Veggies tricked into dating meat-gobbling escorts Vegetarians looking online for lovers who have the same dietary preferences as they do were misled by dating site VeggieDates.com, the Advertising Standards Authority ruled today. The ASA has demanded that the homepage of VeggieDates be changed to reflect the fact that most of its members were neither vegetarian nor vegan. …
"a frustrated Veggie Dates member who discovered that the majority of other singles on the site in fact enjoyed eating dead animals"
Not all bad - better to discover that than that your date enjoys eating live animals, surely?
Have to wonder how VeggieDates expected to get away with this one...
is pretty tame but the idea of speciality dating sites sharing a common pool of members is terrifying.
I can image carrot munchers joining this site and finding thier details appearing on more exotic dating sites that share a single global pool of members.
If employers did a search for your details and say found you on an "odd" dating site, this could wreck your chances of a good job.
"is pretty tame but the idea of speciality dating sites sharing a common pool of members is terrifying."
I know of dating site that started sharing it's pool of members with a dating site specializing in homosexual dating. At one point the filter on the homosexual dating site failed and some heterosexual members started getting propositions from members of the same gender they were not at all interested in.
It was explained in the article. It wasn't a tech limitation but the fact that the profiles were pooled with other sites. Presumably they all used a standard template profile format with no allowance for custom fields.
Or the site was too lazy to pursue an agreed change to the profile for all sites.
If profiles on VeggieDates have an attribute that says 'Veggie' or 'Vegan', then it can be searched on, even if the other sites in the pool do not have a corresponding profile attribute. Searches initiated from any other site in the pool may not know of the attribute, and will then not allow you to select on that, but searches initiated from VeggieDates should know about that attribute and automatically drop any profile from elsewhere in the pool.
If they use a search that only deals with a lowest common denominator, profile-wise, then VeggieDates admins are no more intelligent than the plants they're eating.
Surely only returning vegetarians would have required modifying all of say 1 fucking line of code.
I think "not possible to implement" most likely translates as either "we pay someone else to run out dating network and don't have a fucking clue how it works" or alternatively "we sold all your info to a 3rd party dating site"
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Unfortunately there was no filter to let people search for users who had ticked that option. Veggie Dates explained that it was a feature that they had intended to include but it had not been possible.
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WTF - seriously? It's not possible to do a conditional search on your database to only return results where "user.veggie = 1"?
the common pool of dating profiles which the Veggie Dating site was using to bulk out its own membership list didn't have a field for food preferences therefore there was nothing to filter on for anyone who didn't register directly with the Veggie Dating site.
In most of these sites, the most attractive entries in the database belong to escorts who have signed up. Its a common tactic, they chat someone up and then when it comes to the meeting its... "Oh by the way do you have a contribution for my 'upkeep'" or similar... Its a remarkably successful ploy!
All it needs is a field that indicates 0-Anorexic, 1-Vegan, 2-Vegetarian and 3-Omnivore. The filter would just look at that.. If they cannot do that, they have no access to their system or they are not capable of understanding the idea.
PS - having spent my college days there, I wonder if there might need to be an additional value - 4-Glaswegian
If this site is anything like other ones I've had dealings with, the code was written (badly) by some cheap php shop in Bangalore or Mumbai and the owners don't have a clue how it works. I was asked by owners of a similar site a couple of years ago to take a look to see if I could add some extra functionality and just looking through the site's code was enough to make me want to tear my eyes out and retire from programming forever!
with options sumin' like :-
field (1) anoxeric , correct-weight , obese
field (2) vegan, vegitarian , pescitarian, lacto-ovo-vegitarian , omnivore , carnivore
I can't see how you can mix up vegi / meat eaters with anorexics. There must surely be meat eating anorexics , ok they don't eat enough , but they still eat something .
You need a field for "vegan level":
level 0: I don't even chew my own fingernails.
level 1: I don't eat cute animals.
level 2: I don't eat ugly animals.
level 3: I don't eat anything with a face.
level 4: I don't eat anything with a body.
level 5: I don't eat anything with a shadow.
"Of course we serve vegetarians: what do you think cows are?" - sign in a restaurant in Jackson, Wy.
Since "omnivore" (from Latin: omni all, everything; vorare to devour)* seems to mean "eats everything", I'm at a loss to guess what Glaswegians eat that omnivores don't. Even deep-fried Mars bars and haggis seem to fall into the "everything" category.
Although, come to think of it, perhaps I'd rather not know.
*source: Wikipedia
... on Failbook offering dates according to whatever "targetted" information it can dredge out of your personal preferences.
Like Salsa Dancing? Join Salsa Dance Dating!
Like Real Ale? Join Real Ale Drinking Girls!
Like Computers? Too bad, sunshine!
Of course you have to pay to join and there's no guarantee that they'll actually find someone in your town/ country/ continent who's interested in the same thing...
You're all making the mistake of assuming that the person's attributes are stored in a thing-per-field basis. An alternative is to wrap up all that stuff into a single serialized field called "attributes" or something. It's an approach taken by a well-known wordpress plugin, and yes, it makes it essentially impossible to do a sensible search for "products that weigh more than 2 kilos" or similar.
All these people claiming that it's so easy to add in this filter in the SQL are right - but missing the point.
That'd severely decrease the number of profiles on the site; less profiles, so it's less popular, meaning less people will visit or come back.
This is no different from 'dating sites' which steal profiles/pictures from other sites, often with fake info. A quick google for "Dating site stole my picture" (without quotes) reveals this happens a lot. I'm sure all these companies claim these are real users stealing others' info; I think we can all safely assume this isn't always the case.
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