SkaDate – online dating and social networking software combined
May 16, 2008 by Veiko Herne Social Networks
SkaDate is a social networking and online dating software platform supporting videos and photo albums. It can be seen here: www.skadate.com
Ska Date has been developed by Skalfa eCommerce, employing 18 dedicated programmers and support staff. They recently opened their representative EU office in Czech Republic instead usual UK. Besides dating software their other product line is Chuppo rich media applications, which are actually part of SkaDate.
Sites features are customizable from administration module, like Press, Search, Photo, Multimedia, Profile view, Events, Messages, Virtual Kiss, Friends Only Photos, Flash chat, Instant messenger, Photo rate, Profile Rate, Friends Networking, Polls, Ads, Tags, Bookmark, Blocklist, Chuppo Recorder, Forum, Blogs, Password Protected Photos, Profile comments and HTML usage in profiles.
They also offer a hosted version of this software. Check it out here
From administration module was possible to assign cost for each event or leave it as free service. The software supports unlimited membership levels allowing setup events for each level and limiting even the event usage per day or month.
SkaDate supports several payment gateways like PayPal, ccBILL, SecurePay, Authorise.net, SecPay, etc.
The navigation menu was customizable to each member level group so members will see only functions allocated to the membership level.
The administration module allows customization of multimedia and photo parameters, limiting the number of invitations, creating virtual kiss templates, enabling the friends’ network and customizing the profile fields which can be even dependent to each other.
Customizable watermark can be added to photos and videos to protect copyrights.
The product becomes with 18 layout templates and the customer can get additional templates free of charge from their website when those will become available free of charge. I assume that knowing little bit CSS the programmer can write their own templates for the site.
The site management has enough features including site statistics. Administrators can manage Events, Press releases, Featured Members, Polls, Tags, Affiliates, Forums, Blogs and Links page.
The ads can be setup separately to each activity page and are they appearing in top, bottom, middle, and sidebar or between the profiles.
The affiliate management system supports up to three types of affiliates with any combination of percentage or fixed fees.
The sign up process was simple steps of questionnaire and after validating the code, new member is able to search matches or invite friends.
Each profile page supports profile rating, bookmark or blocking the profile, adding to my friends, sending a message or virtual kiss and sending this profile for somebody else by email.
Users are able to customize profile by adding or removing objects like my photos, profile stats, friend list, comments, etc including four additional HTML objects. User is able to setup the profile background colour but not profile object background colours, which was odd. Repositioning the profile objects was only possible when removing the object and putting it back to screen.
Each user can setup their preferences like allowing only friends to comment profile and do blog posts have commenting option. Also notification settings, like all new messages and virtual kisses to be notified to by email.
Besides photos, there was possibility to upload multimedia files, record webcam or write a blog.
Video upload was easy and the system was converting perfectly FLV and MPEG files. Videos can be rated and commented, like in any video networking platform.
User can seek matches by filling questionnaire information and what kind of characteristics ideal match should have.
There was possibility to search members by those criteria’s, online, with pictures only or just visit the featured members section where members can be listed as details or gallery view having banners between lines.
From search results, user is able directly bookmark a member, add to friend list or block a member. When entering to member full profile, there was a possibility to go back search results or start to browse members again, which was nice feature not loosing the search results.
Users are able to create their own blog categories which can be active or hidden. Besides rich text, blog entries support pictures and links. Those entries can be commented even using the smiles but HTML code was not allowed in comments restricting spamming by SEO specialists.
Blog entries will be visible only from member profile and there where no blog Dashboard or blog entries search by tags.
Forum categories can be setup only by administrator, but users can reply to posts or create a new topic. Forum posts allow smiles but again no HTML code.
How many posts will be shown in page was customisable for each page view.
Forum content was searchable by categories with nice search box.
Videos where listed by most popular per views and from video page there is possibility to rate and comment it. Previous comments and person other videos where listed also with embedded video share code to use this video somewhere else.
For online users you are able to initiate instant chat when this user is online with audio and webcam support. Webcam and audio quality was extremely good even those where in small boxes. The chat starts with “Ping” notification on so you should go setting and check “Sound notifications” off if you do not want to hear “Ping” all the time somebody have typed something to chat box.
Chat room was using same Chuppo Chat software for several users and rooms. Even video boxes can be initiated between users in chat room for private discussions.
Users are able to setup font colour and style (bold, italic) but not the font which was the feature I loved and send smiles in the chat room. This restricts somebody to enter in with Gothic size 26 or 36 font or talk with icons only.
