Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
Those of you having a community website inevitably have to deal with processing users information such as name, e-mail, telephone number, sometimes residential address and even billing details. It’s not that everone is happy to share it with a site owner, but almost any registration form requires a user’s private details. In order to gain trust of your existing and potential members from the very start you have to explain (clearly and honestly) what kind of personal information you keep track of, why you need it and how you use it. That’s what a Privacy Policy is needed for: to reassure users that their private data is safe in your hands. Nothing sophisticated of course, but requiring serious attention.
If we speak about a ‘king-size’ business attracting special attention of law-keepers – it is better to hire a professional lawyer for writing a Privacy Policy, as an incorrect privacy statement may seriously affect your business. Otherwise, you can perfectly handle writing a Privacy Policy by yourself. As an option, you can take one of the numerous Privacy Policy samples on the Internet, and adjust it for your website. Just take into account the tips given below.
1) Tell what personal information you collect from your website users, and why.
Your website members have a legal right to know what types of their private data you will have access to. You have to list everything: name, e-mail address, telephone, IP address etc. Then you should explain what you need that data for, and how it is going to be shared within and probably outside your company. Your aim is to assure users that their personal information will not be used in any way abusing your privacy. Give special attention to this part to avoid any possible legal issues.
2) Give an explanation accompanied with certain examples on why members’ information is safe in your hands.
By filling up your Privacy Policy with broad security statements wrapped in technical language you make it look ’sophisticated’, which is not a synonim to ‘good’. Remember that most of your site visitors are not experienced webmasters, and reading something like ‘Security Socket Layer’ and ‘encryption’ they will most likely have a feeling that you are hiding something behind the technicalisms. So, better build your explanation on plain English clearly indicating what measures you take to protect their private correspondence and billing details, and what makes your servers secure. You should also give a try to explaining special terms, but don’t go too deep though. Being brief and clear is a key point.
3) Give the site members access to viewing and editing their private details.
Having an option to access and change the personal information at any moment site users feel more confident about sharing their personal details with you. So you should tell where and how they can do this, and how editing profile info might influence their membership status and profile page availability.
4) Show your members a ‘way out’.
In other words, specify how they will be able to terminate their site membership in case of being dissatisfied with your services,
or due to any other reason. It is always sad to lose customers, no doubts. But if you give users an option to leave whenever they want, and with no headache – they will definitely feel more relaxed about subscribing for your service. From your part it is required to indicate where and how they can delete a profile or unsubscribe from mass-mailing, and what will happen to their private data after they are no longer on your team. Remember that most site visitors would read your Privacy Policy just for finding that out.
5) Keep your site member aware of possible Privacy Policy updates.
Some companies practice periodical Privacy Policy revising that results in minor or global changes. If you have plans for such occasional or regular updates – let your members know by including a notification that would sound like: ‘Our Privacy Policy is revised on a regular basis, so please check for updates’.
My final advice is – make your Privacy Policy honest and easy to understand. This will help you gain trust of your site users, and will give them a good feeling about your business.
I hope this information will be helpful for SkaDate community and dating script customers, and for those only thinking to start their own online dating business.
Best wishes,
Irene
Image sources: destateparks.com, mistera.co.uk, elitewebmail.com
Posted in Miscellaneous | Tags: dating script · how to write a privacy policy · online dating · privacy policy · privacy statement · SkaDate · writing a privacy policy
Monday, September 28th, 2009
Knowing the typical scammers’ tricks allowing them to swindle credulous online community members prevents from a lot of trouble.
But still, the major question is how to make your website safe enough for the members to relax and concentrate on finding love and friendship they are seeking rather than on ‘unmasking’ scammers. SkaDate community software offers you several tools that will make it a lot easier for you to guard your site members’ peace and quiet.
The first feature to check is our Profile Messages Filter. It is a compound integrated tool unifying 2 methods to protect your members from scamming and spam mail – filter by words, and filter by identical content.
As you might have noticed from the fraud techniques descriptions given in the previous article, scammers tend to send ‘introductory’ letters with the very same content to several potential victims. Their psychology is as clear as day – such bulk mass-mailing will bring at least one-two positive results out of, say, ten trials. 
