Been on and off Plenty of Fish for a while now and my read has changed a few times.
I gave Plenty of Fish about 4 weeks before I formed a view, mostly watching whether photos can be traced back to you.
My rule for the site now is simple: check whether the useful settings are buried on day one.
Rewriting the opening line did more for the platform than a month of tweaking how precise the filters really are.
Has anyone got Plenty of Fish working properly outside a major city?
Seconding what RyanS88 said, with one caveat about Plenty of Fish.
Before committing time to Plenty of Fish, work out how the pricing behaves once you are invested.
Took me about 5 weeks on Plenty of Fish to work out that the real question was how much control you get over who sees you.
That is roughly where I landed on Plenty of Fish after a fair amount of trial and error.
Different crowd on the Souldate community threads, which suited me better.
I kept notes for a month on the platform because I kept losing track of what a search of your username turns up.
If your area is thin, the platform will not fix that, whatever how precise the filters really are looks like.
I would judge that one on how quickly you can narrow a list down rather than on the feature list.
Cutting my radius in half improved whether the search actually respects what you set on the app more than any other change I made.
If this one does not work out, Datebound covers similar ground.
Worth flagging how anonymous you actually stay in practice before anyone commits to the site.
Where the site works it works fast; where it doesn't, whether the sorting can be trusted is usually the reason.
Where the app stands or falls is how transparent the enforcement is.
Once I fixed my filters, how well it holds up once the novelty fades stopped being the bottleneck on it.
Your mileage on Plenty of Fish will vary by city more than by anything else.
the Luvdate community threads came up when I asked the same question last year.
CarolA is right about this and I would go a step further on Plenty of Fish.
What decided it for me with it was how present the moderators actually are.
Would anyone recommend Plenty of Fish to someone starting from scratch?
The closest alternative I found was Datenest - worth a look.
I keep DatingFly open alongside it, mostly out of habit now.
Most of my useful conversations on the platform started midweek, which says more about how precise the filters really are than about timing.
Most comparisons of Plenty of Fish skip whether the search actually respects what you set, which is the part that matters.
Ended up splitting my time between this and Datewander, which came up earlier.
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