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OkCupid's “Removed” Visitor API

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Re: OkCupid's “Removed” Visitor API

#51
post #44

About seven years ago I met my wife on OkCupid. The only reason why I messaged her back (after had messaging with her several months earlier) was because of the frontend visitor feature. She had visited my profile randomly again. Turns out she said she accidentally clicked on to my profile intended to see someone else. I haven't used OkC since then, but I thought I'd share that in the context of this blog post ;-)

[deleted]

Re: OkCupid's “Removed” Visitor API

#52
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You specify it as part of your profile. If you pay for A-List (paid plan), you can filter potential matches by body type. Disclosure: Paying OKCupid customer. I don't mind paying to support the service, it's provided ongoing value to us.

I have to wonder how effective paying for a dating site really is. Presumably if you find a partner through the site you stop paying? Aside from a token few they can blog about, what's their incentive to be successful?

> Presumably if you find a partner through the site you stop paying?

The dating niche that OKCupid has traditionally filled has been non-monogamous relationships of various stripes

Re: OkCupid's “Removed” Visitor API

#55
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OKCupid actually did a blog post about this, which they have since deleted. Here's a copy of it. http://static.izs.me/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dat...

I don't think the fact that OkC now has paid features invalidates their (sadly deleted) blog post. With OkC, you can still match up with someone and accomplish what you intend to (finding dates/partners) without pulling out your credit card. Some of the paid features might (and might not) make it easier or more efficient to find a partner, but you don't need to pay them to get value out of the site. The argument in t…

The reason they deleted that blog post was because they were bought by Match.com

Re: OkCupid's “Removed” Visitor API

#56
post #47
post #27

I dated on okc for a few years. I hate driving (LA) and so I frequently filtered my matches to 5 miles (if I recall that was the smallest radius). 5 miles in LA can be a long drive. So I wrote a chrome plugin to add additional drop down options of 0.1, 0.5 and 1 mile. I was surprised to see it work. It was awesome. There is also a hack to get the infamous “top X% of hottest people” feature unlocked... :)

yeah it was easy to modify it in the query string.

mind elaborating?

Re: OkCupid's “Removed” Visitor API

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only true if there was nothing internally relying on it.

Whitelist internals and deploy? It may be impressively fast or unimpressively simple. We won't know for sure.

Absolutely. But imagine e.g. a mobile app that uses that API. That's a harder change to propagate. That's pure speculation though, as you said. We have no idea.

Re: OkCupid's “Removed” Visitor API

#59
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah it was easy to modify it in the query string.

mind elaborating?

I assume they mean the radius was a parameter in the URL so changing it was easy, e.g. replace &search_radius=5 with &search_radius=1.

Re: OkCupid's “Removed” Visitor API

#60
post #44

About seven years ago I met my wife on OkCupid. The only reason why I messaged her back (after had messaging with her several months earlier) was because of the frontend visitor feature. She had visited my profile randomly again. Turns out she said she accidentally clicked on to my profile intended to see someone else. I haven't used OkC since then, but I thought I'd share that in the context of this blog post ;-)

One day when you have kids, you can tell them "you are the result of a mistaken web click"
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