And they do not waste time bothering about the unique content of their inviting love messages. This is why SkaDate developers team integrated a Message Filter into our online dating software that stops messages in case two and more of them have identical content. Intended recipients will not get these messages until a site Administrator approves them. This feature also helps you to prevent spam mailing on your site, which is a significant advantage.
Here is one more of your opportunities – Message filter by words. It allows you to select and add words, whose presence in mailbox messages will make them stuck in the filter. For example, one of the commonly used scamming strategies is to redirect the mailbox conversation from the site to the scammer’s personal e-mail. Why? Not to leave any evidence of his fraud on the site, and not to make a site Administrator suspicious at some point. So, a good idea would be to add an ‘at symbol’ (@) to the list of restricted words. If a member gives his e-mail to another member – you will be the first one to know about that. Another item to be added is a number ‘190′. Including it to the list of ‘potentially dangerous’ words on the site will help you avoid Telephone scam. Here http://agencyscams.com/scammer-letter-templates.html you can find words and word combinations used by scammers most frequently. There are also a few e-mail templates with a typical scam-intended content. Studying this information will help you recognize tricksters and prevent them from interacting with members on your site.
The two methods described above are good when it comes to internal site mailbox conversations. But what to do if a scammer tries to reach his/her potential victim by, let’s say, leaving a comment to the Forum or Blog post, photo and video. Something like: ‘Hey, what a nice photo! If you want – I can send you mine. Just 
write to this e-mail…’ – and same story again. For such situations the ‘Badwords’ feature in the Admin Panel will be an indispensable help. Basically, it is similar to the Message Filter by words – you add the words you do not want your members to use on the site to the Badwords list, and each time someone uses them – they appear as ‘censored’ in the comment text. With this feature you can prevent users from exchanging e-mail addresses, not to mention an ability to free your site from abusive language.
Besides the already mentioned track-down methods, SkaDate community software Admin Panel interface allows you to inspect all the newly-registered profiles before they become available to the site audience. Until a Site Administrator approves (or unapproves) a new member’s profile – it is inactive, and thus, harmless for your site. Just be attentive during the profile review, remember all the scamming techniques, and writing templates scammers commonly use for self-descriptions. Also, pay strong attention at the profile photo. If it seems too good to be true – it most likely is. Real people’s pictures rarely look like have been taken in a professional studio and brought to perfection in Photoshop.
Take some time to check the above-mentioned features at SkaDate community software Admin Panel demo (login details: admin/skadate).
Now, what to do if you have found a suspicious profile, or a confirmed scammer on your site? Definitely, to block it from accessing your site, and report it to an anti-scam agency. There are lots of sites fighting against scam on the web. They create scammers databases for you to be able to check if the person you suspect 
belongs to Internet fraudsters, or to denounce a scammer laid bare by you. SkaDate dating software team does not stand aside from this hard and important work. On one of our websites you can find a database of profiles used in scam, and report your own unpleasant findings. Feel free to visit http://www.dotsilver.com/antiscam/ and share your experience with us.
The main thing to remember is that being a Site Administrator obliges you to take care of your site reputation by providing security and confidence for your site members, who will not need to worry about losing their funds and faith in love.
If you have already been into scam, and have some more advices on how to avoid it – you are welcome to share it in an article comment.
Best wishes,
Irene
Image sources: http://news.cnet.com, http://photos.tradeholding.com, http://www.wsbtv.com
Posted in Miscellaneous, Products, SkaDate | Tags: community software · dating scam · dating software · online dating · SkaDate
Monday, August 31st, 2009
Running an online dating or a social networking site is a very specific kind of business with its own ‘highs and lows’. One of the pitfalls both site owners and members have to be aware of is online dating scam.
Briefly speaking, scamming is swindling someone for financial gain. When it comes to online dating sites – ’someone’ is usually a single man (almost never a woman) searching for his destiny in the World Wide Web. He is usually trusting and unsuspecting, which makes him almost a 100% confirmed candidate to fall for online Internet fraud.
