Sauer T.

Here is a test I just performed. I set up a profile; filled in the "details," uploaded a recent and pretty good photo, but filled up the "in his own words" part - the self-description, the most important part of the profile, with the possible exception of the photo - with rubbish. The rubbish was a paragraph of "Lorem ipsum," standard Latin gibberish used by printers and type designers.

This profile somehow made it past Match.com's approval process and went live. Less than five hours later, it had 51 "views," 7 "photo likes", 6 "favorites", 3 "likes", 1 "wink", 1 email (which I couldn't read), and an invitation to "chat". This is absurd - who would "like" a profile which is just Latin gobbledegook?

So far, just silliness, nothing sinister. BUT to take any action on any of this - to see who likes my photo, my profile, my details, who makes me a "favorite," who sends a "wink," etc., I have to pay for membership. There is no standard free trial period for access to this information, so there's no way to see if any of it is legit before paying.

So my immediate suspicion is that all the attention is fake, something ginned up by computer to make me think scads of women are interested in my profile. Possibly some of it is genuine, and possibly there are real women with legit intentions active on the site, but there's no way to determine that beforehand.

I never paid for a subscription, so can't comment on that part of the Match.com operation.