advice for online dating

[Jester]

With my recent dating success (cue studio audience's laughter), I have actually been considering going online to find someone myself. The big problem I've had in the past with online dating sites is not all the other stuff that's been touched on here already, but the fact that well over 90% of "matches" end up being girls from the mainland, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, etc. Which, for those of you that don't know, is 150+ miles away, and well over a 3 hour drive up a very slow US1. Hardly optimal, or what I'm really looking for.

Don't get me wrong, if I met the right girl and she happened to live up there, fine, but as for looking for someone online, I would definitely prefer someone in town that I could see on a semi-regular basis.

[wchristopher]

My wife and I met online. We met on a chatting website that is now no longer in existence. Excite VP. After being just friends for a very long time and even visiting at one point. (7 years) We decided to try dating.

There was lots of angst over the 2000 mile distance

I moved in with her family in 2007 and we were married in 2009.
We now have an apartment.

[JLG]

So far it is not going good at all. I have met a bunch of scammers. I talked with a few that turned out to be people trying to pull a scam on me. I was talking to one person on chat that kept telling me that he liked me and wanted to be with me and I thought no way is that possible cause he doesn't even know me. He emailed me a lot and I ignored most of them. We would chat sometimes and yesterday he tried to pull that cash a money order for me scam.
The next guy was much better. He talked to me on chat every day and seemed normal. But he told me he was going out of the country for work. RED FLAG. He sent me a message that he was now in Scotland working as a civil engineer for a little while. I told him to prove it and send a picture. He said he had no camera on his phone. Ya so I figured he was going to be a scammer too. I went to some online sites that has pictures and email addresses of scammers and yup his email was there along with the profile he puts on dating web sites.
It turns out that many of these scammers find pictures online of people and then talk nice and sweet to you for weeks until they try to get money out of you.
I did have people warn me of the weirdos but they forget to warn me of these scammers.