I’m not a fan of Valentines Day. There, I said it. Sure it’s nice to receive flowers or some token of affection. Which girl wouldn’t like that? But if you need a special day to remind you, a day that has been set by someone else without any significance for your relationship and then buy gifts because everybody else is doing it – sorry, don’t bother. There is also something about being manipulated by the flower and gift industry guilt-tripping people into substituting real affection for “stuff”.

Apparently they have found a new way to make suckers lovebirds part with their money: February 13, Mistress Day, the day to wine and dine your secret flame.

I always thought that was just a funny invention by Ashley Madison, who promote this… affair every year. But no, it’s actually as “real” as Valentine’s Day as a mandatory gift-giving occasion for the other significant other and celebrated all over the world.

NBC New York writes many “restaurants traditionally get an as good or bigger bump from that night”. Probably because more often than not the mistress gets the lobster while the missus gets the fish sticks. (66o40rg)CNN Shanghai also offers a long list of suggestions for where to go on Mistress Day to avoid getting caught in that sin city of the East.

You probably won’t find Hallmark cards with Mistress Day themes any time soon, but I can see how this makes sense. Lots of guys, unable to give their secret sweetie all the same privileges as their wife, will compensate with more lavish spending. And hell yeah, if I ran a fancy restaurant, I wouldn’t let the money burn a hole in their pockets.

What do you think of Mistress Day?

We all know what “cheat” usually means at Ashley Madison. In this post I’ll give the word a new meaning borrowed from video games and show those who’re using the affairs site a few “secret” tricks that you may not have known yet.

cheat
noun. In video games, a code or a series of movements (whether intentionally programmed or a glitch) input by the player in order to achieve an advantage.
Source: Urban Dictionary

Should the things described here not make any sense to you, simply sign up at Ashley Madison and see for yourself or read the full review.

1. Credit Warning on IM
2. User ID
3. Message Timing
4. Collect Message Fees
5. Priority Messages

Credit Warning on Instant Messages

Let’s start with the simplest one. Sometimes, when you receive IM chat messages and you try to respond, you see an error like this one.

Don’t click Send Collect and don’t get scared away from your chat by this. You also don’t need to buy credits (although may want to for other reasons). Whoever messaged you already paid for initiating the session, so simply click Cancel. The warning will disappear and you can chat away.

The User ID

In the top-left corner of the screen, you can see your user ID. It’s a number, and because Ashley Madison simply counts that number up with every new member, you can tell how many members there were when you signed up.

That alone may not be so exciting, although it’s an easy way to confirm Ashley Madison’s membership claims. It gets more interesting when you check another user’s ID number(66o40rg). I ranted earlier about how it clutters up search results, but there actually is one useful bit to it. Ashley Madison now removed the number from profile pages (maybe they read my review? ), so to find it, you need to hover your mouse over one of the links under the picture and then look at the link target on the bottom of your browser, like so:

Since all users are numbered sequentially, you can now roughly tell when that guy signed up! Just check what date range his user ID falls into:

• Jan 2007 – 1,200,000
• Sep 2007 – 1,700,000
• Mar 2008 – 2,000,000
• Aug 2008 – 2,500,000
• Jan 2009 – 3,200,000
• Apr 2009 – 3,600,000
• Oct 2009 – 4,600,000
• Mar 2010 – 5,400,000

That gives you an idea if he’s been around the block a few times or if he’s really “just trying out the site” as he may be claiming.

Time Your Messages

This is a trick I already wrote in my Ashley Madison tips for guys. If you want to catch a member who receives a lot of mail, write when she is online so that your message is right on top of her inbox. How?

Add him or her to your favorites and activate “Favorite Member Login” in your account contact options. You will get an email when your sweetheart logs in. If you’re not on your computer 24/7, have the notification forwarded to your mobile phone. When you get that email, move quickly! If you need some time to compose your masterpiece, do it beforehand and save it on your computer. When s/he comes on, paste and send.