Since scam is not something new in the world of online dating industry, there are tons of articles on the Internet describing ‘red light’ symptoms indicating that you are being fooled, and suggesting solutions on how to avoid such traps. People read them, become more educated and careful… and they stop trusting online community sites.
In order to make your website a secure place for acquaintance and entertainment, you should know how scammers typically act, what tricks they use to swindle dating site members, and obviously how to ‘catch’ such impostors before they cause any harm.
Below you fill find some common scammers’ fraud schemes description. As they say, ‘forewarned is forearmed’.
There are three generally known online dating scam types: a ‘Telephone scam’, a so-called ‘Russian Bride scam’ and a ‘419 Nigerian scam’.
Telephone scam ‘works’ pretty easy. A scammer gives you his/her phone number and asks you to call. You do so, which seems pretty logical if you are unprepared for a negative result. You hear an automatic voice machine (sometimes even a live person). You hang up. You get a phone bill that makes you stiffen in surprise. What is the trick? Scammers use so-called ‘premium rate’ phone and fax-back numbers usually starting with 190. The cost of a call to such number can be about $5 per minute or even higer. One more telephone fraud scheme involves a scammer asking you to dial 90# and hang up the conversation (he/she will definitely provide you with a trustworthy reason why you should do that). As soon as you follow the instructions, the cheat will get access to making long-distance calls using your telephone balance. This 90# scamming technique is no longer popular these days (since telephone communications have become more advanced and difficult to hack), and initially it was targeted for business and governmental numbers (requiring to dial 9 or 9-0 to access an outside line). But still, you should keep it in mind.
‘Russian Bride scam’ is very typical for online dating sites, so give it proper attention. Here is how it usually works. Imagine that you are registered on a dating site or a social network. You are lonely and dreaming to find a soul-mate, who is beautiful, young and naive. And one day you receive a message from a profile that looks very similar to your dream. The only drawback is that the girl who sent it lives in Russia (Ukraine, or one of the other former USSR countries). The message would usually be written in broken English, but have vague content anyone would like. Such letters typically start with a brief description of a potential
bride’s personal qualities (such as being honest, loving, not mercenary etc), and of how much she was impressed with your profile. She will promise to send her photos in case you are interested. And most likely you will receive pictures of a model looking just too good to be a real person. In some cases there will be a real girl on those pictures (and they will look more natural). The only problem is that she has nothing to do with the love messages you receive. No doubts that her photo was stolen from the Internet. But let’s get back to your correspondence. Once you start taking serious interest in your new friend, ’she’ will let you know about her feelings for you. Of course, she is in love. You’ve been chatting for only a week or so? You have never met or even talked to each other on the phone? Well, there are no barriers for true love, and you were definitely meant for each other – this is what she will tell you. Then the most interesting part starts. This girl from a country where there is no job, and winters are too cold will want to come and see you, because her love for you is so strong. But she will need some money to get her visa done (maybe about $300). Once you send it – she will definitely need more…. There can be hundreds of reasons: booking tickets, sick relatives, telephone and Internet connection bills (she can’t imagine even a day without communicating with you!) and so on, and so forth… She will never reveal her bank account details, and will ask you to send funds via some money transfer system. Finally (better sooner than later), you will understand that you are being fooled. But by that time you might become broken-hearted and a few hundred dollars poorer.
‘419 Nigerian scam’ named after the section of the Nigerian law pertaining to fraud unifies several methods of advanced fee fraud. It includes lottery scam, bank loan scam, romance scam and many other kinds of scam (if you are interested, you may check them here http://www.419hell.com/Nigerian_Scam_Baiting/Types_of_419_Scams.html). I will tell you about the specific dating or romance scam. As a rule, you will receive a letter from a profile with an attractive picture. She or he will not be so pushy at first. Following one of the fraud schemes, a scammer will tell you that he/she actually lives in the US, but is currently working abroad… say, in Nigeria. Your communication with such scammer may last for a couple of months or even up to a year before a standard process of sucking out your budget starts. A fraudster will become your friend and make you believe you can trust him. But one day something will definitely happen – your ‘friend’ will completely run out of finance just a week before the salary, or he will get to a hospital (or even to jail), he will need to buy a ticket, cash the money order or save a dying aunty who needs an urgent operation…. By the time the cheat asks you for money, your vigilance will most likely be completely lulled, as scammers are very good at psychology, and they know tons of ‘it-sounds-like-truth’ stories. Once you send the money
– you can forget about it. Most likely, the scammer will disappear too… unless he feels that he can ‘milk’ your wallet for a bit longer.
