When there were no 'real' (it was either affiliate spam with fake female members or just raunchy forums) free dating sites around in my country. A lot of people

When there were no 'real' (it was either affiliate spam with fake female members or just raunchy forums) free dating sites around in my country. A lot of people who could not afford the legit paid ones (they were pretty expensive) were also the people who were the most likely to stay alone; divorced, older, poor and without jobs. So I wrote a dating site from scratch (no 'scripts' for sale or open source at that time either) and ran it with my wife: 100% free while we moderated it to have 0 spammers, prostitutes, etc. Somehow it grew and somehow we manage to keep the ratio male/female close to 50/50. We ran it for 5 years basically full-time before handing it over to a relationship council agency who swore to keep it free. They did so far (well over 10 years). This was meaningful because we managed to bring together 1000s and 1000s of people, we still get emails or hear via-via from people who met via the site, made a family, got children etc. We used to get wedding invitations, 100s of postcards and invites to see babies. It was a good feeling; even though it was very heavy work (24/7 basically and we couldn't afford to hire anyone), I would love to do something like this again, just cannot think what it would be.