supposedly people’s credits on the old system are supposed to be converted to points on the new one, although it seems like they’ve been having some problems with this–I used to have 25 credits and now I have 0 points).