Alexis P.

I'm someone who's used a number of sites like this. While Penpals Now! Isn't the absolute worst of the ones I've come across, I think it's towards the bottom of the pile.

The one thing that makes this site stand out as particularly bad is that anyone is able to see your email address after clicking to see it. This strikes me as the kind of thing that ought not happen--it's an easy way for people to find your email address and sell it to mailing lists. It'd be much better for the site to have something like Students of the World has (or at least used to have when I used it) where the site lets you type the email but it sends it. That way you'd still be able to email someone you're interested in, but people wouldn't be able to see your email address unless you decided to respond.

My other big issue with this is that some of the people who use this site are 16-18. Previously the site allowed kids aged as young as 13, but they changed that to be compliant with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation that was implemented in 2018. While they do warn that anyone can see the email address, I feel like this isn't an issue that should come up at all; especially when it's required to give them the email address and when anybody can see that. Knowing how the internet is, and especially given that a site like this can sometimes attract unsavoury people, I'm not convinced the people who run the site have thought this "feature" out.

I think the site itself is a bit of an eyesore as well. While I understand that a site like this most likely won't get a whole lot of ad revenue, surely there's some way of monetising sites like this without the ads regularly taking up half the screen.

The search function is fine; it does what it's supposed to do and is intuitive enough to use. That's really the most I can say about this site--at least the search function is what it's supposed to be. The major downside to the search function here is that the results are limited to five per page while on other sites like this, you might get ten or twenty results per page.

In terms of the actual userbase, there's something offputting about a lot of the people on the site. On any other site like this that I've used, there's always been a few people who've mainly been using the site as a way to find a date or to convert other people to their religion. However, on Pen Pals Now!, there seems to be a disproportionate number of people like this.

I'm not entirely sure if the website designers intended this to be the case or if they were hoping it'd sort itself out over time, but I can't imagine too many people wanting to spend much time there. This is especially the case with younger people, most of whom are probably going to be hesitant to reply to a guy in his fifties telling them about how Jesus saved his life or something.

All in all, it seems like there's really not much positive to be said about this site. If you're looking for something like this, maybe go for another site. You'd probably have a much better time there.

Global Pen Friends has a few things going for it. The search function is easy to use, and it's relatively easy to find people from the countries you're interested in and who are in the general age range you're hoping for. Compare this to Interpals, a site that I've previously said (and continue to think) is the best site like this, where the search function can be haphazard at times.

The obvious downside to this site is that registration can be a little more time consuming than it is for other sites like this. Unlike with other sites where you can fill out your profile at your own pace and as you see fit, this site requires that you fill out something for just about every part of your profile straight away, and with a minimum number of characters filled.

That might be fine for someone who naturally has a lot to say about themselves, but it's not so great for people who might prefer to talk about themselves with other people as opposed to writing about themselves on a public profile. It doesn't help that the minimum number of characters for the "What you're looking for" field is 90. The statement, "I'm looking for penfriends from the United States of America" takes sixty characters, which I personally think would be fine as a reason for that field when you're first signing up. You're almost forced to follow it up with some low level joke like, "Oh, and for someone to scientifically prove that Tonight Alive isn't the best pop punk band ever created."

Once you've filled out the profile, it can take at least two hours, and they say profiles are usually registered within ten hours. Maybe they've had huge issues with spammers in the past that I don't know about, but this is still an incredibly slow sign up speed. With other sites like this such as Interpals, Students of the World, and Pen Pal World, the registration speed is faster--almost instant, in fact; you just need to click the link they email you and it's fine.

The only way to get around this is... to pay a premium fee. And that tends to be one of the common issues with sites like this: they'll do a couple of things really well, but then they'll follow it up with a thing that's either weirdly limited, or they'll want you to pay them money to get the additional features which are more or less standard in other similar sites.

While I understand the logic behind doing stuff like this, I don't think it's really a viable thing when you have sites like Interpals and, for school kids, Students of the World which offer every feature they have for a premium account. Surely a better solution would be to have certain aesthetic things you can put on your profile if you pay a donation or something, but otherwise have it as is.

The other big downside to this site is that it assumes you'll only be interested in a single culture. While they'll try to hide this by asking you to pick a continent rather than a country, this is still implicitly the case. What if you're interested in both German culture and Indian culture, for example? Well, the site assumes that's not going to be the case and doesn't seem to allow for it.

While the search function is great, I think it suffers from a few glaring issues in the registration process. Surely there's been a number of people who've been driven from the site just because they feel it takes a little bit too long for their liking.