Avoid Collect Message Fee

Ashley Madison says that once contact has been established with a member, all further messages are free. I recently had a chance to chat with Keith Lalonde, VP at Ashley Madison. He told me that accepting collect messages does NOT count as establishing contact. I find that quite sneaky and it hasn’t always been this way, but that’s their choice.

That means if you accept a collect message and then reply, you will be charged twice – once for the collect mail, once for your “first” email. To save some points, simply ignore the collect mail and write the member back directly. You can always say that there was an error and you couldn’t read the message. They’ll be happy to repeat whatever they wrote earlier.

Read Priority Messages Without Sending Receipt

I saved the best for last. I receive a lot of Priority messages. Those are the flagged, shaded ones that always sit on top of the inbox, no matter how old. But that’s not the only difference. Normally, the sender also gets a confirmation when I opened his message. Normally?

Well, sometimes I’m curious what he wrote but don’t want him to think I’m all interested.
Step 1:
Click the name in your Inbox.

Step 2:
Open a message panel from his profile.

Step 3:
Message history.
Voilà!

Ok, I’m not an expert on dating advice, and I don’t really have the holy grail on getting laid on Ashley Madison. But I’ve been on there for some time, so I thought I’ll give you guys a glimpse at the other side and maybe you’ll understand why you never heard back from that hot chick you winked 28 times.

First, here’s a look at my inbox less than 4 days after clearing out all messages:

In case you can’t quite tell – that’s 844 messages, 196 winks. Yeah, I was shocked, too.

As you can see, messages trickle in almost every other minute (times are local to the sender(66o40rg)). Because one inbox page only shows ten messages, I’d have to go through 85 pages just to see them all. I’m not gonna do that. So, chances are, if you messaged me yesterday or even just a few hours ago, I won’t even see your email. What to do? Here are my tips:

No Collect Message

See that “Collect Message” there? Do you really expect me to accept a collect mail when I have my inbox bursting at the seams with other guys? You’d have to be Brad Pitt for me to pay for collect. And I doubt he’d be so cheap to make me. But that profile there was com­plete­ly empty – no description, no preferences, no picture! Lefty really got nothing right. Douchebag.

Look, I’m not a gold digger and if we meet, I won’t expect you to pay for my coffee. In fact, if I like you, I may even pay for yours. And that’s the key – if I like you. I won’t pay for your message when I have no clue who you are. And even if your profile shows a Mr. Perfect, I’d wonder how Mr. Perfect can be so cheap. In short: Don’t do it.

The Name Of The Game

Your user name, that is. There really are only three things to see when I scan over those messages: picture, name and the subject line. You see how important that moniker becomes? Choose one that makes me want to click to your profile – something about you or something funny. “TallTexan” is pretty good, but what the hell is “twiz36″? No idea… next!

It’s a fine line though between “funny” and “trying too hard”. If your friends never sang the praises of your unfailing sense of light-hearted humor, stick with something descriptive. Oh, and btw, anything alluding to the size of your custard launcher is about as appealing as Bob the Flasher flaunting his junk at the street corner.

So next, as described in my full Ashley Madison review, I use the filter to whittle that deluge of showcase keys down to something more meaningful. This is what it looks like with custom messages only:

51 messages, much better. I may actually have a quick glance over all six pages. But I’ll only open a few. Which ones? Have a look at that list again. You go:

“Hi”, “Hello”, “hey”, “hi…”

I go: “Skip, skip, skip …”
Seriously, is that the best you can come up with? Remember: picture, name and subject. You can’t afford to waste any of those to make that first connection and I’d say your subject line is the most important. See the one I responded to? It said: “Sending a warm smile on this snowy day”. Not the best, but it was nice and literally stood out because it’s simply much longer than all the “Hi”s.

What always catches my attention is an opening line that shows you actually read my profile and refers to something in there. Something witty works great too, if you have a gift with words.

