Hope to meet you on Friday!

Dirk

PS To the more experienced members: Can we find a system (sorry to sound maybe a bit boring) to know who we are, I know the 'older' members have no issue but for example at the boat trip I really struggled trying to meet up with a few well-known members (also it would be a good starter if we knew who was girl or boy, or the in-between???

ddens hi , l liked the suggestion . yes how am l gonna know who is who. l know charly , glitter and yabancianne they all are cutie ladies but the others like starman,maymunn, johnf, deceivinganillusion,istanbuler and so on

Easy to spot Stargimp - he's a minger. That's all you need to know. Regarding the gender thing we did use to have an m/f id but it was removed. I don't know but I think the decision was that it gave the passport hunters to much scope for identifying their prey. Perhaps it's time for a change now that we have a very suspicious and vindictive mod team in place. JF any comments?

Passport hunter?

or "visa hunters"

excuse me but this passport and visa things, are you going on about me or comments in general ?really would like to know

No just referring to the reason why the male/female indicator was removed (at least I assume that's why). What was happening is that a lot of members were getting pestered by non-expat (how's that for pc) members of the opposite sex. Without the indicators there is less compunction for that to happen. Anyway back to the thread. Good to see you've joined, welcome to the forum. See you on Friday.

OK, fair point.

However, we've managed to keep the number of "visa hunters" and predatory males down by using several methods, the lack of gender identification being one of them. It's been a slow process over the past six months or so and to be frank, I'm reluctant to remove any of the measures we have in place.

We still have to remove and delete accounts on a regular basis, the vast majority of this work happening behind the scenes. This is both time consuming and difficult; we have to try and strike a balance between protecting members from harassment etc and still allowing free access to those who wish to participate and enrich this online community. Maybe we get it wrong sometimes, but past experience has made us very aware that it is better to err on the side of caution.

The forum mods are vigilant and assist Steve, FD and myself to keep the forum fairly pest and spam free for everyone to enjoy. Thats why we do it.

The only suggestions I can make in respect of getting to know who is who, is to either put yourself about a bit more at the monthly meets (in the nicest possible way of course!) or organise a mini meet up yourself. Most folks on here are always up for a bit of socialising so as long as it's got alcohol involved, you're generally going to get a few bodies turn up!

JF

Its sound like another form of strategic virgin strategies.

....um...you know me.....???? I'm definitely not cute. In fact I'm pretty ugly.

For once we are in complete agreement

well , not to leave a suspicion in your minds let me clarify this from angle. l would like you to know that lve had expat friends since 1993- my university years plus l lived in uk long enough to get married to a british if l really was after a passport. plus all my mates who married to "them passport holders" were complaining as the guys were playing ps2 all night after work or spending all their spare time in the pubs being busy getting drunk , and they were never awake or sober all through the weekend. so l still prefer marrying to a Turk to a " passport"

What's wrong with Play Stations and drinking 'til you drop!? Kind of romantic!

I'm not entirely clear about what you are inferring, would you care to expand on it?

JF

Point taken John but maybe an easy solution to this might be a sort of ID thingie during the big meetings (at least there the passport hunters will not be appearing). What do you think?