POF : The bots have almost completely taken over this app.
Not that the “Meet Me” function was ever anything worthwhile, but now it is *completely* useless. Totally overrun with bots. I just checked in, and of about 25 profiles on Meet Me, I would say 23 or 24 were fake profiles.
Not only that, but the bottom row of photos on the main page is ridiculously filled with bots too now. Maybe about 25% of the pics are from fake accounts.
How can they let this persist? Do they not have the technology to stop it? Or do they just not have the will?
Edit: just checked my “Nearby” page. Looks to be all legit accounts. I’m scratching my head, wondering how one area can be almost all bots, yet another area has none.
By. YouSuckAtPhotoshoppe
Saying bots have « nearly » taken over the app is like saying Hitler had nearly taken over germany.
Anytime I even open the app I’m immediately flooded with a million « meet mes » or messages. Its really irritating.
I regularly have used POF in the last year.
Around 10pm to midnight I get around 20+ views from bots. Then I usually get 5-6 messages a day that say « Hey there 🙂 »
By morning all the profiles that viewed me have disappeared.
I agree its epidemic the whole app needs overhaul and some security feature put in so cant be abused by bots
If I use the web browser and click « new users » the first 3 or 4 pages are bots/scammers. If I click on « My City », I see maybe one or two bot profiles. They never show up in the app under « Nearby », since that part of the app uses everyone’s GPS location.
all 55 of my matches are bots.
​
Its worse. I have seen some people comment on here and other places that the bots even report profiles and messages repeatedly to get people removed from the site. All it takes is just a couple blocks or reports, and you are permanently banned. It happened to an account of mine back in December last year. I rarely sent messages, any that I did were never inflammatory or sexual and my pictures were okay as well. I am a respectable person on dating sites. I don’t like it when someone shows off their junk to me in the first message, so I believe that would be the same for others, so I don’t do it.
​
Rarely ever got messages, but when I did I responded to all of them. Then one day, poof, my account vanished. Tried to register again, and my account was deleted within an hour. They have a support email, but all it does is gives you pre written messages about how to reset your password.
​
I know people get banned and claim they didn’t do anything, but they really did. But then there are others like me who didn’t do anything and got banned. It happens. The problem with the site is its community based moderation. The reports aren’t actually looked at. An account gets a high number of reports, its gone. Like Craigslist and their flagging. So it can be abused, and its easy to program bots to solely abuse that feature.
​
The site is shit anyways. It was once decent, one of the more decent sites like OKC but now like OKC its just shit.
I just made a 50 character minimum for initial messages and it cut that shit way down
Beginning of the end for pof