Mature Match - www.maturematch.co.uk

Nothing good about it at all, money still taken after unsubscribing.

I originally joined as a basic, free member. It was free to send messages, but I soon realised that I would have to pay £25 to be able to actually read incoming messages for one month as a full member. I then realised that being a 'full' member was not enough, and I paid another £5 so that ladies could reply to my sent messages without them having to be fully paid-up members. I rushed into paying before I was ready to because I could see that a very attractive lady was trying to contact me, and we could not read or reply to each other's messages!

I did meet up with this nice lady, but the day after I got a 'sorry, we are not suited' message. My quite amusing but very honest, detailed profile should have told the lady what I was like, but Mature Match had mistakenly removed it for about five days! So she was not too know, and no sour grapes from me as far as she is concerned! I sent about four messages to the website about my missing profile and eventually got it published again and an apology – but no offer of compensation or extra full membership time to cover my lost days.

Another gripe: When I originally signed up, after entering my profile (as a copy and paste), I was then prompted to type an introduction. There was not much guidance about what this entailed so I just typed, 'I will fill this in later', and then found that this was sent to all the prospective ladies on the site! With a bit more information, I would have just clicked the 'skip this for now' link. Useless as it was, my introduction seemed to get sent to ladies outside my age, height and distance requirements, judging by the replies I received. At least, I had managed to copy and paste my previously prepared profile text, but most users are not in a position to do that and their new membership gets widely announced before they have had a chance to get their profile ready!

Another gripe: I was only looking for ladies in my area, but I noticed an unusually large number of ladies living in Harpurhey and Cheetham Hill in Manchester, and in Heeley, Sheffield. I think that there is a bug in the system because my own Stockport SK11 postcode had placed me in Cheetham Hill, but luckily I noticed it and corrected my town to Macclesfield. A lot of people seem not to notice this bug unfortunately.

White Label Dating obviously has various dating website brand names and the profiles are pooled between the sites. I noticed one lady who had about eight profiles – I hope that she had paid for no more than one!

I suspect that most of the ladies' profiles that I saw on the site were actually genuine, but I am also sure that many of the ladies were snapped up a long time ago, and found it difficult to remove their profiles. I would guess that less than 20% of the ladies were currently active on the site, and that most profiles, although originally genuine, are now dormant or historic.

To take advantage of my paid subscription I messaged about 20 ladies, usually one a day. Although I was one of the very few men in the area whose photo and messages bore a “reply to this member for free” icon, I only got one reply, and that was to say she had just met someone! I am not unattractive and I certainly got a fair number of unsolicited messages from ladies who were out of my area or age range, but only that one response to my own (well worded) messages.

I will continue looking for a nice lady, but I will stick to using major free dating sites. Plenty Of Fish, they say?