Gary and Deborah's Computer Dating System is an interactive match-making service that lets you enter information about yourself as well as what you want in a mate (match). Your information is saved in the DatingBase as your Profile. You are then able to match your Profile against the DatingBase to display the records that match your Profile.

Standard lifetime membership is free. With standard membership, you can create a profile that other members may match up with and you will be able to match against others in the DatingBase. VIP membership adds many additional enhanced features for a small fee.

Once your are logged on, click on the Display button and you will see all the attributes in your Profile.

Go to the dating home page. Click on the Delete button. Some people delete their Profile shortly after adding it. This is OK, of course. You can then re-add a new profile later if you want. An email is sent to you to confirm the deletion.

Go to the dating home page Click on the Match button. This will match your Profile against the people who have added (or modified) their Profiles in since the Match Date that is displayed. The Match Date will be filled in for you as the date you last logged on and ran a match. Using a date will speed up the matching process and not display matches that you have already seen. The Match Date field is next to the Match button. Blank out the date field to match against the entire DatingBase or change it to some valid date.

Go to the dating logon home page. The only field you have to fill out is the email address field. Leave the Name and Password fields blank. Click on the Submit button and all the Profile's name and passwords registered at the email address will be immediately emailed to that address.

One email address may be used for up to three people. For example, you may add a Profile for yourself and your mother may also add a Profile for herself. Use the same email but different names and passwords. To get a list of all the Profiles at that email, use the technique mentioned above.

Profiles are deleted from the DatingBase when their email addresses no longer work. This can occur due to people leaving their ISP, creating records with invalid emails or, occasionally, due to temporary Internet outages. If this happens to you, simply add a new profile.

Another possibility is that your Profile is in the DatingBase but you specified your name or email address incorrectly. Case (upper/lower) doesn't matter, however, for either name, email or password.

When you create a profile, you specify what you want in a match. For example, you may say you want a female aged 19-38 and you don't care what religion, race, marital status, etc. she is. Chances are you will get a lot of matches unless you are a 75-year old married man:^)

You see, your matches must match your requested attributes, but you must also match your match's requested attributes.

If you get too few matches or no matches at all, either you are not the type of person your potential matches are seeking, or, you are being too picky in what you are seeking. Another possibility is that you made a mistake in setting up your profile. Things like saying your religion is other or that you are married may reduce the number of matches.

If you once received a lot of matches but now you get few or none, check that you are searching the whole DatingBase. Remember that next time you come back to our site and run the match, the MatchDate is initialized to only search people that have added new profiles or modified their profiles since your last logon. You can blank out or enter an older date and re-run the matches.

Another possibility is that you became a VIP member. In this case, you may get fewer matches but they will be of better quality since your location requirements are honored as a VIP member. For example, if you say you want to match with only members in the same state, you need to be a VIP for this to work and it will reduce the number of matches.

The matching process takes into account several of the attributes. The attributes must cross-match or the pairing will not be considered a match. This means that if you are divorced female, and looking for a single male, only single males will be displayed as your matches. Not all single males will be displayed, however. Only those that are looking for divorced females.

That's a cross-match - "They" must match what you are seeking and you must match what "they" are seeking.

In addition to matching on Sex and Marital Status, as shown in the example above, the other primary attributes must also successfully cross-match. The primary attributes are:

You may indicate multiple attributes as being acceptable to match or you may leave an attribute blank. For example, you may not care about the height of your match. There are three ways to indicate you don't care: 1) Click the Don't Care checkbox, 2) Click all the checkboxes, or the easiest, 3) Leave all the checkboxes unchecked. Doing this will give you more potential matches.

When you add your Profile to the DatingBase, enter a nickname or "handle" for your name. You could enter your first name and an initial. Using your full name is not recommended.

Some people would like to include additional text, photos or even voice clips with their Profiles. We don't directly support this however, you may specify a URL (Web page address) in your Profile. You can have it link to your own home page and you can have your personal info all laid out on your page. Another way to provide more information is to put an entry in the Forum GuestBook or Classifieds. People reading these will be able to view your profile (if you want).

Yenta is a Yiddish word that means busybody. Yenta is the matchmaker in Fiddler on the Roof.

One way to send email is to use the Yenta feature. Each match has a check box by their name. You can check up to 5 of the matches and then click the Yenta button at the bottom. This will display a Web page containing a pre-made email message that you can send in one shot to each of the (up to) five matches you checked. The first line of each message will be personalized (Dear Deborah, for example). The remainder will be the message as displayed.

The 5-at-a-time limit is to prevent email overloading of our server. You can easily back up and check 5 different matches, if you want.

Before clicking the button to send the email, read the auto-generated email message. You should modify it to make it more personal and then send it. For example, if it says you are Very Tall, change it to say you ar 6'5" (or whatever).

The email is sent with your own email address in the reply-to so if the match receives your message and clicks on Reply, it will go directly to you.

Unlike other systems, email between you and your matches is direct. You don't use our system to read email - just go to your email program (Eudora, OutLook, etc.) and read and reply from it.

Yes, in general. If you or they get over 25 or (for VIPs) 100 matches, those above are not displayed, so that is one way this cross-match would not display. Also, it is possible that they deleted their profile after they ran their match and before you ran yours.

The computer dating program was originally written in the C language and run on a Unix Web server. Most Web Pages were created using a text editor, not a Web Page editor.

The dating system was re-written in JavaScript Active Server Pages for the Windows NT IIS 4.0 Web Servers with a SQL Server database. Visual InterDev was the tool-of-choice.