Author: Deano

The best way to get around this issue is to have an extremely well written profile that does the following:

1. At the TOP of the profile, clearly indicate that you ONLY reply if interested, due not to your jerky personality but your high-volume inbox.
2. At the BOTTOM of the profile, clearly indicate WHAT you would like in an introductory message – you'd like them to give you specific information that shows that they read your whole ad.
3. For the MIDDLE of the profile, try to put forth the best possible you, in an UNREPENTANT fashion, that hopefully helps filter out at least some of the "one way good matches".

Then, you have a clear sequence of "good etiquette" actions based on what comes into your inbox:

• Offensive/insulting/otherwise terrible messages – IGNORE.
• Messages from interesting guys you want to know more about – WRITE.
• Messages from anyone who doesn't follow rule #2 – IGNORE.
• Messages from really nice "not a match" guys who followed the rules but deserve a break – Follow your heart.

I tend to advise people to only reply to those they'd actually be willing to have a terrible first date with solely based on the initial email interaction. Still, the kind of person who asks a question like this usually has some pretty strong feelings about what it's like to "put yourself out there and hear nothing back", and I think the world would be a better place if everyone knew how to write a good rejection letter, and those who received them knew how best to react upon receiving one.

Still, as others have mentioned, responding to anyone you don't want to go out with has the potential to open a Pandora's Box of bad experiences. Wish it weren't so, but online dating is unlicensed and unregulated, much like offline dating – there are no guarantees that your prospects will have the same experience, background, and general etiquette as you these days. Which, again, is why it's nice to state your defaults in your profile.

What is the etiquette when you are not interested in a person who has messaged you on a dating site?

Dishonesty requires intent… So the best way to identify or predict it is to determine:

1. whether or not a particular profile item (height, salary, eye color) is inaccurate, and
2. whether this inaccuracy can be proven intentional on the part of the profile's author, or simply the result of miscommunication, or faulty perception on the part of the author.

Proving either or both points, on a traditional online dating site, would be incredibly difficult for a large number of parameters, without some form of dedicated profile verification or background checking service.

That said, if one is clever, it's possible to imagine a variety of self-correcting systems that could be created to ensure that profiles are accurate within a degree of variance, or at the very least generated by a well-meaning, if sometimes self-misreporting, human being.

I wish I could be more helpful in terms of actual methodologies, but we're currently looking at patents for these very processes over at navidate.com, so…

How can dishonesty be identified or predicted based on online profiles?

Per Brandon's point – It might be fairer to say that "no site would allow users to implement this kind of tracking on their own" – even then, I could imagine a site constructed EXACTLY around the principal of a user-side free for all, though I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to visit the resulting site.

That said, I can easily imagine a dating site partnering with optimizely to help provide tracking and metrics to their membership in a convenient manner, without having to build that whole freatureset out in-house. Still, it would most likely need to be a white label agreement of some sort, as running the site dating through a third party like optimizely would break most TOSes for existing dating sites.

Can I use optimizely on my dating site profile?

Sometimes silence tells the story.

I came very close to booking a trip to Miami last year, but my schedule exploded a bit, and I had to cancel… I still wonder if maybe fate was trying to tell me something. Between the website, the way the sales team runs things, and the lack of third-party commentary, it just feels a "little off" somehow.

Still, I've heard anecdotally that it's an incredible networking opportunity, as pretty much all the major players and their vendors are represented in some fashion, along with many tiny niche site runners full of energy and insights. Since networking would be the natural focus, it then becomes imperative that you have a solid plan of attack, and start pinging other likely attendees beforehand to suggest meetings/make yourself memorable.

I'd love a free ticket to the Beverly Hills event, but failing that the money is almost certainly better spent poured directly into my company, based on the available evidence. Would love to be proven wrong!

Is the Internet Dating Conference a worthwhile and well run event?

In the general case, there are no reliable independent studies that I can find, that conclude there is a measurable difference between online and offline dating-sourced marriages as far as divorce rate is concerned.

That said, there are bits and pieces of data that show, whether offline or online, that certain qualities, habits, interests, schedules, and demographic matches tend to have an effect on longterm viability of a marriage. 

For example, take eHarmony.com – this is basically a "niche" dating site, where the niche is "primarily observant Christians looking for longterm relationships and marriage". Compared with the rate of offline churchgoers who marry then divorce, eHarmony's rates map very well onto this demographic – though they are lower here as well (no doubt due to their matching system helping to weed things a bit further). 
 
So, on the one hand, they can clearly say "for our target demo, we improve the likelihood of a lasting marriage, on average"… But it's less clear that their demographic is "the pool of all singles", or "everyone looking to get married", etc. Hence, there appears to be some form of selection bias at work skewing the results.
 
More thorough testing and reporting needs to be done in the industry and shared publicly – but online dating companies have historically been VERY tight-lipped on data sharing, with the occasional exception like POF.com or OKCupid.com (both free sites, with much less to lose).

Are there any significant differences in the divorce rates of marriages from offline dating and marriages from online dating?