What I really don’t like are subjects with a sugar daddy proposal. It’s pretty clear from my profile that I don’t need or want anybody to pay for me and to imply that I could be a glorified hooker is just annoying to put it mildly. I’m sure there are some “sugar babes” on Ashley Madison, who might be looking for such an arrangement. But at least make sure you’re propositioning the right person. Or, even better, go to SugarDaddy.com.

So what’s next in our trinity? Right…

The Picture

Gotta have a picture. Women are visual, too! I understand the need for privacy on this site, but as you see above, a pic will help you break through the clutter like a VIP at the night club line. And there are all sorts of things you can do without revealing who you are.

You see, the other main reason why I chose to respond to Mr. Warm Smile, was his picture – a well-dressed man in front of a foreign landmark – I found that intriguing enough to click.

That’s another hint, right there. Groomed and well-dressed works much better than your naked torso in the bathroom mirror. Even though Ashley Madison is a hook-up website, you wouldn’t walk into your local meat market naked either, would you? A woman still wants to be wooed and that starts with decent clothes.

If you really don’t want to put up any public picture, at the very least have some in your private showcase and attach a key directly to your message.

Your Profile

You absolutely need a good profile. In fact, oftentimes, esp. when you send me a priority message where you will get confirmation when I open it, I’ll check out your profile before I even read your email! If all I see there are those check mark preferences, I’ll usually move right along to the next guy.

So what to write? Avoid boring worn-out phrases like “I like to laugh.” Ever met anyone who doesn’t like to laugh? Again, avoid graphic descriptions of your manhood. I know you’re very proud of it, but that will come later. Write a story, something funny, show that you’re not taking yourself too seriously. Show, don’t tell. Instead of saying you’re humorous, tell me an episode that shows you are. Make me wanna keep reading, make me curious about the person behind this.

But by all means, don’t use this as a place to vent about your other half. No matter how frustrated you are, I want to meet an upbeat man, not a whiner who drags me down.

What Else?

Priority Messages
Those are the shaded and flagged ones in the first screen shot. Good idea? Bad idea? I’d give it thumbs up. In the beginning I looked down on them a bit, like “How desperate are those guys?” But since I don’t log in every day and with the volume of email that accumulates, I realize they’re a great way to keep your message from disappearing to page 23 of my inbox where I’ll never see it.

Timing
If you prefer not to be too in-your-face with a priority message, you gotta play the clock to make sure your message is near the top of the heap when I check my inbox. So don’t message a girl who hasn’t been online in a while. Who knows when she’ll be back. By then your email will be buried.

Instead look for women “online now” and write them right away. If you have set your eyes on a particular lady, add her to your favorites and activate “Favorite Member Login” in your account contact options. You will get an email when your sweetheart logs in. When you get that email, move quickly! If you need some time to compose your masterpiece of an introduction, then do it beforehand and save it on your computer. When she comes on, paste and send.

Winks
You noticed I haven’t mentioned them? There’s a reason for that: they’re pretty much useless. See how they are all sorted into their own tab? That tab may as well not be there; I never look at it.

Choose wisely
Of course every guy wants to score a hottie. What do you do? You look for the hottest picture, of course, right? Well, genius, unfortunately you’re not the only one with this great idea. It’s very simple: more attractive = more emails = the choosier she can be. Unless you’re confident you can stand out, why make it harder to yourself? Remember how you were reluctant to put up your picture? So are women, maybe even more so. There are still many pearls among those without public picture, your competition will be much less intense and your response rate will go through the roof.

Single guys
I guess, somehow a “cheating housewife” is every guy’s dream. I always wondered why there are singles on an adultery site. Here’s what Ashley Madison says:

“If you are single and wish to meet an attached person, you’re probably going to have to try a little harder. Single people don’t have as much to risk and you may find some attached people unwilling to take a risk with you. People in relationships may feel that you have an upper-hand and that you may not be sympathetic to their circumstances. Take your time to build an additional level of trust with attached people you wish to meet.”