These were the typical Internet fraud schemes applied on online dating sites by scammers, and earning millions yearly to the ones using them. As an online community site owner, you can add your share to the hard work of fighting against Internet criminals by making your site free from scam and thus, safe and reputable.
In my next article I will introduce a few easy ways to prevent (or get rid of) scamming on your site using tools provided by SkaDate dating software.
For now, feel free to leave your comments and share scam stories you’ve been into or ever heard of. Your experience is very important.
Best wishes,
Irene
Image sources: http://i197.photobucket.com , http://onlinedatinginuk.com , http://www.russian-women-info.com
Posted in Miscellaneous | Tags: 419 Nigerian scam · advanced fee fraud · dating scam · dating software · online community site · online dating · Russian Bride scam · SkaDate · social networking
Monday, August 24th, 2009
Now that your dating site content is optimized and ready to get indexed by search engines, it is time for a final stage – submitting your site to search databases.
Among the search engines Google certainly takes the leading position as the most ‘haunted’ one due to being relevant. This is why I will use it as an example while defining the steps you need to take to let search engines know about your site.
So, the initial step to ‘get friends’ with Google is to be the first to introduce yourself by submitting your site URL through this link http://www.google.com/addurl.html. If you don’t do this – the sky won’t fall over your head, and somehow or other Google spiders will find and index your website on their own… But time is precious in terms of promotion and advertising, and we all want your online dating /social community to reach the top as fast as possible. So why not take a few minutes to help the restless Google crawlers? Good news is that you won’t need to re-submit your site URL again even if you change it – once indexed, it will be tracked and updated automatically (provided you changed only the domain name and did not alter the site content).
Next move is submitting your sitemap to Google. Basically, sitemap is a list of all the website links accessible to users organized in a hierarchical (top-to-down) manner. It helps Google crawlers ‘understand’ the structure of your site and, thus, provide a significantly better indexation to its pages (essential for Flash or JavaScript menus not containing HTML links). SkaDate dating software team developed an integrated tool for automatic XML sitemap generation, which allows you to get a ready map of your site structure by a simple button click in the Admin Panel.
So, what happens next? I bet, most of you wonder how exactly Google (or any other search engine) ‘calculates’ the web site’s relevancy and importance for defining its position in search results, what factors it takes into account, and what is the priority of these factors for such evaluation. No one except for the Google staff members knows this mysterious algorithm. Even SEO sharks will hardly ever get close enough to understanding it, as it constantly gets updated. But still there is some useful information for all of us to learn.
Let’s take a look at Google PageRank, often referred to as ‘PR’ (not to confuse with Public Relations). This is how Google itself describes it: ”PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.” PageRank grades from 0 to 10. The higher your web page rank is – the better (www.yahoo.com and www.microsoft.com have PR9, www.google.com has PR10). Please, note that I mentioned a ‘web page’, not a ‘web site’. For a search engine all your site pages are ‘autonomous’ objects for indexation. So, each page will have its own PR. PageRank is invisible to Internet users in search results. But it can be seen by means of a special tool, such as Google Toolbar. It has both numerical and visual (scale bar) indicators.
As you might have understood from the PageRank description given above, it is based on the quantity and (most importantly) quality of the inbound links to your site pages. If a few web sites with good positions in search results (it is 
exactly high search ranks, not PR I am speaking about right now) link to your site, they give you a share of their popularity, thus, helping you to get a better PageRank too. So, you should be quite ‘picky’ while going for link exchange, since even multiple references from web sites with low Search Engine Results Placement (SERP) will not help you much in SEO.
