I have been reviewing the Mingle2.com site for the past 7 days as a free account as part of a plan to review many of the popular Dating sites. 

This whole idea of reviewing Dating sites was cooked up in the V8 Cafe shortly after closing my account on Dh (DateHookup). Having spent five years on DateHookup I was familiar with what I consider the "traditional" Dating sites that offered the ability to view locals, fill out a profile, chat on web forums and communicate via private message. Having spent 5 years on Dh (primarily the forums) I was exposed to a lot of alleged locals, many of whom had very sketchy english skills, and some of whom were "on the job" so to speak. After awhile I became obsessed with meeting someone - not to "hook up" or have a relationship, but just to see if any of these people were real. In my 5 years of not paying on Dh, I never once met or spoke to a single person IRL. 

Upon learning that Dh was closing, like many people, I decided to try some other sites. One of the first was Mingle2.com, which I have been on for 7 days and which I also connected with many people who are here from Dh after having closed my account. 

Yesterday was my one week anniversary on Mingle2.com, and in using the service free for 7 days I noticed a few things about this site that may be of interest

-  The forums are monitored to the point that its hard to justify posting in them. I had over a half dozen post deleted my first few hours of membership.

-  There are an extremely high amount of fake user profiles

-  In my area, there aren't a lot of members

-  Possible connections are hidden until you pay unless you both "like" each other, then you can message. But most of the times these people will be from out of state, fake, or both.

By my seventh day I had watched my possible connections grow to 60 people, at which time it went up and down and hovered around 40 by the time I decided to go ahead and give them some money to kick off my review.

With regards to the fee's for Mingle2.com, it would seem the least expensive plan is $29.85 which covers three months. There are less expensive options but in all cases you must pay for the 3, 6 or 12 month subscription up front.

Warming up the business card for it's first company review, I held my nose and paid the $29.85 for three months. Upon paying I went to my hidden "possible likes" which were all now visible.

Out of forty people, only four were even in my state! What a scam! Of them 4, all of them were fake profiles save for one that only had one photo and no description or introduction. I'd like to assume it was fake like the other three 

however with only one photo and no description I couldn't say for sure.

Feeling a little tricked I reached out to PayPal and they gave me the email address for customer service. Upon sending them an email expressing my concern it immediately bounced back! 

Wanting to give them the benefit of the doubt, and check out the 14 new matches I had gotten in a short time, I went back to Mingle2.com to see. All 14 people were from out of state!

Genuinely feeling scammed at this point I escalated my complaint on PayPal to a claim which could take a little time to sort out, however I was prepared to take the $29.85 hit just to review the place but I didn't figure I'd come away

feeling like I was scammed. 

My opinion of Mingle2.com is this, it's an okay "free" dating site but it lacks the members and membership to merit paying any money for. The forums are over-moderated and a lot of the members are fake accounts with very loose english.

There is also Mingle.com which from the looks of it is a "dating site" platform for people to host their own dating sites, much like how some companies host web forums. This service is still in it's infancy and apparently is very

basic so I didn't even bother with that because of the bad experience I was having with the Mingle2.com site. It is doubtful many would stick around long due to the over-moderated forums, but it is pretty stable

and could be entertaining if you were enjoying it as a free subscription. 

My next review is of Tinder, which is not like the "traditional" dating site. Rather than having forums and different area's it's about as basic as it comes. 

I will go in depth about Tinder in my next thread, but as of today I have paid them money and we will see what happens.