Date In Asia Reviews

(based on 10 reviews)

157 of 309 people found this review helpful

In the past I would have recommended this site, but not any more.

I joined the site long ago. In many ways it's good and in some ways it's improved slowly over time. But
in other ways it's got worse, and now it's got nasty.

It always did have some strange and ugly characteristics. I don't know about now, but in the past they had a specific policy of having no separate category for TG/TV/TS people, and they way they described this was rude. But this is a stupid policy because T* is NOT the same as being genetically [whatever], so to deny this is to deny reality. And for them to say in-effect (or actually, I forget the wording now), "if you don't like it, tough", is absolutely not necessary and it's not nice.

And by way of proof that my views and not theirs on this are correct, at the time I got a huge number of messages from the T*'s, all of which were of zero interest to me, and all of which wasted my time and annoyed me. So this is a policy which is useless to those people too. Now I think they may have changed the policy, but after recent events I'm too annoyed with the site to check.

Later on they changed their photo policy to only allow faces. Fine if they also allowed other photos, but they don't. So apart from the fact that I and I'm sure many people would want to see other photos, for the many, many people who lie about their weight but often give themselves away with their full-length photos, there's no way to know any more.

Quite recently and without any notification they started blocking access via proxy servers. Although of course proxy servers can be abused, so can anything else. They're just a part of the Internet, there's nothing bad about them. Some people have to use them for various reasons. Other people prefer to for various reasons. Perfectly good, valid, legitimate, technical, personal, practical or other reasons.

For example, try accessing all your favourite web sites if you travel a lot. Nowadays you may well have trouble with some of them, due to dimwit "security" policies. After all, if you're in the UK today, China tomorrow, Australia next week, obviously you're a nasty hacker. So you'll need to surmount a series of maybe impossible hurdles to prove otherwise. Unless maybe you use a proxy so that all of your accesses come from the same location, which may (or not) avoid some of those problems. Or maybe you just don't want your ISP (and then the NSA, GCHQ, ASIO and worse) recording all of your dating site visits, purely because it's not their business. Or maybe your mobile plan forces all of your traffic through your telcom proxy. And etc.

But no, now if you want to use a proxy you just can't. Worse, I suspect that that if you try, at the very least you get flagged as suspicious. And if so, that's just outright wrong / incorrect / unfair / unreasonable.

More recently when I visited the site I saw a message saying my profile was "not approved". This is the complete, polite, accurate, honest profile that's been there for ages. One which was better than the vast majority they have there. But now, suddenly, with no explanation, it's "not approved". No reason why, which is wrong in itself. How can you fix "problems" when you don't know what you allegedly did wrong?

Investigating this lead to a compulsory profile edit page headed by a long list of reasons to refuse or delete profiles. None of which have ever applied to me. (And unlike, you know, everybody else, I do actually read web site Terms of Use as well. Nothing was ever wrong with the profile.)

So I clicked the save button, only to be told my profile was "closed", with another long list of possible reasons for closure. None of which applied to me. I find it hard even to imagine it would be due to untruthful complaints about me from other members because I haven't communicated with anyone there for a long time.

I have no idea what happened, but from my perspective, it's accused, tried, judged, found guilty and sentenced to death for a crime which never even happened. Totally wrong, totally despicable, totally stupid.

The people that run the site seem to arbitrarily apply restrictions and rules without warning, policies which are so badly thought out that you can immediately think of cases in which they're going to hurt the innocent. And insultingly, the phrasing of their partial explanations and justifications are aggressive and rude, pretty much accusing you of being at fault if you even have to ask.

I know that dating sites have many problems with scammers and abusers of various kinds. Dealing with that absolute torrent of misuse is very difficult. But if what I've described above is an attempt to limit those problems, their cure for the abuse is killing the innocent.

So be wary if you use this site. You could invest time and effort into it and then find your profile has been deleted for no good reason, and you'll never even know why. And I doubt that you'll get an answer if you ask.

In summary, I would not recommend Date In Asia to a friend.