The Atheist Foundation of Australia is one of those things I have mixed feelings about.

On the one hand, I agree there is a need for the organisation. Promoting a separation of church and state and advocating for a fact-based worldview on life are good things to be promoting and I think these things are ultimately beneficial to everyone, regardless of their beliefs and background.

On the other hand however, I believe the culture on the site's forums tends to be somewhat insular. Most of the forum's active users seem to either be moderators or admins at this point, and the forum activity seems to be pretty low.

I think a lot of this is just because online atheism is less popular than it was a decade ago. However, by the same token, I think it does the foundation in general a disservice because at times it has produced a culture which can seem unwelcoming to newcomers, even if they broadly agree with the political and philosophical leanings of the site.

It's a shame, because the Foundation probably would be able to do a lot more good for this country if it weren't for some of the excesses of its forum culture.

The best way to describe iMeetzu is that it's a smaller, more niche version of Omegle. I'm not entirely sure who the people who'd be attracted to iMeetzu are that wouldn't just be using the larger, better known Omegle are, but apparently there's around 350 or 400 of them right now.

No, that's not entirely true. There are some legitimate reasons to use iMeetzu over Omegle. When you're using the site's text chat, you have the option of adding pictures to the chat. This option is currently unavailable on Omegle. Plus there's less bots on the site.

However, outside of these two advantages, there's not much reason to use iMeetzu over Omegle. There's still a pretty high number of perverts, and you don't have the option of at least nominally adding tags before you start talking to people.

This probably would be a legit competitor for Omegle if it caught on, but nobody seems to know or care about it for the most part.

Omegle is one of those sites a lot of people have a lot of nostagia for. They remember the glory days of when you could go on there and not encounter any perverts or bots. A lot of people are looking at Omegle through rose-tinted glasses.

Here's the thing: Omegle has always been filled with bots and perverts. Even in 2011, when the site was ostensibly at the height of its popularity, the site had a lot of bots and perverts. The only difference between today and 2011 is that less people use the site, so the perverts and the bots become far more noticeable.

Omegle is one of those sites that I've used on again and off again for several years now. I'm always amazed at how long some of the bots and spammers will use the site. I'm fairly sure that one of the bots on there has been going for something like three or four years now.

There are some genuine people on the site, but don't expect to be having long lasting conversations with them. Most of the people who use Omegle are people who aren't looking to make new friends or anything, they're just looking to waste a bit of time before they have to go do something else.

So long as you go in knowing that most of the real people on the site are just there to waste time, you'll be fine. But that's the kind of expectation you should really have of any chat room, not just Omegle, so I think that's more than fair.

If the powers that be in charge of the site would crack down on all the bots, the site would probably be okay. I don't think it'd ever be the best site ever, but it'd be a passable place to spend a bit of time if you're bored. As is though, you'll probably walk away frustrated after twenty or thirty minutes because of all the bots you encounter.

People complain about the mods and admins of Christian Forums banning people who disagree with Christianity. To be quite frank, I'm not entirely sure what people expect from a forum like this--it's literally a forum for Christians to discuss Christianity. There should be no real expectation that this would be an open forum for debate with non-Christians.

While there are places on the forums set up for debating theology, I think the trouble is that these kind of discussions have to be moderated quite heavily. Due to the personal nature of religion, it's extremely difficult for many people to debate it as merely an intellectual thing. For many, their religion isn't just an intellectual exercise, it's a part of their identity: their church life is a part of their identity, or their lack thereof is a part of their identity.

Maybe the mods could do things differently when it comes to these discussions, and maybe the standards should be more clearly communicated. This has always been an issue with the social internet, though: community guidelines and exactly where the line between acceptable and unacceptable input is rarely communicated effectively.

To some extent, it's difficult to do that, because ultimately it is a judgement call. However, I think how much criticism of Christianity will be tolerated on a Christian forum is one of the things that absolutely needs to have some kind of guidelines. But I think any kind of firm guidelines with clear examples of what is and isn't accepted won't go down well with non-Christians like myself due to the culture on these forums.

Culturally speaking, Christian Forums tends to be filled with the worst stereotypes of Christians. These are your Republican voters who think Jesus will be coming back in the next twenty years, the people who think they can pray the gay away, and the kind that have issues with a large chunk of secular culture.

But this is exactly the kind of person you would expect to be going to a forum like this. These aren't your culturally Christian people who might go to church once or twice a year or who are from some of the more progressive churches, these are the people who not only identify as Christian, but some have even mistaken their religion for a whole personality.