Sending message to someone can be done from the person profile and besides text; users are able to include smileys. It has been implemented as small pop up box and after pressing “Send” I got a verification “Readable message has been sent”?
Users are able to manage posts from their mailbox, including blocking users but unable to sort posts to folders.
Conclusion
SkaDate is a working online dating software platform with rich multimedia features. I found it sometimes too technical for novice internet user but in same time it was enough powerful to provide lot of functionality and restricts misuse. From developer you can either purchase the managed solution ($295 setup and $95 monthly) or source code license for $795.
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Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
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SkaDate PHP Dating and social networking Software
Tags: online dating, photo, php, skadate, social network, software, video
(5 votes, average: 4.60 out of 5)
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May 16th, 2008 at 4:58 am
Thanks for the review, I found it very helpful.
May 16th, 2008 at 5:50 am
Thanks for the visit! Hope you will return soon.
June 18th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Waste of money.
Soooo disappointed with this software, more bugs than I can be bothered to go into, nonexistent customer service, technical support unable to fix anything, all they have done is make my site completely unusable and left it like that and now won’t even reply to emails or phone calls. What a waste of time and money this software is. Next stop is small claims court if I don’t get my money back.
June 18th, 2008 at 10:56 am
Supposedly they are really taking things seriously and making a move! Considering the catastrophe that was the current bug-ridden releases we’ve seen and all the demo-sites experiencing poor or non-functionality, you’ve got to have rocks in your head to consider this. Do they still have the “members fee” to get the buggy code earlier?
June 23rd, 2008 at 3:32 pm
They say it’s the best dating script. This is really odd, their Customer Service lacks so much. The price, wow I can’t believe I actually payed for this (full source code). I don’t even use it anymore. It’s like 17,000 files to upload. So not an easy upload.
June 25th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Input passed to the “view_mode” parameter in member/featured_list.php is not properly sanitised before being used. This can be exploited to display arbitrary files via directory traversal attacks with URL-encoded NULL bytes at the end.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:08 am
Dear administration,
Please check the above comments for belonging to a single person by possible patterns, like IP, email addresses, and the like. We have that person trying to create black PR here and there so we want your visitors to know the truth, no to be misled by fake reviews of a milicious individual.
Somebody is trying to slander SkaDate. Read the official response: http://www.skadate.com/black_pr_response.php
Thank you,
SkaDate team.
July 8th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Ok, I’ve looked at the IPs of some comments and some comments have the same IP but different names. So I deleted them (they should be the same name and IP to be taken seriously).
October 23rd, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Sorry please remove both my entries I just put them in the wrong spot
October 23rd, 2008 at 6:59 pm
@marcile vore
I removed your comments per your request.
November 27th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Skadate is synonymous with Russian scammers. Stay away from this garbage. Please please stay away from this script.
December 3rd, 2008 at 3:26 am
David don’t muddle others about like that, tell us exactly what they did.
If you can’t prove it then do not write this kind of posts.
January 8th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
I bought Ska Date about a year ago and it was so bug ridden that it was unusable. Their tech support was terrible, sending you round and round between different support staff each time ignoring glaring issues with their script.
I finally had to do a chargeback with my creditcard through paypal. Also, during the dispute process at paypal, they flat out lied in order to not have to refund me.
I have to say I got a kick out of this comment above:
Somebody is trying to slander SkaDate. Read the official response: http://www.skadate.com/black_pr_response.php
Yeah… that somebody is ANYONE who has had the misfortune of dealing with your poor product and miserable support.
Buyer beware.
-T
January 11th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
SkaDate dating software. SkaDate official response
Hi folks. My name is Tim and I represent SkaDate dating and community software.
It is funny to read all these ‘skadate scam’ reviews about SkaDate dating software. All of them seemed to be the same and maybe made by one author. If these would be real complaints we would be snowed under with dozens of messages of outraged complaints against our company. But we are not snowed, because these reviews are written by non-existent customers.
We provide 24/7 support: phone, email, online ticket system. Every customer may contact our support department at any time and his issue will be resolved in a timely manner.
If you have any further questions you may contact our support department at: support [at] skadate.com or make a call at (+1)574 203 0675 or (+1)574 203 0674
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Best regards, Tim S.
November 2nd, 2009 at 7:34 am
Broken software and full of bugs. There support is just for all the bugs they leave, obvious to me so they can charge extra for that. Pay and you’ll be sorry later that should be there guarantee.