Agreed.

This should get you the “foot in the door”, i.e. have me read your email and check out your profile. At this point you already cut out all the riffraff – 90% of your competition. Where will it go from here? Will you ignite my fantasy? Will you get me to reply… and more than once?

I can’t write like a man, but let me tell you about Mark, one of the guys I met through Ashley Madison. He had an amazing way to keep me on the edge of my seat with his emails and had I come across his profile first, I’d have written him myself. When I met up with him, I complimented Mark and he smiled and admitted that he’d had some “training”. He used this material, which shows how to set up a hot profile, choose a tempting picture and write engaging messages that just need to be replied to. What can I say, it worked for him, maybe you should check it out too!

That’s it, now stop reading and start doing!

Whether you have made up your mind or are just amazed that stuff like this exists and can’t help a certain titillation at the idea – if you want to dip your feet into the world of secret affairs online, the Ashley Madison Agency stands out among the pack of similar sites for several reasons.

1. Members
2. Search
3. Profile
4. Messaging
5. Other Features
6. Costs

Members: 5/5

The most important aspect for any community site – be it eBay, Facebook or a dating website – is the number of people on it. You want members, lots of ‘em, the more the merrier. And not just anywhere, but within driving distance. Because what good does it do to you if Mr. Classy Hunk turns out living in Chihuahua, Mexico?

It is here where Ashley Madison truly shines. When I played with the site on a Tuesday afternoon, I found more than 200 guys who had logged in within the last day, in each of the major cities (San Francisco, Kansas City, New York, Miami) and in each of the age groups I looked at (men in their 20s, 30s, 40s)! To test the limits of the site, I tried the small town of Helena, MT (population 26,000) and even there, Ashley Madison had one guy logging in THAT DAY in his 20s (aptly named “wastedyouth”), 7 in their 30s, and 3 men in their 40s. There were several dozen men looking for an affair total in each age group.

Ok, so quantity is great, what about quality? Let’s face it, no dating site is just a stud collection straight out of the Celebs & Style section in Cosmopolitan. But with the large number and variety of gents to browse you will easily find your match. Or he will find you. In fact, I found most men on the site respectful and pleasant, and the douchebag rate noticeably lower than on other dating sites. The reason is that on Ashley Madison the guys are in the same boat as you, understand your situation and your privacy requirements and share the same risks.

Search: 3.5/5

With more guys available than at any Superbowl party, heck, more than at the stadium, how do you find your perfect playmate? Good search tools! The simple quick-search bar is always ready for you(66o40rg): But you want to go to the Advanced Search screen. Besides the regular criteria (age, height, weight, ethnicity etc.), you can limit your search to only profiles with pictures, only new members (registered within 10 days) or – what I find the most useful – to men who are online right now or were active within the last few days. After all why would you want to waste your time messaging someone who is not using the site anymore?

A keyword option where you can enter free text matches anything in the profile descriptions and you can look up members by user name where you will get back everyone whose screen name contains the search term.

The result list is one of the few places that have room to improve. It shows some key data at one glance but why would you care about the cryptic profile number of all things? It would make more sense to put e.g. race there instead. Recently, Ashley Madison added the option to have Spanish profiles and now a big button announcing the profile language sits between the results and spaces them out unnecessarily. A denser design would be better and since you’re likely using the site in only one language anyway, I doubt the value of that button.

More annoying is Ashley Madison’s layout where the top and bottom parts are essentially two separate web pages squished into one. This screws up tabbed browsing, you can’t use the Back button on your browser reliably and on top of that, the right-click menu is disabled. For example you may go to page 3 of your search results, click through to a guy’s profile and when you click Back, you’re suddenly on page 1 of the results again.

Another issue is that you cannot change the order in which search results are listed. In fact, doing the same search twice can bring the same results in a different order and it’s not clear what they’re sorted by to begin with. The maximum number of results shown for any search is 200.

Profile: 5/5

Now that you checked out the goodies, it’s time to complete your own profile. Many of Ashley Madison’s features are uniquely geared towards people who want to have an affair and nowhere can you see this better than in the profile design. Where other sites just give you an “About Me” field, on Ashley Madison you get these sections:

• Preferences and encounters I am open to
• What really turns me on
• What I am looking for

In each section you can check off a number of pre-selected items, (“Bubble Bath for 2″ anyone?), which makes setting up your profile easy if your writer’s block is kicking in again. But of course you can also pen your own masterpiece.

You can add multiple pictures to your profile, which people can click through, slide-show style. Only one will show at a time. In addition you also have a private showcase that nobody can see until you send them a key. You can post some more reveling images there and while main profile pictures cannot be enlarged, those private photos show in full size when clicked on. You’ll find that many people post only in that private showcase and leave the public picture blank for privacy. After all, we all want to have an affair and not get caught.

If you are worried about that, you can use another great example of affair-specific features: Personal Limits. They allow you to restrict your presence on the site to a level you feel comfortable with. Want to tickle your fantasy but not really hookup with a married man? No problem, just set your profile to “Cyber Affair / Erotic Chat”.

Messaging: 4/5

To that end, there is an instant messenger on top, which lets you have multiple private chats at the same time. It’s great to connect with someone instantly or exchange some racy lines, and – who knows? – you may get your fill just from some salacious virtual adultery! On the other hand, you will most likely be inundated with guys requesting a chat as soon as you sign up. It can be distracting when you’re just on the prowl through the profiles, but you can easily turn it off.

You have the regular winks, of course, as on any dating site. Luckily, they are relegated to their own tab in the messaging system because if you are an even half-attractive woman, your inbox will already be overflowing with other messages within hours. Turns out most of them are just notifications that some dude added you to his fa­vor­ites, sent you a private pic­ture key or requests yours. The fil­tering system comes in very handy here and will quickly be­come your fa­vor­ite tool. Check for Custom Messages and Pri­or­ity Mail, because those are the ones where he actually took the time to write you a personal note.

When writing and reading email, you have access to the guy’s key profile data right on the message screen as well as a link to his full profile, so you never forget which one of your dozens admirers you’re talking with. Very useful here is also the option to roll out the entire message history with that fellow, so it’s easy to refer to what was said or asked before.

An interesting option is to send collect messages. This makes sense with Ashley Madison’s fee structure, and allows you to email men without paying anything. Keep in mind though that he will have to pay to read your message, so make sure he’s a good match you would really like to get in touch with and say something meaningful.

The downgrade here comes from the same issues as with the search results: right-click disabled, cannot reliably work with multiple emails in separate tabs, back button issues. Also Ashley Madison stores mail for only 21 days, then they get auto-deleted. At least, you can manually save your best email gems for posterity in a special folder.

Other Features: 4.5/5

A unique Ashley Madison feature is the member feedback system.

Once you had contact with somebody, you can dish out those smiley points. And don’t worry, nobody can mark you down, no negative feedback here. Think about it, this really only makes sense on an affair website where people accept the idea that you can have multiple flings. On AM though, it can help you judge a guy’s personality and sincerity.

Very interesting also is the Traveling Man. What is the best time to have an affair without much risk of getting caught or long-term drama? When you’re on the road, of course! Yeah, those darn long business partner meetings far away… Much more fun when there’s a partner for a different kind of business! The Traveling Man feature allows to select a city outside of one’s own zip code and some criteria about who you want to meet and Ashley Madison will let you send a free custom priority message to up to 40 people.

Great idea, but there’s a downside: The feature is called Traveling MAN for a reason, it’s currently not available to women. Bummer! Can the otherwise so open-minded folks at Ashley Madison not envision traveling women? I hear a female version is in the works though and until then, you can at least take advantage of it from the other side. The Traveling Man messages are marked in your inbox and if you prefer short-term flings without long attachment, hook up with a business guy coming to town.