And here comes the most important part. PageRank is just one of many components Google engine takes into consideration while ‘granting’ a search results position to your site. Which means that even if you get a PR which is 10 out of 10 – it does not guarantee you the top position in a search rank. This is proved by a number of examples when a web page with a lower PageRank got a higher SERP as compared to its competitors. Besides, PageRank is solely the Google invention, and does not affect search results positions in other search engines in any way. So, no need to focus only on this ‘magic PR’, but it’s essential to give enough attention to other important aspects, such as developing a carefully-optimized site content, choosing relevant keywords, and many more useful things mentioned in my previous articles devoted to SEO.
Search engine optimization is a science, whose motto is definitely ‘live and learn’. It’s constantly altered and updated. So take time to follow the newest SEO trends and strategies – and you will see how rewarding the results of your online business may be.
From my side, I will always be glad to answer your questions and assist in every way.
Feel free to leave your comments.
Best wishes,
Irene
Image sources: http://www.crsolutionsgroup.com , http://www.tasticproductions.com , http://icp.ge.ch
Posted in Marketing, Products, SkaDate | Tags: dating software · online dating · PageRank · search engine optimization · SEO · SkaDate · social community · XML sitemap
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
SkaDate released a new dating software build – SkaDate 7.1201. The main features delivered in the SkaDate 7.1201 build are:
-Top rated blog lists
-Polls
-French and Italian languages
-Three new community and dating templates
-Custom Backgrounds admin approve tool
-IM/Chat Smiles;
-FavIcon
-Members’ photo count;
-Paging for Friend Lists;
- Apply photo watermark to all photos
-Admin photo upload tool
-My Saved Searches
- Latest Activity
- Status Line
Three new well designed templates: Color Touch II, Emotion and Dating Shine.
SkaDate presents three new templates for dating sites and social networks. Starting or running a social network and a dating web site seems to be a daunting task, but with the new great looking templates you may attract more members who will love your web site. SkaDate web designers sharpen their skills on continuing basis and gladden us with their artworks. Take a look at the templates:
Polls
Here are screen shots of the admin and user interfaces of the Pools feature. You may easily create a new poll and set particular answers to your questions. This feature is useful for collecting your members’ feedback which can be used for the analysis of their needs and desires.
Custom Backgrounds admin approve tool.
Sometimes it is necessary to check your members’ background images to prevent using copyrighted materials. Here are screen shots of the admin interface of this feature:
IM/Chat Smiles
Smiles is a common feature of a number instant messengers and chats on the net and now you may express your emotions by using smiles in SkaDate dating software chat and IM.
FavIcon
You may upload your favorite icon and your members will see it in a browser. SkaDate.com has its own favicon. Favicon maybe your logotype or any other picture you want to show in front of your web address.
Number of members photos.
This improvement helps your members to see how many photos a member has without looking at her profile.
Admin photo upload tool.
This feature was in SkaDate 6 and we recoded it for SkaDate 7 basing on customers’ feedback. Now administrators may upload photos to a member’s profile.
My Saved Searches
We made it easier for your members to save their searches. If your member finds a number of interesting profiles he may save the search and it will be available at his fingertips – Member Home page. He can look the profiles again and initiate contact with members at your dating web site or social network.
Latest activity.
Well this feature was long awaited by our customers and we developed it for them. I guess you know this feature from the famous FaceBook™ where you can see the activity of your friends and your activity will be shown to your friends as well. This status section displays the latest activity of your friends, take a look at the below screen shot.
Status line.
This feature is also cool and you can type anything you have in your mind thereby express your mood. Your updates will be shown in the latest activity at your friends’ member home pages. In my mind the status line feature is a perfect feature that will appeal to a set of users.
The build also includes several dating software enhancements and minor fixes. As always SkaDate professionally trained web developers made a good job and developed a number of useful features for online dating web sites and social networks. Feel free to check SkaDate 7 Demo.
SkaDate 7.1201 is a free build to SkaDate 7 license owners and is available for use.
What are your thoughts on the 7.1201 build, and which features are you most interested in using? Please share your opinion.
Posted in Miscellaneous, News, SkaDate | Tags: community script · dating software · dating templates · online dating · SkaDate
