I keep getting a few emails each week asking about not being able to find replies to your ad on the site. Back in August 2007, we announced that we had changed from keeping the replies on the site to forwarding them to you anonymously. If you still have questions please feel free to contact us.

It appears there are 1 or 2 spammers harvesting the anonymous email links on our sites and then sending spam to them. From what we can see most of this is ending up in spam/junk email boxes and not reaching your inbox but to be proactive we will be encoding these email links (I will post when this has been completed). What does this mean? Well, for one the link will more than likely say “click here to respond to this ad” rather than pers-####@thedatelist.com as it does now.

Now comes the question of using web based email clients like Yahoo as there is no longer an email address to copy and paste into your Yahoo email. Until a feasible solution is found you will need to click the link which will open the email client on your PC and then copy the email address from there. While that is not an ideal solution it will keep the spammers at bay for now. We will continue to work to make a better solution to this. It may also be in your benefit to use Gmail and have that email read by your email client on your PC and also allowing you to respond to ads using your Gmail email address without having to copy an paste.

To get a Gmail account click on this link - www.gmail.com. For explanation of how to get your mail on your PC using Gmail do the following - create the email account > login to the email account > click on settings > click on the Forwarding and POP tab > select Enable POP only for mail that arrives from now on > click save changes. Also, on the Forwarding and POP page you will see a link for configuration instructions - click on it and then select the email client you have on your PC to configure it to get the mail from Gmail.

For the simplicity of it in the coming weeks I will be making some video tutorials to show you how to navigate and best make use of the site. For starters there will be 3 videos: Basic site navigation, how to post an ad and password recovery.

If you have any other suggestions for video tutorials please submit them by clicking on this link - contact us

We are in the works of adding a few features and modifications to all the sites. These should make the site easier for everyone to use.

First, a lot of people seem to lose their password for the ad and are unable to view replies to their ad. Next, they email us and we have the password resent. This has become quite a task of late and as such we will be modifying the sites so that replies are forwarded to you directly from the sender via a pass through email system on the site. The person replying to your ad will click on a link which sends an email to an anonymous-email-addy@thedatelist.com which triggers the site to forward the reply to the email address you used to post the ad. People replying to your ad will not have access to your email address. Your email address will be unknown to them until you reply to their email.

Surfer reads ad > clicks on reply link > writes an email reply > reply is sent to an anonymous email addy on the site > the site forwards this email to the ad’s poster > you choose to reply to the email or not.

Second, ads will be editable. Right now you can post and delete your ad. Soon, you will be able to edit the ad as well.

Third, a flagging system will be established so that if you find a post on the site you find unworthy you may flag it. This will be helpful on cutting down on double and triple posts as well as spam. This is your online dating community so make it what you want it to be. How many times must an ad be flagged to be removed? That will depend on the volume of ads or if someone is abusing the system. It may take one person flagging an ad or it may take a lot more.

Fourth, we will institute an automatic reposting system right on the page where you write your ad. You will be able to choose to have your ad automatically reposted every 7 days, 30 days or not to have it automatically reposted. When your ad is reposted the old ad will be deleted from the system and a new email will be sent to you letting you know your ad has been posted.

There will also be a few other small changes that are mostly cosmetic but should also make the site even easier for you to use. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions please feel free to contact us.

After several attempts we have finally come up with a design we like for the Gay Date List. Big props to Fused for putting up with us through this process. There are a few minor tweaks needed for some of the older browsers - IE6 especially (and I am sure a few of you still use IE6). If you do have Internet Explorer 6 and want to upgrade you can for free from Microsoft. Just click here and you will be taken to the Microsoft IE7 download page.

Again, thanks Fused for the awesome work!

In early 2007 we will be adding a new site: College Date List. As soon as the redisgn of The Date List and Gay Date List are complete College Date List will go live. Instead of pages for each city, each college/university will have a page. For instance Auburn would be auburn.collegedatelist.com and Notre Dame will be notredame.collegedatelist.com instead of having the pages broken down by city.

Please feel free to contact us to suggest a college or university.

We have spent months and months on getting the script that runs The Date List and Gay Date List fine tuned and with that done we will be redesigning the whole site to give it a better visual appearance. If you have any input on what you would like to see or anything that you think would make the site better please leave a comment.

We have also had a few people request that we set up responses to ads like Craigslist where the email is just passed through to you and not stored on our site. While there advantages to that we also feels it opens the site up to fake ads and spammers just wanting to fill your inbox with junk so we have opted not to do that for now.

A picture is worth a 1000 words and will also get you at least ten times the responses. With that being said, there are some pics that do NOT work to your benefit.

- men, a pic of your genitals are really a turn off to a lady looking to hook-up.
- old pics that do not look like you are good for memories sake but not good to represent how you look.
- fake pics. Hopefully, an explanation is not needed.

What pics work the best?

- A recent face pic (please smile).
- A full body shot (clothed).

What pics are prohibited?

- any pic with graphic sex or object penetration.
- a pic of you with your friends in it. They did not approve their photo to be posted by you.
- copyrighted images you do not own the copyright for.

Happy Posting!

We have added RSS feeds to the home page and every city page. These are dynamic RSS feeds that are constantly updated as new ads are posted so we can keep you up to date with the latest ads via RSS. The home page RSS feed gives you the latest 15 ads for the entire site whereas a city page RSS would give you the last 15 ads for that city. Along with the industry standard RSS feed button we have included buttons to add the feed to; My Yahoo!, Google and My AOL.

If you have any questions about RSS feeds please feel free to contact us.

If you visited the site you saw we were down briefly last night. No worries. We were doing a server update and installing a few things so we can move forward and give you a better experience at The Date List and the Gay Date List. This new update coming out should increase the amount of posts giving you more ads to read and more ads to answer. BUT….make sure you post your ad too and remember ads with a pic get 10 times the responses and ad without a pic does.

Now, with the server update instead of having some wacky looking link we can make them user friendly. For instance if you live in Albany, NY and want to get just the Albany page you can type in and/or bookmark:

albany-ny.thedatelist.com.
albany-ny.gaydatelist.com

We added the two letter state abreviation in there seperated with a hyphen as in some instances we have more than two cities with the same name such as Portland, Maine & Oregon. Also, note on multiple word cities to remove the spaces. Thus New York City would be newyorkcity-nythedatelist.com.

If you make a mistake in typing it out and hit enter do not worry as by default (as long as you spell the domain name correctly; thedatelist.com or gaydatelist.com) the link will take you to the home page for the site.

The next implementation we will be making soon will render women seeking men, etc. as follows:

albany-ny.thedatelist.com/w4m/
When this is ready I will let you know but it should not be too far off.

If you have any questions or suggestions please contact us. Thanks!