You can send virtual gifts to interesting men. There are two free options (Want to hint at your skilled tongue play? Send a cherry with a knotted stem!) and if you feel more generous, send a golden key to your “room” for 5 credits. I believe men have different options as I received roses and teddy bears. Those gifts arrive as a simple picture without any further function. Gimmicky perhaps, but still kinda neat.

Costs and Payments: 5/5

There’s no such thing as a free lunch and someone’s gotta pony up to make Ashley Madison happen. But how it happens is probably the biggest difference to other sites. There is no membership fee here, instead everything is based on credits. No monthly commitment, no automatic re-billing, unused credits never expire – much better suited for a website where you occasionally go to have an affair than for a regular dating site.

As free guest member you can browse full profiles, send winks, read and reply to messages, and respond to chat invitations. What matters is who makes first contact. The first person to send a custom email or initiate an IM session has to pay in credits, thereafter all further communication with that member is free. Here are costs in credits:

Accepting collect messages costs the same as directly sent ones, e.g. if you send a collect invitation to a chat session and the guy accepts, he’ll pay at least 30 credits for it.

To load up, Ashley Madison offers different bundles and I calculated what that means for a first email contact :

The affair guarantee will refund your money if you don’t find anyone within three months – yeah, like that’s gonna happen to a fun fearless female like you!

Payments can be made by credit card with discreet billing (won’t say Ashley Madison), by electronic check directly from a bank account or even via trusty old Mr. Postman.

But should you pay at all? Think about it this way: As an attractive woman, you’ll probably get lots of messages to which you can respond for free. But it’s the men who choose you first in this case and Mr. Hot-And-Charming may or may not be among them. Sure, you could send collect messages or winks, hoping that he will pay for the first contact, but that could make you look like you’re digging for a sugar daddy. But if you buy a couple of credits, the power shifts to you to choose whoever YOU want without feeling indebted to anybody.
Sign Up!

Married Date Link is a strange beast. I’ve had an account there for several months and although I mostly use Ashley Madison now, I still keep it around. A dud for men, but for women – there are a few things you need to be aware of and depending on what those things mean to you, Married Date Link may or may not be a good choice for you.

First of all, Married Date Link really is not just one site. It’s one puppy of a huge family. This company runs a long list of other “niche sites” like Divorced Date Link, Lonely Wives Date Link or even Biker Date Link that vary no more than in the picture on the homepage. Think 101 Dalmatians. They’re basically all the same except that the spots are in a different place. The keen observer that you are, you already noticed the sites are not strictly focussed on having an affair for married people. And the problem – or oppor­tu­ni­ty – is that the user database is shared across all those sites. So if you sign up at Married Date Link, and you’re an Asian lady, you will also show up at Asian Date Link. In fact, your log-in works across all of their sites. Let’s see what that leads to:

1. Members
2. Profile
3. Search
4. Messaging
5. Other Features
6. Costs

Members: 4/5

The good news is that all those niche sites combined make for a quite substantial supply of willing men. “Willing” being key as the nature of most of the sites is much more explicit than, say, Ashley Madison. Some numbers:

In all the large cities, there are over 1000 total guys in each of the age groups I looked at and from each group about 100 had checked in within the last 24 hours.(66o40rg) More than enough for even the most insatiable femme fatale among you! But remember that many of them did not necessarily sign up at Married Date Link, so it looks quite different if you’re really only out for other attached people. While total married members per city and age group were still in the upper hundreds, I typically found less than 30 married men that were active within the last day in each group.

