DontDateHimGirl.com

» see dontdatehimgirl.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

This was a site for American women to warn each other about American men, and I am neither. What earns it a stone from the outside is that it ran one of the web's first full-scale experiments in anonymous public accusation, spent four years being sued over it, and then ended the experiment with a press release.

DontDateHimGirl.com launched in July 2005. Tasha Joseph, a Miami journalist who also worked under the name Tasha Cunningham, built it as a place where a woman could post a man's photograph and a description of what he had done, with his city attached. Registration was optional. Verification did not exist. Joseph told the New York Times in February 2006 that the site was a dating credit report for women, and told reporters asking about accuracy that the terms of service required posts to be true and that men were welcome to join and respond.

Coverage came fast, because the premise wrote its own headlines. By 2007 the site was a standing item on American morning television, where ABC News called it a revenge site and The O'Reilly Factor called it a hate site on the same day in August. The structural problem had been visible since the first week: the site had every incentive to host accusations and none whatsoever to check them.

~ the case file ~

~ the lawsuits ~

Todd Hollis, a Pennsylvania attorney, found postings about himself in 2006 and sued the site's owner along with two named posters and five unidentified women. The Pennsylvania case was dismissed for lack of personal jurisdiction, so in 2007 he refiled in federal court in Florida. When that judge declined to dismiss it, the case settled on undisclosed terms, which is the outcome a site like this least wants: no ruling it can point to, and a bill it cannot talk about.

The Miami New Times did the reporting that mattered more. In a September 2006 investigation, Joanne Green went through a batch of profiles and found the claims largely false. One supposed philandering ex-boyfriend turned out to be a gay man who had turned down a woman's advances. Somebody else had built a fabricated profile from scratch, simply to demonstrate that it could be done.

~ the thirty days ~

On 19 July 2010 the company issued a press release saying it would remove the database of alleged cads within thirty days and refocus on quality content such as articles, videos and podcasts, plus content partnerships and engaging mobile platforms. That is the language of a business plan, and it was also an admission. The thing the site was famous for was being switched off by the people who built it.

The repositioning took hold faster than the deletion did. By January 2011 the site's own about page described DontDateHimGirl as a resource for women and men seeking counsel about love and marriage, with no mention of cheaters anywhere on it. For the next two years the address served a women's lifestyle magazine, with sections on beauty and relationships sitting on top of the same software.

~ what outlived it ~

Wikipedia records that the database was still reachable in June 2011 through the site's posts directory, extensively linked from elsewhere, and that it was removed on an unknown date before February 2016. The archive narrows that. Individual accusation pages were still answering normally as late as 29 June 2013, and by 20 March 2015 the posts directory itself returned a 404. The deletion promised in thirty days took somewhere between three and five years.

What was left afterward was a one-page brochure built on Weebly, headline Date Safer and Smarter, stock photograph of a laughing woman. It sat there for a decade. The last capture of it is from 13 November 2025, and by February 2026 the domain answered 404. Two successors to the idea are listed at the bottom of its Wikipedia article, Lulu and Are We Dating The Same Guy, which suggests the demand never went anywhere even after the first attempt was litigated into silence.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »