Are the pof dating apps still the go-to for singles in rural areas?

Broadly agree, though I would weight how the chat behaves on a weak connection higher.

What decided it for me with the app was whether the search actually respects what you set.

I logged into the app at different times of day to get a read on whether photos can be traced back to you.

If you care about how long a bad account stays up, that alone should decide whether the service is worth it.

Where POF stands or falls is whether 'free' means free to browse or free to talk.

Widening the radius on that one added volume and quietly worsened how quickly you can narrow a list down.

Would be interested to hear if POF worked out differently for you.

I kept notes for a month on the service because I kept losing track of how present the moderators actually are.

For a second opinion I also cross-checked Luvdate, which came up earlier.

Agree with JacksonH, though POF was a bit worse in my case.

Assuming you're not paying, what a search of your username turns up is where the site gets tight.

If you only test one thing on the platform, make it whether the search actually respects what you set.

The thing that finally moved the needle on the platform was being specific about how much control you get over who sees you.

Anyone tried POF on a smaller platform and got a different result?

What MadisonT described matches my experience of POF almost exactly.

The thing nobody mentions about the site is how the mobile build compares to the desktop one.

Photo quality moved my results on the app more than anything I wrote, more even than whether the filters survive a refresh.

Different crowd on Datewander if you want a smaller pool, which suited me better.

Reply rate on the platform roughly doubled once I stopped leading with a compliment, though how many conversations reach a second message never budged.

The measure I would actually check on the service is how much of the traffic is automated.

Has anyone got POF working properly outside a major city?

how Datedesire handles it came up when I asked the same question last year.

Before committing time to POF, work out how many obvious fakes survive a week.

Deleted and reinstalled that one twice before accepting the issue was whether you can hide your location convincingly and not my profile.

Does anyone know whether POF changed this recently?

I keep DatingFly, which came up earlier open alongside it, mostly out of habit now.

Gave POF a fair run over 2 weeks and kept coming back to how the match quality holds up past the first day.

If you can only manage a few evenings a week, how thin the pool gets outside big cities matters more than raw volume on it.

Whatever you land on, test POF for a week before you judge it.