I already mentioned the more explicit nature. No surprise since many other Datelink sites are strongly “hook up tonight”-themed. Cougar Date Link, Big Boob Date Link, or One Night Date Link anyone? And dogs being dogs – I mean, men being men, those sites seem to pull in the most male traffic. Very few members are aware of this little secret I just let you in on – they don’t even know about the existence of the other sites, let alone the shared member base behind the scenes. So everybody assumes that they are talking to another member of “their” site, e.g. a cougar or a girl looking for one-night stands. What do you expect the tone to be like?

You’ll find more naked flesh in profile pictures, and messages like

please send me some pictures and lets do it ok??

are quite common. Now, if you are into something purely sexual, no strings attached, or you just wanna re-live the booty calls from your college years, Married Date Link is a great site. If you’re looking for something more subtle or an affair that lasts longer than a night, you can still find a good partner, but you may have to try a bit harder. There are many more men than women, so your competition is lower and among the many guys are still plenty of fine Romeos.

Profile: 3/5

Another result of catering to many niches at the same time is that the profiles need to be much more detailed. Where e.g. Ashley Madison’s profile setup is somewhat limited to op­tions most relevant to married people looking for an affair, Married Date Link offers a very com­pre­hen­sive set of attributes for both your­self as well as for the guy (or girl?) you expect. On top of that you have a personality section with choices like ideal place to live, fashion sense or what to do with free time. My fave: “If I had $1000 dollars to blow, I would buy…” Yeah, probably a flight ticket, but I won’t tell you where…

To flaunt those sizzling glam shots of yours, you can of course assign one as your profile picture, but also create a public and as “backstage” gallery. Putting pictures in the public gallery will activate the “See More Photos” button on your profile and the backstage gallery can be accessed through the “Request Photo” button. Only guys who you granted this request will be able to see your backstage pictures. This is a bit more flexible than Ashley Madison’s solution as you can leave your main profile picture blank but still have public photos in your gallery. Not sure why you’d wanna do that, but I see it by quite a few guys. Maybe to prevent the wrong eyes from catching them too easily on a search result list?

One annoying bug in the “Describing myself” section: It does not show line breaks. So if you write more than a few lines, it all turns into one big blob of text, no paragraphs. Also, you cannot change your zip code or age after you signed up. Set in stone. While that kind of makes sense for your birthday, what if you move? Tough luck! Another issue is what’s not there. Don’t you think that one of the most important things to help keep track of who you’re looking at is… the user name? Married Date Link doesn’t and so the nickname is nowhere to be found on the profile. You better remember who you clicked on! Instead they tell you how often the profile was viewed. Yeah, thanks, very helpful!

Search: 3.5/5

The counterpart to the elaborate profile setup are elaborate search options. Besides the simple Quick Search by age and distance, you can do a Detailed Search across any of the many profile attributes including the personality section, a keyword search, user name search and there is a two-way match that finds men who match what you filled in your profile as your expectations and who in turn are looking for girls like you.

Very handy with all the options is the feature to save searches. Select your 800 (kidding!) most important criteria a man must meet, and save the settings as “Incredible Hunks” or “Fat Sugar Daddies”. Especially useful since the regular Detailed Search form resets with every search. You can even subscribe to a saved search by email and you’ll be notified about new dudes who match.

The zip code issue becomes more bothersome here because all searches center around a certain distance from your profile zip. You can select the distance, but not the location. So if you’re planning a trip somewhere, you’re truly out of luck – no Traveling Man here! With all the many other search options, I can’t believe they left this out.

The result list (see screen shot on top) looks a bit like something out of the Internet stone age (the 90′s), but is acceptable. You’ll see this 3-faces icon on many listings and it indicates that the guy has more pictures on his profile either in his public or private gallery. This dude here had public gallery photos but no profile picture as explained earlier. One beef I had with it was that, similar to Ashley Madison, you can’t right-click and open multiple profiles in tabs. Click, go back, click another one… Like I said, the 90′s are calling.

