I had a good conversation yesterday with a developer who works with various dating and social networking scripts. I ended up venting for a good part of the call which led me to do some thinking about the status of online dating scripts.
I get many calls an emails from startups looking for the best dating and social networking scripts and I’d like to have a stable of people to call on when it’s time to build a site. I know what I’m talking about when it comes to the strategy, marketing and branding or a site, but when it’s time to help a client select a system, my knees buckle and I start to mumble.
Dating scripts are not doing their part to make it easy for me to recommend their system over the others. It’s been like this for years. I’m the first to admit that I haven’t built a site on every main dating script out there, but I feel like I’m in the trenches with the hundreds of people who email me about their problems with scripts or inability to choose one for their projects.
This is the reality of the situation from my perspective. Yes I have dating software companies as advertisers. If they disagree with anything I say, let’s turn it into a discussion. In 2008, I’d like to see dating scripts address the issues surrounding their products and services and stop sweeping problems under the carpet.
- Dating script providers spam blogs with canned messages.
- Support is usually nowhere near as good as it should be.
- For basic dating sites that will not see much traffic, most software is ok. It doesn’t really matter what you use. What matters most is the developer you hire. A great developer can negate many of the problems you will have with dating scripts.
- It’s near-impossible to easily figure out which solution is best for your scalable, heavily-customized dating site.
- Dating scripts should cost more. It’s a perception thing. I would never recommend running a dating site on a free or cheap software. I’m a big fan of open source, but paid support and standing behind a price tag says a lot about the maturity of a company.
I started writing this post this because someone sent me a link to the AbleDating software reviews. A review site created by the company that’s being reviewed. How backwards is that? These are testimonials, not reviews.
An entire blog full of positive testimonials is absolutely useless to the scores of people I speak with weekly who are looking for a solid and dependable dating script solution. If these things work, then why do so many people have no idea which software to use? And not a single negative review!
Why is it that I keep hearing social networking software is so much more robust an the support tends to be better?
Given the current state of most dating scripts, it’s becoming easier to recommend white label dating services for most startups, with a few caveats, of course. Believe me, white label solutions have their share of issues and problems as well.
What it comes down to is figuring out if a script or white label solution based on your unique circumstances.
Depending on your answer, then it’s time to understand the functionality of your site. Then you want to find the absolute best developer your money can buy. If he’s booked for a month, you should wait for them, because a lesser-experienced developer will spend a month learning the software and end up costing you more money in the long run.
Dating script providers:
Why not share how many concurrent people your script can support on a a generic web server?
Why not provide clear and concise direction on how to edit templates?
Why not make it easier to understand how to customize the signup process?
These are problems I, and the many people who contact me, have come across during the last year. I’m not pulling this out of thin air. These are real-world people with money in hand, dying for someone to tell them what to do next.
Dating startups need:
Rock-solid software. Some are better than others. Companies that focus too much on extra features like forums and chats are not focused enough on the prize. Give people a base platform thats easy to customize and change the look and feel. Stop adding features and get the ones that have been broken for years right before you expand your suite of services.
I’ve had developers do code reviews of several major packages, results were mixed. I don’t know if people from different countries code differently, but what I do know is that most are not spending enough time focusing on what real users require in a dating script. sometimes it feels like the software was built in a vacuum.
It’s time to call out the dating script companies and make them accountable for the problems they are causing dating startups. This is not rocket science, it’s pretty basic programming for the most part.
Here’s what dating script developers can do. Hire an outside consultant or set up a peer review to go through your code and make recommendations on ways to refactor and clean it up.
Have a UI developer go through your templates and do the same. Just look at Wordpress. Thousands of templates to choose from, all based on 15 or so files. Creating a WP theme couldn’t be easier. Installing one takes about 30 seconds. Why is it so difficult with dating scripts?
Ignoring localization for a moment, it should not be difficult to make changes to the CSS or the graphics on a site. Hundreds of folders, redundant code, legacy cruft sitting around from three releases ago and the dreaded “we stopped supporting that feature” have bitten me on the @$$ several times over.
Upgrading dating software after you have customized it is almost impossible. Do you know how many dating sites are out there with gaping security holes because the site they launched in 2003 hasn’t been updated since then? Scary.
And compiled PHP code? Why the secrecy? Do you have something to hide or don’t you understand you lose more business than you gain by doing this?
I’ve said enough for now, hopefully the dating script providers will leave comments and we can start to move things forward. I’m always available to talk privately, but let’s open the lines of communication and look towards making 2008 a better and more profitable year for everyone involved.
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Lots of good points here. The last time I looked at dating scripts a couple of years ago, most of them where a programming mess. I hope that is starting to change.
