Recently joined and within 8 days received some very violent and insulting emails from lifestime members. When customer service was contacted they requested evidence and thankfully my wife asked me to screen save them all and record any and all communications with members from that day forward. Once we sent them in to customer service "Sandy" defended them and accused us of using Photoshop to fabricate a false reply. Then we contacted 11 members who saw several of the abusive reply's in email and in chat and within 24 hours all of them were deleted. 4 of these members were lifetime paid members. This was so insulting we retracted our interest and deleted our profile before we sent the check for our monthly membership. Whew, we had no idea the FCC would allow this in this day and age.

Update to this review: Due to the popularity I feel I need to add some things.
Keep in mind the title of my review was "Absurd Customer Service" This meant how we were treated as free members. Considering the free option is designed for getting acquainted with the site and potentially giving one an idea of what a paid membership would be like. Our opinion was simply too violent and negative too early. In other words: It appeared to us that had we joined we would have been subjected to the same absurd treatment.
Look folks, it seems to us that the site can be great, has potential, is a great way to network etc However, when the site allows such questionable behavior without any vetting process or moderation of members conduct it falls short in providing a pleasant experience. Example: If I go to a dept store to purchase a tie and have a bad or questionable experience while doing so, I then have a take away opinion of said store. Be it positive or negative I have that opinion. In some of the replies I see to this post are not even relevant to the post so that should tell you something about what people may encounter. Despite access or membership levels of entitlement, basic treatment of a potential customer should not be so harsh and dis guarded.
Considering if one wants to try this lifestyle out and really see and get honest feedback they should just go to a "Club or Lifestyle Event" No site needed and no membership pressure. One would then learn a site dedicated to such a lifestyle is not really necessary whatsoever. This may be the issues retail is having these days. Im our opinion if a free or (test) membership is offered then it is the obligation of said site to provide a comfortable atmosphere as to gain your business. Not to partake in messy, low brow and childish site politics. Do you NOT owe it to your clients or potential clients to at the very least, make semi it professional? If i am poss. Going to join and give you my credit card info and personal information I feel a certain amount of safety, respect and fair treatment is expected.
To go so far as to make excuses, turn your back on or point fingers at any free member on any site is ABSURD. Not to mention asking for proof and receiving it only to call it a lie is the very definition of ABSURD as it would relate to this review and experience. It seems when faced with the truth customer service really does not know how or posses the skills it takes to address the issue so anger and denial become the method in which it is dealt with. To pay money to be left out to dry and or ignored when a issue comes about would be the take away, thankfully we did not get that far because of the professionalism was so quickly noticeable.
In closing I can only say review the reply's to this review and judge for yourself and make very thoughtful choices in whatever you decide. Many reply's tend to reveal the tru nature of a "take the money and run" mentality. As for site options and features, they are not even needed and should not be used to "guilt" people into paying for a membership to get unlimited use of site emails and unlimited profile access. That certainly is not the reason we wanted to try the site. How interesting is it that some use that as an argument to our posted review. It almost sounds like they assume everyone who wants to join simply wants to look at profiles and pics and send tons of emails to strangers. The question becomes "how many people do you need to email" "how many profiles do you need to read" to ultimately conclude you just need to go to a Club or Resort where you meet people face to face, in real time. They seem to be all over and sites like these do not have much to do with their existence except for the occasional sponsorship to an event. Just try and be wise in your decisions on whom to trust with your personal info and bank card. Be educated enough to know the entire platform the site is built upon was up to date and modern in 2000 at best. I think compuserv was still in business then right? Bottom line, in these times we all need to be thrifty and prudent and above all provided a secure sense of safety. Our experience is not leaning toward Swinglifestyle.com at all.
This review did not take on the following:
Racial epitaphs, stalking, being lured to yahoo instant message, death threats, people recording your cam sessions and posting them to porn sites, people taking snapshots of profiles to use in social media bullying.
This is just our review of our experience and is designed to warn and educate... nothing more. Had we had a warning or some insight we might not have even tried it for free. Lastly, the site is large and has quite a bit of members, the amount of members allows them to sell the term "the best swingers site" Those numbers are largely due to the amount of free members most of which are single men making their attempt in a couple oriented world. "Free" is a mega draw to single men and the current owners fully understand the power that has to their numbers of memberships. Just because they are large does not make them the best and that is the case with any site. The owners seem to change often and their domain is managed by GoDaddy if I am not mistaken. While understanding bandwidth is expensive and site management is costly one would think the free trial option would be removed until they are able to effectively moderate the site and its members. Instead there are a certain amount of members online at scheduled times to randomly say things like "all free members are fakes" "we never trust free members with no certifications" Now logic tells us that if this is a method, again remove the free membership trial option in order to offer a more positive climate in which to mingle for paid members. Hostile environments appeal to a very special class of American and when you create a segregation between paid vs. free members it creates a tension and entitlement that does nothing to welcome more traffic. As far as conversion rates from free to paid, they have alot to learn about the power in having a free existing member and the duty required to convert them into paid members. They simply just do not understand the art of sales and marketing and for that we urge you to review all other options in order to land in a more supportive environment.

