Raven’s Rides
Raven's Rides Motorcycle Blog

This is part two of two. Part one is here.

Let’s try this again, eh?

This time, I do receive an activation email (overnight–I didn’t check how many hours, but it was several). I click it. And now I’m back in the sign-up process and required to put up a photograph. Required! And it’s not any old photo. It must be face-on with no helmet. What is this, passports-r-us?

So I upload my photo, and I’m appalled to find a watermark emblazoned across it–© Motorcycle Junction. It’s my photograph! Not theirs!

From this point onwards I know for a fact that I’ll be having nothing further to do with this site other than to give an exposé of them on my blog. I fire off an email to customer support hoping that now, finally, I’ll be able to meet some people–some British bikers, even. But no! There’s more!

Now, they tell me, my profile is going to need to be “manually approved” because, after all this typing, they’re still not convinced that I’m for real, and not a spam bot. Okay, fine, they promise it’ll be “within 24 hours, often sooner.” But it’s not. It’s more than 24 hours. I can allegedly use some parts of the site, but I can’t find my way to forums, profiles, etc. and give up for the night…after first making one very interesting discovery.

I find out it’s not free

I get this far, and I find that there’s a £5/month or £25/year (approximately ($10/$50 US) fee to get full access to the site. This isn’t mentioned during sign-up, though going back, I now notice an unobtrusive tab at the top: “Price.” I check this tab and discover the following (and I’ve corrected multiple spelling mistakes):

Free: Create your own profile page; upload up to 10 photos; upload videos; upload voice messages; unlimited gallery space; view the forums; send & receive “nods”; see who is online; rate profiles & photos; use the business directory; use the events calendar; search for & view profiles; browse local members; vote in polls; create your friends list; motorcycle news.

Good: this all appears to be standard fare.

Now, if you become a paid member you can also: Send unlimited messages; receive unlimited messages; post in the forums; use the chatrooms; use the Flash instant messenger; create party phone lines; read, sign, create guestbooks; read & create blogs.

So you get extra value. But the trouble is, many of these features–in particular the unlimited messages, forums, chat rooms, guestbooks and blogs–are provided for free at the other sites. And I can’t believe that they let you read the forums, but not post!

So it’s not such a value-added proposition after all.

Today I did some searching and discovered that the url for this site used to be–get this–bikerdating.co.uk. It’s a dating site turned social media, without embracing the free nature of social media sites (or at least as far as I can tell, the basic functions are always free) and keeping its dating site fee structure.

Rejection! Oh, woe!

This morning I received email saying that my profile has been rejected. Not very usefully, they send me a long list of things that could be wrong with my profile. Let me list those here, along with my responses:

Your profile was reviewed and rejected due to one or more of the following reasons:

1) Your profile text contains contact information:
Does it? It had a url. Is that contact information?

2) You MUST complete all the sections marked *mandatory
Evidently, because leaving them blank sends you back to the form to fill them out. In other words, so far as I can tell, it’s impossible to miss out the mandatory fields.

3) You have uploaded unacceptable photos to your profile. Your first image (picture 1 ) must be a facial shot of yourself, without a helmet and include no other person. Nude or risque (sic) images MUST be made Private
OK, my standard profile pic is right here. What do you think? Risqué? Helmet? Invisible bystander?

4)Your profile must be in ENGLISH
No problem! I speak both English and ENGLISH.

5) Your profile contains unacceptable information. Make sure that you do not use profanities or crude language
No, we don’t need to worry about that. Poopy! Poot! Piffle!

6) You have not added enough information to one of the sections about yourself.
This is impossible, since the application won’t go through without said required information.

So, these guys can trouble to manually approve each profile, but cannot be bothered to give a personal response. This reminds me of a time when one of our former landlords posted a flyer with generic violations and said we had to fix one. I returned it to them marked “Which one?”

So, I’m still stumped. Supposedly I can go in and fix it, but as I don’t have any idea what to fix and they don’t include a contactable email with the notification, I’m not going to go and dig. They stole my photograph. I’m not going to play with these guys any more.

And this part really sucks

Their sign-up policy seems to state that any image you post to their site is theirs for reuse and adaptation.

I’m pretty sure that this is one of the things that Facebook got into trouble for.

I’ve had no response to the request for clarification about the photograph.

Try these guys, instead

So–forget these guys. If I want to meet British bikers, I’ll become active at The Motorbike Forum, where my welcome was very warm indeed.

I’ll just have to remember to go back there once in a while.

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