In light of this, the issues with the moderation when it comes to dissenting opinions aren't too surprising. If anything, they're to be expected.

A long time ago, this site tried to cover the same kind of niche that Students of the World covers. It was the e-pal site where the ads would let people contact you via email without having to put your email address up for anybody to see. The difference was that E-pal World was open to everybody while Students of the World was mostly catering to students.

In 2013 or 2014, the owners of the site made the decision to make the site more like a social networking platform. The new design of the site was something of an Interpals knock-off, if Interpals was done on even more of a shoestring budget.

This was a decision that made sense to some extent. The old design, much like the design Students of the World has almost always had, was perpetually stuck in the nineties.

However, the decision was a mistake. The new design wasn't much to look at, and it wasn't necessarily as user friendly as the previous iteration. It wasn't as user friendly as Interpals either, a site which I'd generally consider to be the gold standard for a site like this.

While the site was nothing special, I wanted to give it another try today. It seems like the site is down now, though there is still a listing for it on Google. Their Facebook page is still up as well, with a single status update from February 2014. That status is a simple description of what the site is, and seems pretty similar to the description of the service that was present on the site itself for a long time.

I think the mistake they made was that they wanted for the site to be more of a social media type thing. This wasn't necessarily why the people signing up for E-pal World wanted to use the service, though: some, especially Baby Boomers it seemed, were using the site because it gave them an excuse to use their email address. These aren't the same people who were hoping for a social media website--those people mostly go to Interpals, which was the case in 2013-2014 when the change was made as well.

I can understand the appeal of a decision like that, though. To some extent, you would hope that a huge change like that would help the site make money. However, I doubt even Interpals, with all of its regular users, would be making that much money in a year. With an epal/pen palling website, you're probably never going to be making huge amounts of money because it's such a niche interest.

A long time ago, I thought Facebook was great. This was in 2008-2011 when it was mostly just kids in high school and in university who were using it (I was 14 in 2008). But as it became more popular and more baby boomers and Gen Xers starting to use it, it started to go downhill as it slowly became more and more inundated with the most mind-numbing political memes and personal drama imaginable.

From a business perspective, having the site be as open and as accessible as possible makes sense. It's no secret that Facebook makes a whole lot of money from knowing everything about everyone. But from a personal level, I don't think it's worked out so great.

Social networking sites are often at their best when they have some kind of niche that they're geared towards. Reddit is a forum site that's geared towards having a lot of different communities talking about the things related to the theme of the subreddit. Tumblr is a social network made up of various fan communities and special interests as well, but in a microblogging/photo blogging kind of format.

But what does Facebook have going for it? It's the site for keeping up with old friends and with family members who live a long way away. It's a great idea on paper, and for the most part it has been a profitable one, but in reality, it turns out that if you let these people connect with each other in an online environment, they're mostly going to be sharing the most inane stuff imaginable. The people I thought were great once upon a time turn out to be the most annoying people.

Unfortunately, it's also socially required to have an account. Our culture assumes you're trying to hide something if you don't have a Facebook profile now, even if the reality is that you just don't want to know every passing thought of everyone you've met.

So I think it's one of those sites that would work better if it was mostly geared towards people who are/were still in school. Once the scope of the site expanded beyond that, the site began to spiral downhill.

This site can be useful if you're looking for coping strategies for stressful times during your teen years, often the advice given on the site lacks the nuance or the awareness that sometimes there are no positive solutions to your situation.

It's a good thing that the site knows that it's not a replacement for actual therapy, as people on there will often tell you to seek psychological help if you're concerned about your well-being or showing signs that you should be.

During the couple of years that I frequented the site, the biggest drawback was that the forums would be redesigned every couple of years. Often they'd be hosted by a different site, so often you would have to sign up for a new forum account every two or three years once this happened. The last time I checked, they'd seemed to have seen the error of this practice though and have had the same set of forums since 2012.

Because this site is mostly aimed at people in their teens and their very early twenties, you'll often find that the people on there cycle out of the forums every couple of years. So while a large part of the forums hinges on the idea of there being this tight-knit online community, it often lacks a strong enough old guard for anyone to really believe this is the case.

Generally though, if you're in the site's target audience, this isn't going to be too much of a problem for you. But the people who run the site did find a way to skirt around the issue of there being no real old guard on the site: often the moderators and administrators are active in the community, acting as a guiding force for some of the more serious discussions on there. Some of the mods and admins seem to be from the same group of mods and admins that were around when I signed up for the site in late 2009 or early 2010.

