OKCupid Complaint

I just sent this off to OkCu­pid. They don’t guar­an­tee any kind of response, and I don’t expect to get one. It is, after all, a “free” (in exchange for see­ing a shit­load of Google Adsense text) service.

I was, how­ev­er, annoyed enough with their arbi­trary actions that I child­ish­ly decid­ed to post the mes­sage here.

The pho­to in ques­tion is the same one that’s the icon for this post. That’s my face, dammit!

I logged in to my account today in response to an email about new peo­ple in my area. I found that I had received a mes­sage in my OkCu­pid mail­box on 2/12, which was news to me. I had­n’t received a noti­fi­ca­tion email about the mes­sage. My mail serv­er has­n’t had any down­time that I’m aware of, and if it had a brief blip, it cer­tain­ly has­n’t had an out­age long enough for any prop­er­ly-con­fig­ured mail serv­er to have stopped try­ing to send me an email.

If it were just some ran­dom flirt, two days would­n’t real­ly mat­ter, but this was a “sys­tem mes­sage.” It claimed that “many users” (how many is “many” any­way?) had stat­ed that one of my pic­tures was bad­ly cropped, not of my face, not me, etc. The pic­ture in ques­tion was sup­posed to be includ­ed, but there was just a miss­ing image sym­bol on the page.

The sys­tem had already delet­ed the pic­ture in ques­tion. The mes­sage had­n’t said any­thing about doing that. Does it hap­pen auto­mat­i­cal­ly? Did it hap­pen after a cer­tain num­ber of hours?

The pic­ture in ques­tion WAS of me. It was of my face. It was per­fect­ly clear and cropped in a very sedate man­ner. There was­n’t any­thing unclear about it.

It was a por­trait of me and was based (as its cap­tion said) on one of the oth­er pho­tos in my pro­file (that pho­to is still there). The por­trait is rec­og­niz­ably me. That’s what my part­ner, who had it paint­ed, want­ed when he com­mis­sioned it!

I can’t find any rules that say that only pho­tos are per­mit­ted, although the sec­tion is called “pho­tos” now. I don’t remem­ber if it has always been called that or not, but the por­trait had been part of my pro­file pret­ty much since I cre­at­ed the pro­file two years ago!

Have the rules changed since I cre­at­ed my pro­file and uploaded the por­trait, or is some­one just being an ass? Is there a rule against upload­ing any­thing but photos?

Now I’m won­der­ing if OkCu­pid is going to add asi­nine poli­cies like those that Yahoo! has put in place, which say that only monog­a­mous peo­ple who are not cur­rent­ly involved with any­one else are wel­come there.

I’m sure they’re just shak­ing in their boots. Right. But at least I got it out of my system.