I've been a member since 2007. Met some very nice people, a couple whom I wrote to for quite a few years. However, 12 yrs down the track, I've decided to pause my account for the time being. I need a bit of a break. Recently, I've had a few women writing to me who turned out to be men. A couple of them came right out & told me, they thought it was a great joke! Why do the majority of people have to be someone they're not online? I don't get it. My trust in online friendships has been broken. Its very unfortunate, as I loved penpalling & meeting new people from around the world.

Having said all that, Penpal World is a great penpal site, run by a man who does things right for all the members. He is continually banning profiles of people who are scammers or have been complained about by others. The fees are good. I think they are very reasonable. I live in Australia & after being a member for a year or so, I decided to pay for a lifetime membership. I paid about $US110.00 & that is valid for 99 yrs. I think thats value for money, don't you? :) Lifetime membership entitles you to write as many messages/comments as you like each day. It also allows you to keep every message that is sent to you, & you also get to keep every message you send to others. As a lifetime member, you can enforce your penpal settings, ban countries, have a "hot list", & many more perks. It is money well spent, for sure. Lots of people complain about losing their messages because they are not a paid-up member. What's the big deal? Just pay the fee that is being asked. Its not much. And for you guys in the USA, you pay a lot less than I had to. If you don't want to pay for a lifetime membership, there are other monthly options available. People say they can't afford to pay. Are these the same ones who can afford to buy smokes & grog each week, or gamble, without even giving it a second thought? Food for thought:)

I may unpause my account on Penpal World at some stage, I may not. Haven't decided as yet. For the most part, it was a nice experience. If you are looking for penpals, I recommend you go with Penpal World. I think its the best out of all of them. I'm enjoying my friends in the "real" world at the moment.

Thanks to you all for taking the time out of your busy day/nite to read my comments. Cheers!

For starters there are too many restrictions placed on non paying members. It's the most ridiculous business model I've ever encountered. As a free member you're entitled to a profile and three messages and three profile comments a day. If you receive four messages in your inbox the fourth one is automatically deleted never to be read again. There are plenty of crazy pervert scammers, so your inbox will fill up quickly and unfortunately anyone genuine responding to your profile will likely get lost in the shuffle.
Plenty of people will try to use the comment section in your profile to carry on a conversation with you but if you've already exhausted your limits for the day it could take awhile to exchange emails and get the pen pal relationship up and off the site. That sucks, if you're going to have a social site then communication should come easily. Some users bypass this problem by including their email address in their profile, but that's not my scene, at least PPW is fairly good about dealing with scamming or abusive users, I wouldn't want to have to sort through all that spam in a throwaway inbox.
One of the most annoying things I've found with the site is that you can't even delete emails that you've already read! I guess that's for paying members only? How cheap is that? And what members? This site has very low user inventory. Not many people are ever online. Again, it's such a hassle to be a member on the site, if there weren't so many restrictions I'm sure more people would sign up creating greater user inventory. There are literally zero incentives to have a paying membership. You pay something like $10 USD a month to get emails from spammers and to wait and hope for a few more real people to sign up. The site even looks like it was made in the 90s, the user interface is horrible and not well organised, unlike Interpals, PenPalWorld has messages, users and friend requests hidden under various tabs. It's not intuitive at all, it's confusing. Even marking your marital status isn't in your profile (which would make sense) it's under your account information but it's visible on your profile when people search for you -figure that out!
Overall, I would never use or return to the site unless they dropped the paid membership and cleaned up their UI.