Unfortunately, there's rarely enough nuance to the conversations for it to be worth using if you're hoping for any kind of in-depth understanding of the issues being discussed, or even for a perspective more nuanced than the high level of optimism that pervades the site.

Students of the World is a site that I used when I was in high school. It's a lot like Interpals in the sense that it's for finding pen pals and epals, but it's mostly geared towards kids. At the time I thought it was pretty good, but that was mostly because I hadn't really used any other sites like it until years later.

Here's the pros: It's fairly simple to use, and there's enough people on there that you're bound to find at least a few people on there who you (or your kid) will find interesting. Plus because the site has a mailbox system, you're never actually required to give your contact information out to anyone.

Because the site's explicitly meant for kids, there's not a whole lot of adults on the site. Those who are are typically parents looking for a pen friend for their kid, or they're teachers looking for a class exchange, or they're people in university/college. So if you're a parent reading this, I don't think you have to be too worried about the people on there being creepy adults because, with only a couple of exceptions over the course of three or four years of using the site, I didn't encounter too many through here.

Here's the cons: The site seems to be perpetually stuck in the '90s when it comes to website design. Because of this, I'm not entirely convinced it's the best when it comes to web security either, so I guess there's a certain degree of buyer beware when it comes to the site.

Plus due to what I'd assume are server limitations, most messages you had in your Students of the World inbox would be deleted after a year. It was unfortunate if you'd been talking to someone on there for a while and suddenly lost all of your early messages.

Here's a neutral point: You didn't really get a whole lot of room to say stuff on your profile, so it's not like you can have a huge wall of text on your SotW profile like you can on an Interpals profile. This can cut both ways, depending on how you want to look at things--if you're someone who doesn't really like long profiles, it's fine, because it forces people to be succinct; but if you're someone who wants to make sure the other person has something in common with you before you talk to them, then you're screwed because it's hard to summarise all your interests into two or three lines unless you're the world's most boring person.

While the site is good for what it is and it does carve out a niche that I don't think would be catered to otherwise, I think it suffers from its very dated looking, '90s-style layout and apparent lack of budget to produce any real updates for the site. But I think this could be a matter of you getting what you pay for, because it's free to use like Interpals but also lacks any adverts like Interpals does.

I think there's some tiers to email servers. At the top, there's stuff like Gmail that generally have a reputation for being fairly secure, and then there's some of the B-team servers like Outlook, Yahoo, etc. that aren't always the most secure sites or try to integrate weird features that don't add anything to the user experience.

The bottom tier would be stuff like GMX which are barely passable as throwaway accounts. I can see someone using GMX maybe if they wanted an email account to set up an account somewhere that they were only planning to use for a week or two.

While it takes less than a minute to sign up for a GMX account, there are certain benefits to having a backup email address ready for these accounts. Hell, there's even a reason why you'd want to have a phone number attached to your email address. But none of this matters here because GMX doesn't really give a $#*! about your account security.

When it comes to penpal sites, this is a fairly typical, bland site. Its use isn't intuitive enough for it to be worth using as often as Interpals, and while there are some features you can get if you're willing to pay for them, I don't see why anyone would want to hang around long enough to sign up for that stuff.

I know the free features might seem generous to an outside observer, but consider this. Pen Pal World is extremely strict with the number of messages you're allowed to send per day on a free account--that number is three. While there might be limits on the number of messages you can send on similar sites like Interpals, that limit is high enough that you probably won't ever reach it unless you're just carpet bombing everyone you see with messages (and I believe with Interpals specifically, the limit is based on the number of individual users you can contact in any given day rather than the number of overall messages you can send).

While you might be inclined to pay for an account, I don't think there's any real reason to do that. You can get similar kinds of services on different sites that do it better and won't charge you for it.

Let me tell you the reasons why this site sucks.

The first issue is that there's no real moderation team. Because of this, every single other complaint I and others have made about this site often are as bad as people make them out to be, if not much worse. While the site is relatively small and obscure, it desperately needs an effective moderation team to clean the house.

However, this is not the worst issue. The worst issue is that there's an overabundance of pedophiles on the site, many of whom seem to have been using the site for a number of years now without consequence. Maybe Chris Hansen should be using this site for his Hansen vs. Predator show, because he could have a field day with it and get enough content to keep the show running for a few years.

It's honestly a wonder that there hasn't been any kind of huge sting operation based around the site. A large number of the adults who use the site are pedophiles or are so close to it that they're only not pedophiles because of a technicality in the dictionary definition. A large number of the teens on the site are really just adults pretending to be teens so they can solicit sexual conversations (and possibly even nudes) from actual teenagers.