Messaging: 1/5

Here’s another secret of how Married Date Link operates. This is what your inbox is going to look like shortly after you signed up: See all the emails that are Replies to an earlier email from me? Hello? Do you really think I messaged a bunch of dudes with the exact same subject line? Of course not. The site did it for me. Without asking. They took my profile tag line as subject and my “Describing myself” section as main text and emailed it to a bunch of guys.

Now you have a swarm of puppies all wagging their tails that a woman actually emailed them first who won’t understand why they never hear back again. No wonder, after calling out some dude on a rude message, I got this response:

Ooops , my bad …. youre the first real person Ive heard from on this site . Sorry for being flip …. I had just read through about 10 fake responses and was frustrated …. can we start over ?

I find this pretty lame, and frankly, I can’t rule out that they actually do use entirely fake female profiles to lure guys into paying.

Then again, there seems to be only one wave of such automatic introductions on your behalf, and it’s certainly more annoying to the guys than to you, so let’s move on. The messaging system itself also has issues:

It can’t handle apostrophes. You may have noticed in the quotes above, “you’re” turns into “youre” and “let’s” into “lets”. Those were not typos, the message system swallows them.

There is no link to the sender’s profile when reading a message. You can see who the message is from, but the name is not linked, so you can’t check out the guy. You have to go back to the Inbox, find the email in the list and then you can click on the sender name from there. Cum­ber­some especially when the emails all have the same subject.

No message history. Other than at Ashley Madison, you can’t see your prior emails with a guy when reading or replying to a message. Not all is lost though – you can at least re-sort your inbox by sender, but you still have to open each message separately.

On the upside, messages stay longer – for 30 days. And you can open multiple messages at once in separate tabs.

One more issue are the photo requests. When someone requests your backstage gallery, you’re not notified of the request. On one hand, it’s good that it doesn’t clutter up your mailbox as at Ashley Madison. On the other hand, you most likely will never see the request because you have to click on My Photos, then Gallery Request every time just to check and most people don’t do that.

See anything missing? Winks? Pokes? Nudges? Nada. Not that I miss that feature much, but some do. Too bad. Married Date Link doesn’t have it.

Other Features: 1/5

Here’s the third secret: Married Date Link advertises “Live Video and Audio Chat 24/7″, sounds great right? Find Mr. Knock-Me-Off-My-Feet, start talking right away! And if he has a webcam, you can check him out in person or even get into some cyber action? Right?? Far from it!

The “Live Chat” is nothing but a link to a professional cam girl site. Meaning you get paid girls – yes girls, no guys – stripping in front of a camera. You can tell them what to do but you’ll have to create a new login and pay separately for it. For me about as useful as penis extenders.

Oh, what did you just say? Well, there is also a Sexy Links section, supposedly with handy resources for online daters. Hmm… handy only if you’re in the market for … wait for it … penis extenders! Hey girls, any takers? Yeah, I think that’s the sound of crickets chirping.

One useful feature that no other site has is a discussion forum where you can actually chat with other members. Be warned though, the tone is kind of childish.

Costs: 5/5

So here’s the best part. Married Date Link is completely free for women. You can use all features (except the video chat) and never pay a dime. Be aware though that that’s not true for men. The poor chaps can’t even see your profile without paying. Yes, even if you message a guy, he can read your email, but he can’t check you out until he paid. And of course, they need to pay to send messages to anyone, including replies.

Payment works in a traditional membership model. As long as the subscription is paid, all features are open without any further fees. The options for men are:

I usually don’t like such imbalance as it gives power away. As a modern woman, I can pay for my own stuff – thank you very much – including my dating. But it’s hard to argue with free, so I give it 5 points.

Overall, Married Date Link makes a bit of a sleazy impression on a girl as it’s clearly focused on horny men and getting them to pay with dirty tricks. Hence the “exposed”. However if you’re aware of the caveats, the abundance of guys and the low competition from other girls make it a decent second choice. At the end, it’s the members that count, not so much the features of the site.
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Coming soon, but initial impression isn’t that great.