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http://www.cupid.co.nz appears to have a reasonable size membership and
has all the features of the best sites including unlimited photo uploads, chat rooms, real
time instant messenger, messageboard forums and much more. The only negative I could find was the inability to change screen
name and email address once registered, but apart from that, this should be the number one NZ dating site. Best of all, this
feature packed site is 100% Free
http://www.hotmatch.co.nz has a lot of the usual features including chat rooms, internal email, messageboard forums (which
only paid members can use) and an events list BUT, a very broad criteria search only showed me 5 results, and they varied
from last online Feb '03 to June '02. The latest messageboard post was Sept '04 and the latest events listing is Feb
'04 so it looks like the members have abandoned this site. There is a 3 month free trial and then $9.95
for 1 month, $19.95 for 3 months and $69.95 a year. Update: I wrote this review in Sept 05 and as at 29 Jan 06 nothing has changed. At 4:00pm I was the only one showing
as online and after browsing 80 profiles at random, I found only 3 that were last online this year. The rest were all 02,
03, 04 with a handfull in 05. I might put in an offer to purchase this site and bring it back from the dead.
http://www.nzdate.com boasts 'millions' of NZ singles but you do the math. It also states it's NZ's
largest and in their words:
"Rated THE BEST dating, singles and love personals for New Zealand!"
Ok, now to put these claims to the test and see how they stack up. I'm still evaluating this one but it appears to be an international site with sub sites for other countries.
Their pricing is so complex I had to assign a whole page to it. The link is over on the left, called
NZdate. Update: I've since deleted the page on pricing because I personally wouldn't bother with
this one. They bombard you with emails trying to get you to upgrade to paid membership.
http://singlesnet.com is US based and claims to have over 13 million members world wide, but don't waste your time trying
to register because when almost completed, it asks for a US state despite entering NZ. It won't proceed any further without
selecting a state from a nonexistant list. The 'contact us' forms don't work either, and instead of sending the email, it
asks you to phone them! The google ads say it's free but (if you do manage to join) you'll find it's just a free trial. I couldn't register so can't tell you how much they charge. PS...if anyone does manage
to join this site, I'd appreciate your feedback.
http://match.com is affiliated with xtraMSN Personals and is another one that advertises you can
join for free. You can join for free and after the half hour process to do so (you can get quite fast at this after awhile) you
are informed that approval will be within 48 hours. You can however browse the profiles of the 18,000 plus they state are
online now (when I searched) but when I entered a very broad search criteria for women in the Wellington region, I only
got 2 online now, 7 within the last 24 hours, 35 within the last 7 days and the remaining 300 odd were last online from a
few weeks ago to some months ago, so the rest of them must be overseas. In all fairness though, a search of all women
in NZ produced a few hundred profiles, so I presume a search for men would produce even more. The profiles appear in the main
to be of genuine people looking for a relationship (remember I said on page 1 that the pay sites tend to attract the more
genuine?) An attempt to contact anyone only takes you to the pay by credit card page, so before you part with your cash,
remember we have a lot of choices. No free trial, no chat rooms, no messageboard forums and you can't do anything but
look without paying. Update! Despite the high membership fees, this site produces a lot
more members making contact than most of the others. $34.95 for 1 month, $69.95 for 3 months
and $104.95 for 6 months.
http://www.globalherbalsupplies.com/herpes/dating.html Is a site with links to dating sites that specialise in members with herpes and STD's. I didn't
join any of them but added the link in case anyone is interested .
http://www.netdating.co.nz/ This site is a NZ division of www.freeway.dk and although they boast over 8,000 members, I suspect that's
world wide. A broad criteria search of who's been online showed only 3 people in the past 2 days, and only a handful in the
past 5. There are chat rooms but all have had no chatters every time I have visited the site. Although the site is quite well
laid out with easy(ish) navigation and features etc, I wouldn't put this site in my top 10 if you are looking to meet people
in NZ. Note: Within a few minutes of joining this site, I started recieving spam
emails inviting me to join sexually explicit sites, so make of that what you will. Free but with limited features is
available. Gold membership is $10 a month and in the upper price range. They do however have a 2 week free trial of gold.
NZ Connections http://www.nzc.co.nz isn't even worth a mention, but I will and hopefully save you 15 minutes of wasted time. This site says
it is for people seeking spiritual connections, and a search of each category came up with this message: "Sorry, there are
no ads currently in this category. I'm waiting until there are 5 ads before I add them." A look at the testimonials page
showed 3 (yes three) entries dating back to 2003. Sheesh, I thought my site looks like crap but you just gotta see this
one! Free to place an ad in most catagories and $5 a month for international (no ads there
either)
The first review on the next page (Reviews 4) is a real hoot. You gotta have a look!
Click here to go to page 4 of reviews.
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