Can't access sight

All of the reviews about how poorly they treat lifetime members are a fact. We have been lifetime members for one year. Notice how there is not one single company rebuttal here? Informative, yes? Customer (dis)service is hostile, unprofessional, and unhelpful. We are among several lifetime or paid members we know who brought issues to the attention of tech support - with the goal of improving the community - to be informed that if we were unhappy, tech support would gladly assist us in deleting our profiles.

The site "upgrade" has been like putting lipstick on a pig. None of the bugs have been addressed, nor have any of the problems that paid members experience from "guests" (non-paid users). For example, if a non-paying user harasses you, and you use the "ignore" feature in chat - that ignore is only good for the non-paid user's session. This is well known and the trolls will simply log out and log back again and, VOILA! - they are no longer on your ignore list. The site administration is well aware of this "feature" and has no plans to fix it in the so-called "upgrade".

The enforcement of terms of service is arbitrary and capricious at best. Certain users are constantly rude, harassing, and abusive yet they remain on the site in spite of a well known reputation of this behavior that is a clear violation of the terms of use. However, other users have been suspended for private conversations (emails, whispers) that the administrators decided to monitor and just didn't like for whatever reason.

Most recently, lifetime members have found their privileges downgraded to the status of free users (audiovisual time limits imposed) without any explanation or warning whatsoever.

In the past approximately two months, the site performance has gotten worse and worse. The chat lags, people get booted for no apparent reason, cams won't load in the video chat rooms. These performance problems are not isolated to free users - paid and lifetime members are constantly complaining of the same issue.

The reports of blocked member types being able to access profiles is also 100% accurate. We have single males and free members blocked, but get emails from those user types regularly. In an effort to try to help the administrators identify and fix the security breach, I engaged one single male and asked him very politely if he could give details about how he was able to find our profile. He was helpful enough to tell me what platform and browser he was using. I posted it to the "site upgrade" (hahahah) forums as an objective bug report. The response? My post was deleted. I discussed this with other lifetime members we chat with and they report they had the same kinds of helpful user feedback bug reports deleted from the discussion forum as well with no response. They don't intend to fix anything to make the user experience better - they just want to sweep the dirt under the rug so that new free members can't see what an awful experience it is for paid members and how paying for the service is so not worth it.

As to the comments about how low the price is - it's not that low if it doesn't work any better than not paying for it at all, which is what our experience over the past year has been. I would not recommend this site.

System: Is outdated and for a time period your private pictures were able to be seen by the public by changing one digit on the web address which means that all patrons for the site who had photos of themselves up in precarious situations were vulnerable to their images being exposed.

Membership: They have no real vetting process for free or unpaid members other than using other paid members to verify them. What I have found over all is that there is a large number of fake and phoney profiles on the site and some of them are paid. If you are an affiliate of the site or a party host they offer you free memberships (monthly, annual as well as lifetime) rather than paying you the money. Smart business tactic. So is creating fake accounts if you are a party host or hostess or a club owner with pictures to attract business. You really have to read not just the certifications on profiles but look to see if the profile certifying some one has any legitimacy to it as well. Being an event host I have found far too many profiles that were catfish or fake on the site for me to say they have any credibility so far as their vetting system goes for members.