The only free script I would consider using would be osDate. It’s an open source solution that has been around for a little while and has evolved nicely. They even now have a plugin interface (I believe) that allows new features to be added easier without changing the original code.
Dave,
I could not agree with you more. I went through the whole buy versus built scenario in my head and in the end went with the build option. I did this because I wanted to have total flexibility in the direction of the software. Creating templates that allow me to change the layout, 1 style sheet that will allow me to change all of the visual I need at a high level., and a clean directory structure that, well just makes sense. With my background in web development, and my last 7 years of my career focusing on management and strategy of web application it just made sense. If you move forward with any off line discussions please let me know I would love to participate if possible.
Frank
Loovya.com
For readers: my name is Emil Sarnogoev, I represent SkaDate from Skalfa eCommerce.
Dave,
Thanks for raising this issue, your questions and concerns are basically the same most people ask us all the time. Since you asked for feedback, I want to comment on some points you make and give some straight answers regarding SkaDate.
* Dating scripts should cost more.
As I nailed it down on our blog, most often you get what you pay for. People should realize that advanced and specific business tools can’t be free or cheap. Same for effective support. Enough on the topic.
* Social networking, online dating, white label solutions.
Clue me in. Social networking and online dating may have different business model and different audience but technically vendors are companies that sell and support a piece of community site software with user membership system and a number of communication features. Example, we sell SkaDate as a piece of software to download, as a hosted solution. We have customers running old-school purely dating sites, or niche social networking sites (more often all kinds of hybrids, though). That doesn’t change the technical team and support staff on 24/7 seats. All the difference is people behind the helm, not the target industry.
* Why not share concurrent users support?
As stated here, SkaDate proved to feel well during a test of 500K profiles (1000 online) on a P4 HT 3.06 GHz server with 4Gb RAM.
I’ve seen some companies claim that their PHP/MySQL script would support millions of members. There’s no way it’s possible.
* Why not provide concise direction how to edit templates. Why not like Wordpress?
Which house do you want – robust or portable?
99% of customers want robust. So it just works every morning you check it.
After playing with it for some time you understand you want to change something to stand out. After reading resources like ODI you understand that you need to adjust quick, to pay special attention to what users want, to try 3rd party value-added services, it’s an endless game.
In the end of the day you want your site to dance and jump around. You come to the vendor or ask your developer to implement your portion of carefully chosen changes.
But what do they say? “Every single detail you want to change is complex code modification.” Because the software is written like Wordpress.
Wordpress is good for doing its function – posting articles, gathering feedback, and including arbitrary HTML code (widgets) in the sidebar. You can see straight PHP code right in the templates. You have header, footer, main page, archives templates, and CSS styles file.
Now you look back at your site and realize you need to disable a bunch of features, customize the signup process, edit all email templates, send matches to members after 1 month of inactivity, introduce a new trial membership which allows a number of features for a limited time, implement a couple completely new features, see statistics and advanced moderation tools, and finally you want to move that user feedback poll to another page. And of course, you still want it to work. Finally, you wonder if you can upgrade to a new cool version and retain all the changes you made.
The word “community” has much wider meaning than the word “blogging”. Corresponding software packages are of a different complexity scale as well.
Ask MySpace how many file changes would be involved if they wanted to change the site theme completely. It’s probably the difference between a skateboard and a BMW. Different scope, different approach to design.
We had hard time projecting SkaDate with all these things in mind yet the final product was worth it.
* Easier signup process customization.
Again, it’s simplicity vs customization issue. I’d prefer 4-5 basic profile questions on signup. Some people want several pages with a bunch of fields on each, some are with extended multiple choice. All this must communicate with database in a proper way. What about your own specific questions on a niche site? Uploading a photo during signup? Making “breast size” appear if a user enters “female” for gender?
(Un)technically speaking, signup process must be able to change it’s form and size like hell, otherwise it’s heavy programming customization for almost every customer = impossible.
The toughest problem vendors face is making administrative customization right and bug-free. Again, this is more about projecting software from the start with a lot of experience on tank. I mean it’s about writing good software.
* Rock-solid software vs features.
Nice point, this is the plaque affecting most software packages and companies. The problem as I see it is vendors heroine-dependent on new sales. For that you need to throw a bunch of “cool” features to prospects’ faces every month. It greatly helps if you have the word “free” around. Free support, free license, free upgrades. You need to close that sale dammit.
Now imagine how this kind of a rushed release schedule affects the product quality. You just don’t have time to fix bugs or improve existing features. At some point you are not sure if anything particular is going to work at all. Also, you realize that the fixes you do (you’ll need to do a bunch of them very soon with this approach) only cause more bugs.
This is not going to fly.
