So I received this email yesterday:

Hi,

–
Jay C
Ulust.com
TrafficCashGold.com
LoveDollars.com

This was my response:

Hi Jay,

We don’t think it would be entirely fair to remove the post, as Craig was just expressing his opinion of the site and relating the experience he’d had there. However, if you would like to respond to the review and/or the comment specifically, we would be happy to publish your (unedited) response on the blog or link to a response if you’d like to publish one elsewhere.

Regarding ad space, we’re happy with our current arrangements, but will contact you if that changes.

Cheers,

Janak
CasualEncounters.com

The next day, this comment was posted on the original review:

Dan Says:

In Reply to Craig Eisele-

Ulust is not “fraud”, the member database is from 9 years of doing business. We receive TONS of new profiles daily which are approved by our customer service team to ensure the profiles are real and not fake profiles, we have a team of customer service that works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week 365 days a year. We take providing customer support as a very high priority so our customers stay happy using the site; we also have a security enforcement team in place that does nothing but look for “scammer” profiles and deletes them immediately once found.. If you ever run into one of these scammers you can contact our customer support and get that profile reviewed ASAP and removed if found to be doing fraudulent activity or even if a member is being abusive we will give that member a warning. We try everything in our power to remove these scammers from our site so our members can hookup with REAL members in a fun / adult environment. If you have problems with any member our support team is online 24 hours a day to assist you just visit http://www.ulustsupport.com for LIVE Chat Support.

We will not go into a debate of our member base statistics as that is company data that is confidential but rest assured we have TONS of REAL new members joining daily and what our numbers show for online is accurate.

Also about females leaving the site to go to yahoo / msn / aol … not all members want to give you their personal contact information. That’s the whole reason they joined a dating site so they can have the security of getting to know a person without providing personal contact information until they want to provide that information. I would suggest getting to know the person first before you ask for personal information unless that member wants to give their contact information right away…if you went into a bar and asked a girl for her number you would most likely end up with the same ratio of numbers received. If you are looking just to get laid then you might want to try a escort site as that’s what it sounds like you are looking for,, remember http://www.Ulust.com is a dating site that can provide you with endless possibilities of contacts to a gender your seeking to hookup with but just b/c a profile states looking for “sex” doesn’t mean they don’t want to get to know your before they hookup or give out personal information.

I responded to that comment with this:

Hi Dan,

Thanks for taking the time to respond to our review on behalf of your employer. I agree that uLust.com is not a fraud, and think Craig was getting a little emotive and hyperbolic when he labelled it as such.

Otherwise though, I stand by my review, my description of the experience I had on your site, and the conclusions I drew based on that experience. People are naturally free to try your site out for themselves and make up their own minds.

Take it easy,

-Janak

Would anyone else like to weigh in on the debate? Anything you’d like to add, disagree with, questions? Hit the comments in the original post, over here.

Quick Summary:

Hookup potential: 2/5    Features: 3/5    Design: 4/5    Content: 4/5

• Clean-looking site with a tight, integrated design and interface.
• Fake profiles galore.
• Chatroom shills.
• Lots of XXX content, but more of a porn site, really?

The Full Story:

This was going to be a review of fling.com, but they decided they were going to have some big problem with our credit card, so we’ve postponed it until we can figure that crap out. Instead, this will be a review of uLust.com.

So I kicked it off by landing here, signing up and logging in. Here’s a screenshot of the members’ area.

Well, first impressions: it’s a clean, white, uncluttered, and attractive site with a lot of Ajax-y Web 2.0 bells and whistles. The upsell advertising (cams and penis pills while I was on the site) isn’t so in-your face and ubiquitous as it is with AFF.

The membership database, however, is considerably smaller than AFF ‘s–clocking in at around 5.5 million, but while I was logged in there seemed to be a proportionately larger number of active members; namely, 57-115k active/5.5 million for uLust.com compared to 132k active/32 million on AFF. My later interaction with the site ended up leaving me with some serious reservations about the accuracy of that figure, though. For which read on.

So I finished filling in my profile details, fired up the search function, and went trawling for tail. Now what you should probably know about mainstream adult dating sites is that a sizable percentage of them create fake profiles, usually of women, to attract and retain the interest of paying male members. The first thing I noticed was that there were a lot of suspicious profiles, even by industry standards. Like “the overwhelming majority” a lot.

Some, like this one, is just too “Penthouse Pet” to be real, while others, like this one, were real-but-c’mon-guys-it’s-a- freaking-hooker. Genuine profiles like this one, this one, and this one were in the decided minority plus, uh, you know. Look at them. “Hoorah?”

It wasn’t too long before the whole site started to give me a serious “porn” vibe. It seemed to be far more about the fake profiles and shilling for camwhores than it was about anything else. Like, for example, “adult dating”. Or “getting laid.” There was also an annoying bug in the picture viewing code, which kept distorting the picture dimensions in the thumbnail view when I was reviewing profiles.

After about half an hour searching profiles I wandered over to check the “Members’ Video Chat”. The girls here (and surprise, they were all girls) all seemed to be professional websluts doing “teaser” shows. They weren’t overly responsive to what was being typed, and one of the rooms was empty when I looked at it. Two others closed while I was viewing them, leading me to suspect the girls had received requests for private shows .

The main Cams link here goes to pages full of thumbnails. You can click on a thumbnail to talk to the associated girl if she’s available AND you join the ulustcams.com site. Joining this complementary site requires validation of your credit card, then presumably (I didn’t investigate much further) the payment of some per-minute charge to naked cam-to-cam with the googly-eyed slut of your choice.

Like I said, a glorified porn site. The “Movies” link takes you to a bunch of porn clips (yeah, I’m on an adult dating site because I only want porn, right?) These clips have some Firefox playability issues, which I couldn’t be bothered figuring out. The user videos are little better, though they suffer from the same issues as the profiles. Namely that a lot of them consist of generic porn content. i.e. “they’re fakes.”

uLust’s chatrooms were all dead when I looked in on them, except for one (the “Lounge”) which had a fake-profile “babe” chatting in it. This prosti-shill regaled the room with a banal chronicle of “her” daily routine (“Yeah, sorry I was just on the phone. Yeah, I’m feeling pretty tired now. Yeah, wonder what I’ll have for dinner tonight.”) The (old, unattractive, desperate, horny) men floating around the room were hanging on her every utterance, entranced. Some of them definitely seemed to be regulars. They had kind of a leering, wolfish demeanor and snippily informed me that if any REAL women turned up (keep dreaming, losers!) the “vetereins” would have first crack at them.

I scanned through the forums and groups. They have a reasonable number of posts, but they’re all moderated (there’s a general theme of heavy-handed moderation, presumably because the owners of the property don’t want people squawking publicly about how much the site, you know, sucks.) You can see that most of them are of the LADIES HERE I AM LET’S FUCK variety. Yeah. I hear that’s how the hardcore playaz really pull.

As you can probably tell by now, I was less than impressed by my uLust.com experience. There’s very little evidence of genuine community here and I’m skeptical about both the userbase size and participation level claims that they’re making. On the bright side, the site looks good, and there’s a ton of porn (movies and galleries) there, if that’s really what you’re after. But don’t expect to get laid, and don’t expect not to feel like you’ve been cheated, if you join expecting anything other than a boatload of porn.

C-. Must try harder.