I had an account with AFF briefly in 2006. I suspect it might work well enough if you are:
- a straight guy who lives in a major metro area (like LA, NYC, or the like)
- a gay or bi guy/gal in any populated area
- a straight woman who lives almost anywhere at all :tongue:
But as a straight guy not located in a major metropolis, I found that there were actually only a handful of genuine female members of suitable age in my area. As compared to like 200 men.
There are a couple of crippling problems with these kinds of sites. First off, they are mainly marketed to horny, lonely guys, via sexy picture links on other sites. Perhaps as a result, males outnumber females by like 20 to 1 or worse. This creates a dynamic where the women are inundated and the men get little or no action, which doesn't work out well for anybody.
A good test to run on this kind of site, if they will let you do a search without becoming a paid member (iirc AFF does), is to search for, say, males 25-45 within 100 miles of your location, and then do the same for females. See how many of each there are, and what portion of each are paid subscribers. If the ratio is drastically unbalanced, give it a miss or take your chances. Also, look at how many of those accounts are still active; often sites are reluctant to purge women's accounts even if they haven't been accessed in months.
Secondly, these sites will try to compensate for the lack of eligible females by adding robotic profiles. If you read enough female profiles attentively (as I did), you begin to notice that there are a limited number of paragraphs that show up (misspellings and all) in varying order in profile after profile, set against completely different pictures. These "robo-members" do not of course respond to contacts. :biggrin1:
Third, if you are a guy (can't speak for women members) you
will receive what look like contacts from women. However, once you start up a conversation they will tell you about how their pics or contact info are to be found on their profile on some other site. Which is, naturally, a pay per view site. Dealing with this is annoying. The dead giveaway is when they want you to contact them at an external email address. Don't do it unless you want porno site spam out your ears. They're just phishing for your email address, and possibly CC data as well.
I understand that there are people who use these sites successfully, and as I said above I believe even single men might find them useful if there are enough women members in their area. But you will be navigating a figurative minefield mainly designed, IMHO, not to join happy couples together but to separate desperate and incautious single people, especially men, from their money. YMMV.
Cheers,
-DC