There's no truly effective safeguard to keep a pedophile from contacting a child on this site. While a minor's profile will initially be set on a safe mode that prevents anyone over a certain age (that age is calculated with the half your age plus seven rule in mind), this safe mode is easily turned off and there's nothing preventing an adult from sending a message to a minor if the safe mode is turned on.

While you might consider this a petty complaint, consider this: back when MySpace was a thing, anyone under 16 or 18 would automatically have their profiles set to private. If memory serves me correctly, it'd be difficult for anyone to get into contact with you if your profile was set to private on MySpace, and this was back in 2008 or 2009. Hell, even for a site that's arguably still relevant today (and, even though it's not necessarily mainstream, still a lot bigger than Chat Hour), Interpals prevents anyone over 18 from contacting someone under 16.

There's no reason why, in 2018, Chat Hour couldn't have a similar set of safeguards in place. If the people who own the site want to make the argument that the site is primarily for people to set up hookups and flings and stuff of that nature, that's fine; but if they want to make that argument, there's absolutely no reason why kids should be able to use the site to begin with.

Of course, to enforce any kind of age limit would require the site to have some sort of effective moderation team. As it stands, and as I mentioned at the start of this rant, there is no effective moderation team on this site--even the stuff that does get reported is often left there for weeks or months after it was initially reported.

Even something as simple as the 13+ age limit in place is sometimes left unenforced, which means there is the occasional profile belonging to someone claiming to be 10-12 (or, in once case that I was unfortunate enough to encounter, someone claiming to be 7), is left there. I do have to wonder what the credentials of the moderation team is, given how poorly they enforce this one simple rule.

If you happen to be a furry or someone with an incest fetish, don't worry; because Chat Hour has heaps of people into the same stuff as you. I suppose once you know there's a bunch of pedos on the same site, that picture of an anthropomorphic wolf doesn't seem so weird after all.

That's kind of the story of Chat Hour, really. You end up running into a bunch of bizarre fetishes you wish you hadn't heard about.

A few paragraphs ago I touched on adults sometimes claiming to be children on the site. The problem of fake profiles is also hugely prevalent. Many of them are quite obviously fake, too; using pictures of models, porn stars, or of the scene queens that were popular ten or twelve years ago. You would think that this practice would go away in the long term because people would call them out on it, but the culture on the site seems to largely turn a blind eye to this.

I should point out that, at least in the last year or two, people have been less inclined to use pictures of the scene queens from the '00s. I don't think this is reflective of the culture on the site getting cleaner as it is the people on there realising that people are going to recognise a scene queen more or less instantly now. There's still a lot of people on there with emo in their username, so I guess if you're looking for someone to talk about your love of Paramore and My Chemical Romance with, Chat Hour has you covered.

There's no real limit to how many accounts a person can have on here. It really only seems to be limited by the number of email accounts you have, so a dedicated person who's been on the internet long enough to have accumulated a large number of email addresses can set up a dozen accounts today if they're so inclined.

Because of this, it's difficult to really assess how many people are actually fake on the site. You know a lot of these people probably have multiple accounts, so it could be ten people who have fake accounts or it could be a hundred. You'll never know for sure unless you buy the site and start limiting how many accounts can be associated with a single IP address.

Unfortunately, even a lot of the real people on the site are only on there to discuss sex. So when you do find someone who you can have a decent conversation with, it's like finding a diamond in the rough--you just don't see it that often.

A lot of the time, even these clean chats will disappoint you. Either they'll turn sexual after a while, or it'll be some weird dude like brocleanchatonly who seems to have a weird fetish for LGBT+ women to the point they're the only people he'll talk to on the site, or the people aren't anywhere near as smart as they'd like to pretend.

I'm honestly not sure what's worse about the site: the number of fake profiles on there, or that the people who aren't there to just talk about sex are often pseudo-intellectuals who want to talk about stuff they only have the most basic understanding of. Word to the wise, guys--if you want to debate politics or religion on a chat room, you probably don't have enough of an understanding of the subject o be doing that.

Of course, the pedophile problem is the worst problem; but there are a lot of other issues there.

While there may be some argument to be made that if anyone tried to impose some level of decorum onto the site it'd go out of business, it often amazes me that the site has remained in business for as long as it has. How the site hasn't been the target of any kind of lawsuits or police investigations that I know of is beyond me, because I think a federal-level police team or lawyer could have a field day with this site.