We at SkaDate charge for support, charge for customizations. And we tell about that upfront. Our license price is not the cheapest in the industry of small community businesses. We don’t release new features every month. We make major release once a year at maximum. Our usual development process is incremental improvement based on feedback with rare features implementation, again based on feedback and new trends. We have around 30 features lying on the table, and we pick up only 3 or 4 because we need them to be useful and easy for end users.
Stable product = less customers moving on from you. Our existing customers relations bring us more revenue than the new sales. This makes us almost invincible to the new-sales drug. For example July and December are the slowest months for sales, do we care that much? This doesn’t mean people have no choice – you can’t make someone pay month by month without seeing value. We are interested in helping bringing up successful sites.
Why do I share this? Because I’m not afraid that new-sales vendors will do the same. Making people stay with you is a damn tough thing to do. If a vendor doesn’t do it, it means they can’t/don’t want to.
* Code review, cleaning up, refactoring.
Cleaning up and refactoring is exactly what we do constantly in our incremental development cycle as described above. Yes, every software package has its own imperfections and bugs hiding somewhere, I’m just sure we do pretty good job eliminating them. Good enough to provide working business solutions.
We wouldn’t mind having our source code reviewed by an independent competent entity. Dave, do you care to send enquiries to other vendors with this initiative? I’m sure companies producing fine software will agree. People will know what to expect behind the scene.
* Difficulties with upgrading, security holes.
Let me be honest – upgrading modified code is always a problem to a certain extent. If a product has solid architecture and implemented fine the problem is less critical. Imagine you have a highly customized site. You implemented new features. Some day you see new release with a lot of improvements and some features similar to yours but of course made their own way. How do you go about the upgrade? Do you upgrade at all? We have customers with big customizations who are not interested in upgrades. As a rule, the more you customize the less you need upgrades from us.
As for security holes – this is a real problem in general. Every vendor must do everything possible to prevent and/or diminish the threat. Speaking about SkaDate – during the 3 year product lifetime there was only one security hole found. Based on our customer report we found it, fixed it, and upgraded hosted customers before that security problem was dispatched on secunia.com and similar resources.
I see dating and social networking software products security hole reports all the time. Do vendors do something about that? How quickly? This is the question.
* Encrypted PHP source
100% agree. People, don’t ever buy an encrypted piece of software for a site. You just can’t change it. Does anyone still believe one can take an off-the-shelf product and run a business?
Recently, we integrated our chuPPo Chat into an encrypted piece of software from one of the vendors you mentioned. Well, what you get is just a number of useless files that you can do nothing with. Nevertheless, we did integrate the chat into it but why do YOU want to go to great lengths? What do you pay money for?
—
Dave, it’s cool that you create this kind of discussions on your blog from time to time. We do the same on Skalfa blog to have our customers speaking up.
I invite anyone to participate in this discussion.
I switched to AbleDating after having used some other popular script for 2 years. To my mind this software is more interactive then the rest, I mean the guys try to add really interesting features like 3d chat, voice recording etc. Sometimes the support tend to be not too fast, but all of questions and problems are paid attention to.
Just a quick to e-mail to let you all know how constantly amazed we are at just how good your company customer service is. It is so refreshing to see that in today’s market a company values this element of its business so much.
Well done and keep up the good work.
When we got the idea for setting up a dating-oriented community, we searched through all the possible options. First we started to look at free scripts, but they didn’t seem to offer something different or special, so we would end up with yet-another-dating-community web service.
After that we started to look at commercial options, then we saw AbleDating – it had great price and loads of essential features, plus support. So we purchased and downloaded. Installation went without problems at all, script was up and running for testing/modifying in no time.
In conclusion, this product is more than we could have ever hoped for. The customer service before – during – and after the sale is the best I have EVER run across. (I have run a technical customer service helpdesk for a fortune 50 company and it wasn’t even close to this good) Your graphic artists are amoungst the best in the world and our site design is more than I had dreamed of – and I have a great imagination.
Our site is a HUGE success now. We’ve been interviewed on the radio, had articles written about us, and are happy customers. And to be totally honest – TOTALLY honest – the entire reason for it is ABK Soft. If it was not for them we could not have come close to achieving what we have. It is good to know that we have an unfair advantage in the marketplace.
That unfair advantage is AbleDating and the great folks at ABK Soft that wrote it. There are some things in life and business that anyone would be dumb for doing. This is one of those things that you’d be dumb not to do.
Looks like ABKSoft really knows how to motivate their customers to say glowing things about them. Is everyone this happy with the software? I’m skeptical at this point.
