Glitches, Not Scam, Account for Troubled12dateme.com

Programming problems are to blame for a deluge of emails to Harvard students from the website www.12dateme.com over the past week, and it is not the scam that some students expected.

Website users send anonymous emails to acquaintances they'd like to date, and the recipient receives instructions to go to the site and guess who sent the email. Ideally, if one guesses correctly, both participants receive an email declaring the match.

But instead of matching up couples that guess correctly and sending a matching email, the website automatically sends the same preliminary email to everyone that the user entered as a guess, thus causing the number of emails sent to rise exponentially.

And even if a user does guess his or her suitor correctly, the website neither recognizes matches nor sends out matching emails.

Brian S. Ree, a 21-year-old senior at the University of California at Berkely, created the website last month as "a little fun thing," he said in an email.

In the past week, he said, 12dateme.com has seen more than 2500 visitors per day.

"The traffic is growing substantially," Ree said. "I'm a very inexperienced programmer. This is the first website that I've actually made and put on the Internet,"

Some Harvard students thought that the site was sending out spam email to Harvard mailing lists, since the frequency of the emails was so high.

Some even thought it was a ploy to amass an email database to sell, and expressed concerns to that effect over house email lists.

"This site is brilliant," wrote Jenn E. Clark `02 wrote to Quincy-open last week. "You can never find out the person who put in your name or sent the date request. It's programmed to just say "no matches."

She and other angry students even discussed the possibility of calling and emailing Ree himself to complain.

But Ree emphasized that by no means is the website a business, nor is it intended to be one.

"It's just something I put up," he said. "If people wanted to collect emails, there are much easier ways to do it."

The "date list" feature of the website where visitors can send emails to prospective matches and guess who sent emails is one of the faulty aspects of the website, which Ree said he is in the process of trying to fix.

The website also has a ranking system for pictures that registered users post, and visitors decide if they would or would not date the person pictured.

Both the ranking system and date list are certified as private, according to the site, and a disclaimer assures participants of the security of their information.

"We will never sell any of your information to any third party," the site declares. 12dateme.com's mission is to create a fun, safe, and trustworthy environment for people to meet each other."