Have you ever tried setting up honeypots - profiles and ads allegedly belonging to attractive women - and seeing what would be the reaction to that? Everybody knows what AFCs do in clubs, so we need to know what they do online too, and what we're up against!

I'm playing with a few right now, I'll post the results after I go through all the messages they got, as it's always plenty.

If you tried that too, bring them here!

Yeah this gives you great insight in how to engineer a profile for women. It also lets you in on quit a bit about how lame most men's attempts are, and how many messages these girls get every day.

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Been around the world twice, Talked to everyone once...

What I hate about my honeypots is that I only know what men write to women, I have no idea what gets a response. I guess not the lamest ones, but among the less than lame something must gets a response. Does it depend on kind of message, on profile pic, on something else? It drives me crazy that I don't know it and don't have any way of learning it.

What AFCs write should be pretty obvious, you don't need a honeypot to know that 99% of them write "Hey ur hot wanna fuk lol"

I've gotten several replies back from women saying "wow ur cool most guys just say im hot and ask for my number"

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If my post made me appear homosexual, I want you all to know that prior to sitting down at my computer I slammed 15 shots of whiskey, went balls-deep into my woman, and recited Clint Eastwood lines for 20 minutes.

Time for me to contribute something.

So here's honeypot number 1 - generic ad without pic to gumtree dating section, with instructions what kind of message I want (something along the lines of "tell me something witty and interesting or get lost").

It got 48 views and 8 replies in first 12 hours, 162 views and 27 replies total in the first 24 hours. That's weird ... seems most guys are spamming at late evening. 2 replies referred to what I said, but just saying they are witty and interesting, without giving any even one weak joke or story. 1 really tried, writing some story, nothing too funny really.

Rest are all obvious copypasta, something like "Hi I'm <some boring stats>, looking for <some boring description>". Sometimes some thought went into composing the text, but it's obviously reused and most likely spammed to absolutely everyone.

Photo was attached to 12 responses. One had business CV attached ... I believe someone simply clicked on the wrong file while sending ... he couldn't possibly be that weird. They're not Brad Pitts but they're on average not ugly. One guy sent 3 photos, one of them shirtless - and he seriously shouldn't, he might work out a bit but he must also be eating plenty of burgers.

One guy sent link to youtube video about him, from some family party with his aunt and uncle saying how awesome he is. The video is really lame, but it wouldn't be surprised if it worked, as at least it's something original plus a weak but some social proof.

Only one message had non-default subject to something generic. Now this is funny, because all replies were "You Gumtree ad #XXXXXX: my line" I thought it's not even possible to change it while sending via gumtree ... turns out to be possible.

So gumtree looks like a surprisingly easy target, craigslist is most likely the same. It's a lot fewer replies that I expected - are the other 130 guys too scared to write? I guess a PUA with good looks and witty message might clean it dry, especially if he learned about that subject changing trick.

Honeypot 2. Plentyoffish profile with a good looking pic, I would say 7-8/10 and very generic profile - "looking for someone special who would make me laugh", "I love hanging out with my mates", "I totally love <some band>". It got 68 messages over period of a few days, not that many considering how well she looked compared to POF average.

Pic got average score among men 7.77, and among women 4.1. It's a funny story actually, 18-25 men gave it 8.64, then lower as they got older, old women gave it 5, one 18-25 woman gave it 1. Envy much?

Almost all messages had subjects, typically "hi" or variation thereof. Contents were typically "you're so beautiful", "how are you?", or "i'm X, <blah blah>" copypasta. A few messages seem customized, referring to bits in my honeypot girl's profile. A few tried to be funny. Nothing really stood out. There was also one bi girl hitting on my honeypot, with generic introduction message. 6 messages contained email addresses, 1 contained a phone number. 21 had attached pics, but they were all just profile pics.

Only 1 attached a POF gift. On POF you have certain number of points per day that you can use to make your messages stand out. I wonder if it would make sense to try gift spamming, with ten accounts of course to get decent numbers of them.

Text speak was very common, I made sure to make honeypot profile flawless English, so they weren't trying to adjust to her (might be a smart move if that was the case), they just write like that to everyone.

Many of the guys were rather good looking. I think there's really no hope of competing on looks alone on POF.

tiemnao - Looks do matter online and off, but they only go so far. You can easily make up for looks by your profile and what you say in your message. You wonder what type of messages will get a reply on POF, I would think it is pretty obvious. As I would say its the ones that are different from all of the AFC like messages.

On POF even getting a girl to read your message is quite hard. They look at your subject line (very short size limit), and at your pic if you attach one, and if your subject line (+pic) look good enough they'll click on your profile to see more of your photos. It all happens before you have any chance of getting your words in profile or message across. That's my conclusion.