Yes, the script has been totally reworked.Abledating is the best script I’ve used! It has so many features which are easy to use. I really don’t know much about scripts or editing however every time I emailed abk-soft they helped me with everything! There service is great there tech support is outstanding! So if your looking for a script then look no further then here
Look http://www.abledatingreview.com/
Thanks ABK Team !! to be continued…!
(special thanks for G.C., D.R. and A.B. from ABK) Greg
It’s amazing how so many Able customers found the same thread over the same period of time to give raving reviews with lots of exclamation points. It is so unbelievable and so transparent, it’s ridiculous. People are not that stupid to buy such a transparent marketing ploy.
Wesley A. Alexander
307 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Ma. 02115
Email alexanderunlimited@ymail.com
Phone number either 802-310-5000
September 16, 2008
To whom it my concern:
I believe what I want done next is simple I will purchase one to two dating $000.00 sites. You will then take one site and customize to the contest. Because the contest is exactly a dating site accept one thing once the contestant enter their entry and pay that is it for the contestant. He will agree to terms of the contest and pay his, her, or theirs entry fee. Then this breaks the contest down what happen for the contestant and the members who are viewing the entry for the contest. Unless one site can be customize to both of my request. I also want a regular dating site format to go with both of these sites.
Site will contain the following:
1. Contestant simple will sign up using the forms that are provided for people that want to enter the contest.
2. Contestant will do as following add their name, password, email, image or video upload and of course payment link.
3. The members will look at the contestant material. Using a search form where members can browse and vote. 1 vote for each constant (Maximum of 5) every 24 hours.
4. When the member is finishing viewing the contestant material for the day he will pick his five choices like a shopping cart he will add his selection and remove until his final vote.
5. The site will show top 10 contestants per day to show the members who are winning. Then at the end will who show the top ten winners.
6. Now the site will automatically place each entry in the right contest. Giving each entry an entry number by category and will show at the bottom how many votes this contest has received as of today. At the end will show how many votes did this entry received.
7. Users can be members of the dating site and have free access to the
contestant site or users can be members of the contestant site and
have free access to the dating site.
Admin:
1. Will part will do pricing of the contest, category for the contest and view the material before it becomes part of the contest for the next month or bi-monthly.
2. Show payment detail
3. Set up contests, time and category
4. Library to hold all old images and video
5. I will provide you with the legal agreement, being over 18, consent
to be on the site, I will become the owner of the material, etc.
The Virtual Speed dating:
This is the other site I will purchase for $000.00 and this done to this site.
Site will contain the following:
1. Would have the dating site structure (registration, profile
questions, photos, etc) like a regular dating site this the difference for this part it is a party at which members will visit and group up like a chat room the most 100 people broken down in couples making it 50 couple at one time. The list 10 couples.
2. Admin which will enable me to add events
3. Users will sign up (pay) for the event if non-member and free for members.
4. Once the events start and gives each user 5 minutes to chat with opposite
sex, same sex, or couples, then the program would disconnect the chat and would move the user to chat with user 2 and so on.
5. When all sessions are completed, each user is prompted a page to enter
their matches. The program would check for compatibility and send the
matches their info for contact. Chat would show user name, picture if
available and the option to click on the detailed profile.
6. For members with web cams can use them for additional cost
If you have any questions, please let me know. On the phone and we can discuss in detail what issue you is having. After you customize the two sites I just want the sites link together as one and as separate. If a member pays for all three sites site he gets one discount, if he pays just for two he gets another discount, and if he just pay for one just one he pays one price. I want in place a one-day membership for people to try out the different site and free sign up to all three sites.
I want the main dating site and speed-dating site to be able take in couples and let both couple do a profile that this should already include. I would like the site to be multiple languages or have a section of where they are from as a member and where they want to meet people that you already say the site can do.
I just want the price of the customization for the other two sites and what it will cost to have all three connected as a site, two connect and just having the site for $0000.00, will cost with some customization which will include a little customization.
Can you give me a call between the time you will be ready to start the work in October, any time during that following week and this weekend at the number left at the top? I want to purchase and have at least the $0000.00, site work started and running within the next two to three weeks from now. The rest we can discuss payment and time frame.
Thank you very much in advance.
Sincerely
Wesley A. Alexander
We use boonex dolphin in 6.xx versions on our sites and it works. It’s easy to customize the templates and there are a lot of valuable functions integrated for free (groups, forums, blogs, 1:1 Chat, live-chat etc.). After testing OSdate we think, that Dolphin gives us more flexibility and it’s a little easier to administrate than any other (free) dating script we ever tested…
Dolphin? I’d rather have cancer. boonex is one of the foremost ruinous brands in social networking on the Internet today and devalues the turnkey industry with its awful script full of recycled bugs which is basically the zenith of problems that the OP described at the start of this blog.