Customer Service: The website is run by dashboard hosting. It is a small office with a group of highly unprofessional people working for them. You should know that the owners: Brian and Olga Depenbrock are absentee. This site was started and is maintained at the lowest level of cost (especially for the staff from my experience) because it fuels their other business which is lifestyle travel. If you will notice all over the site is advertisements for cruises and lifestyle destination vacations. All of which are at inflated pricing if you know anything about travel. They also will shut down profiles for illegitimate reasons if you are an event host(ess) and you refuse to buy advertising from the site to hinder your ability to do business there. I have had them cite that I broke TOS when they changed my profile from a single female to a couple with out my permission and claimed I was in violation for setting it that way. Because I have had so many issues with customer service I contacted the Depenbrock's personally and got no response. In fact their original principal who was handling the company parted ways with them last year because he was tired of the numerous amounts of complaints from customers he received due to the poor customer service standards. Their new law firm: Pollenberg and Cooper has also received complaints from me and I encourage any one with any customer service issues to contact them as well.

Bottom Line: Swinglifestyle is a cheap site so lots of people join it. It is the only one where event hosts can post with out being harassed so far as swingers sites go that has any membership base so that is why it stays in business. Just like all sites there are some good people and bad people on it but over all the site it's self is lack luster so far as the technology goes, the customer service is worse than you would find in a restaurant in a third world impoverished nation and the owners are only in it for the money. They could give a $#*! less about you as a patron.

I am praying for the day that some one else starts a good site with expansive range to put them out of business. They do not deserve a dime and unless you know what to look for in a profile they are also a waste of your time.

Update. I changed my review to five stars from four for two reasons: First, to balance some of the one star reviews, many of which I think are unfair and some of which are suspect. Second, this is hands down the best swinger site I know of as far as community and actually meeting people which is why, hello!, I'm interested in a friggin' swinger's site in the first place. I will say, if you are a tech savvy person, and that's important to you, this site will probably drive you bat sh#t crazy. Many of the critiques on here about technical glitches are fair and accurate.

I do think many the poor reviews on here are fake. Take a look at all the helpful votes some of the bad reviews get. Even the one that is so badly misspelled as to be gibberish got eight helpful votes. Yeah, right. I think this is frankly people with an agenda or who had a bad experience that are trying IMO to slam the company. I also clearly recognize one critique as written by an SLS forum poster that no one in the forums, and I mean literally no one, can stand. He even used the same name.

No, it's not a perfect site. But I have met many couples from the site that are very real. While web sites are not the only way I meet people in the lifestyle, SLS is, lately, the only website where I have made any dates. To be fair I have also chatted with numerous people who are obvious fakes or flakes. Welcome to "the lifestyle" folks. I find the forums very useful and friendly. Yes there are trolls there but generally they are kept in check by the community. If you have a serious question, and you aren't offensive in the way you ask it, you will get a sincere and thoughtful answer.

There are definitely some odd quirks. They have used filters for their chat rooms that are laughably inaccurate. They automatically block website names but get much weirder. For example to limit incest and pedophile chat they once banned words like son and daughter. So someone, for example, with the name Christenson couldn't even use their name! They fixed that but it did earn them some ridicule from members.

One other quirk is that they use lifetime members rather than staff to review profiles. This leads to some inconsistency. The comment in one review here about race preference being prohibited in profiles, while completely false, may stem from this inconsistency. There are in fact many people who say things in their profile like "Sorry fellas but we're not interested in black men. Just her preference". Just as often you will see women seeking "BBC" and not a few who are exclusively interested in African American men. That review is simply wrong on that point.

Their messenger system is absolutely terrible. I was actually suspended temporarily for encouraging people to chat on Yahoo because the messenger works so much better there. They said this violated their TOS by "promoting another website". I didn't really see it that way but I complied and they reinstated me. People are also banished from the forums to limbo from time to time for being nasty. The inconsistent nature of this is a bit comical but the long term forum community laughs it off. Clearly though the nonexistent customer service comments are also not true, at least as far as abuse complaints.

On balance I don't know of a better site in terms of actual real members, relative expense, and number of overall members giving you some local choices. Consequently I'm rating them high based on an apples to apples comparison. I would love to hear of a better site if there is one. I will agree with the reviewer who suggests that someone may one day eat their lunch by creating a really good swinger site.

Horriable site no one is whi they really are its all a joke