Phphelp Group Project

[benanamen]

Some threads ago it was discussed about doing a group project with the experts of this forum. My suggestion is we build an online dating application/website.

I realize there are several software’s already available free and paid but they were not built by us. I have had this idea in the back of my head for many, many years and at various times have researched the industry.

As far as running an actual dating site, my struggle was always not having millions to spend on marketing leaving me with the the chicken and the egg , being that you cant get people to sign up if there are no viable members already joined. Basically, you cant have chickens without eggs and you cant have eggs without chickens. From my research, I have found that many sites start with fake profiles which never sat right with me which brought me back to needing a lot of money for marketing.

In any case, as programmers and software engineers, I figured we could at least build the app and take it from there. Even if you don’t actually write code for it, your thoughts and ideas can be shared on the project.

[Strider64]

I been thinking it would be a great way to piggyback it to a social media website (Facebook), by this I mean have it where the user logins via Facebook. I’ve been meaning to implement this to my own website, but I haven’t taken the time myself to figure out on how to go about doing this. I came close a couple of times. This way 99 percent of the time you know you’re getting a real person, but unfortunately there’s the 1 percent who will be spammers. This way it well be a secure login without having to actually write the security portion of the code.
Most applications/websites that I see on Facebook are junk, by that I mean they are filled with ads and javascript that crashes the page after only a few clicks. Just shooting the idea across the bow.

[benanamen]

Yes, I have Facebook and Twitter login on the list of features. I want it to be as easy as possible for people to join. I have already started on the back end, PDO with prepared statements of course.

If anyone is on or has been on dating sites, please share what you liked and disliked.

[JimL]

General

How should it differentiate from other dating apps? Since there are tons of these it could really use a killer feature / something new

What’s the audience/demographic? (young, older, single, affairs, serious, tindery one nighters, etc)

How could it address lack of female signup / imbalanced male/female userbase

Monetization - even a free service (if that’s what’s intended) need some kind of plan to cover server costs etc. If the intent is to make money then it’s a pretty good idea to get some ways of doing that planned early so they can be seamlessly implemented in the app. Doing this non-free also brings in a lot of other aspects, like how to share earnings, equity etc.

Technical

Target platforms? I still have a feeling it’s easier to get signups with a mobile app. The experts say “we are tired of everyone having their own app”, but non technical people I know hardly use the web browser any more…

Social integration (login, sharing) is a must. Tonnes of resources/libs on this so it’s usually a simple task to implement.

Is the backend written from scratch? If so, why not use a framework?

Github/gitlab seems like a good idea, no reason to wait (if it’s not already there)

[Topcoder]

I wrote a dating website a long time ago, I put a lot of work in it. Had a disagreement about pay with an expert that was providing the uniqueness to the site. Then it just went no where, greed got in the way.

At the time it was going to match people on handwriting analysis and call it the “writematch.com” - the other party still owns the site name.

Since that was a no go, I thought about replacing the handing writing with a color system and match people based on color personality. So I owned the site “chemistryofcolors.com” - It might be available and I was trying to get the owner of “www.deweycolorsystem.com” to provide the matching engine, since he has a validated color system.

The owner responded and he said he was already doing a dating system with some other vendor and then I just gave up on it.

This is all so 15 years ago… Things probably changed since then…