It would be possible to start some A/B testing, create a few accounts, select 100 girls at random for each, spam essentially the same message except with different pics, and see how much it matters. Sounds like quite a bit of work, only a dedicated PUA would do that. Any takers? And I'm sure some of you guys have your honeypots, share the knowledge!

I find it pretty easy to get girls to at least take a look at my profile. Tho getting them to respond has been something else.

Do you attach pic to your messages to them? I haven't been doing that, and my honeypot says it's quite popular thing to do.

POF attaches them if the girl I send a message to requires that you have a photo. Beyond that I don't send a photo at all.

Not really honeypot, just data analysis. Most popular interests on POF. A few common synonyms (movies / films / cinema) replaced by the most popular form. Data scrapped for UK, so football means soccer.

My POF results are so bad that you shouldn't be taking any advice from me, but I guess you should take something that's more original than the top 10.

Straight guys:
33% - music
29% - movies
25% - football
20% - gym
19% - travelling
18% - friends
18% - sports
9% - reading
8% - clubbing
7% - cooking

Straight girls:
37% - music
33% - movies
31% - friends
20% - reading
17% - travelling
16% - shopping
14% - going-out
13% - gym
12% - clubbing
11% - dancing

Gay guys:
32% - music
27% - movies
25% - friends
13% - reading
12% - clubbing
11% - travelling
10% - going-out
8% - gym
6% - drinking
6% - love

Lesbian girls:
33% - music
25% - friends
25% - movies
12% - reading
12% - shopping
10% - going-out
9% - travelling
9% - fun
8% - dancing
8% - clubbing

This is my favourite honeypot to date. Gumtree is like Craigslist for UK, except it provides the feature that you can see ad view count. So of the latest 2000 ads in "dating > guys seeking girls" (not casuals, that's a different section), here's the top 25.

Format is: view count[age - * if there's a photo] - subject - location
These are normal non-featured ads only. You only see the tiny miniature of photo, so girls click based on subject / age / location only, not on photo or content. No idea how many actually contact the poster after clicking.

Anybody has explanation what is going on here? None of these subjects seem very unusual. One possibility is that because Gumtree updates ads in batches with a few hours delay, some of them might simply be on the top of the page for a long time during rush hours, while others are less lucky. I'm not sure about that, some of these superpopular ads are near other popular ads, others are in the middle of a click desert. There's also a possibility that they use Gumtree paid bump technique (1.50 pound text to get your free ad bumped as if you just posted it). Mean click count is 96, median is 53.

7040[34*] British Genuine Guy Seeks Genuine Girl - London
5283[29] Do you find that all your friends are getting married or having babies and your the only single one? - London
2930[29] Cute Asian Lady sought after - Fulham
2597[29*] 2009 is the year for curvy women - London
2327[] Just a normal french guy - London
2029[*] What do I have to write to make you click here? - Sw London
1974[31] Tired of sex without meaning I want to fall in love - West London
1969[24] Intelligent and single - london
1713[29*] hey girls lets go out meet for a drink ,cinema or just walk in the park pls txt on 07724533171 - london city:)
1416[29] It's bloomin' freezing, let's go out for drinks to warm up - London
1285[32] looking for a nice woman - london
1179[23*] What you see is not even half what you get Genuine Gumtree reply no link to dating site - London
1165[48*] N17 0be - Tottenham
1154[31] to English girls living in London only - Anywhere in London
1087[34] lovely east European girl - london
991[24*] 24YO Scottish guy just moved to London area, looking for fun girls to know and have fun - Surry,Woking
845[32*] young oriental girl sought for a long term relationship - south london
823[] Slim single Scotsman sks slim single UKrain Russia, East Europe ,South America,Asia ,Lady - London Britain
775[35*] Male 35, 6ft 4, looking for someone special - North London
774[38] Read this with understanding. No timewaster - London
769[28*] nice guy looking for a nice girl for a walk or coffee this week or weekend - London
697[33] polish ,slovakian ,lithuanin princessa x - london only
644[] I love bigger girls - london
641[37] Is cupid on strike? - Central Herts
618[44*] Fancy a trip to Kiev during the Easter weekend? - London

Another Gumtree honeypot, with a reasonably attractive photo but nothing too good. 63 replies in 6 hours. This suggests photos more than double response rate for women.

This is getting a bit depressing. AFCs don't have approach anxiety online like they have in real life. Ugly girls have their fan clubs.

hahahahaha

and THERE IT IS, my friends.....

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"A man is but the product of his thoughts, what he thinks, he becomes." - Mohandas Gandhi