Online dating behemoths Match.com, eHarmony and Spark Networks (which operates JDate and the less buzzword-y ChristianMingle) issued a joint statement Tuesday pledging action to protect users from sexual predators and financial scammers.

Frustrated 30-year-old 6'6" man walks us through his experience using one of the world's most popular dating sites. He finds religious undertones in the questionnaire, is disappointed by his results, and uncovers footage from site founder Dr. Neil Clark Warren.

As we learned from the lawsuit filed to open Christian dating site eHarmony to homosexuals, everyone wants to take advantage of Neil Clark Warren's methodology that pairs compatible couples. Per the terms of this week's settlement between the dating site and the state of New Jersey, eHarmony will create Compatible Partners, a separate but equal branch of the popular dating site. Congrats to the gays, but those on the straighter side don't really care who uses eHarmony: they just want the unfair barrier to insanely popular gay dating side Manhunt eradicated. New Jersey, tear down that wall!EHarmony was launched in 2000 by evangelical Christian PhD Neil Clark Warren, and purports to base itself on research of heterosexual couples. Following in the footsteps of the once staunchly hetero Jewish site JDate, the new sit Compatible Partners will use the same hokum to cater to a different clientele. The New Jersey Law Against Discrimination has had strange bedfellows before, and now some are suggesting it's only a matter of time before other niche websites will be forced to admit everyone. The fight against discrimination rolls on! Here comes the story of the Hurricane: it's long past time that popular gay cruising site ManHunt includes str8s. We felt the bear pain of computer programmer/petitioner Eric McKinley, 46, who described the frustration that straight users of Manhunt must feel every single day of their lives:

eHarmony does not hate gay people. It is merely ignorant of them. That is the dating site's excuse for excluding same-sex customers — a practice that led a gay New Jersey man, Eric McKinley, to file a complaint with New Jersey's attorney general which eHarmony has just settled, paying a $50,000 fine to the state and $5,000 to McKinley. eHarmony was founded in 2000 by Neil Clark Warren, an evangelical Christian and a psychologist; he is still the company's chairman.To settle the complaint, eHarmony is also launching Compatible Partners, a gay dating site. But the Compatible site, as proposed is not just separate; it's also unequal. eHarmony executives have long insisted that they didn't want to serve gay daters because their site used an algorithm based on long-term studies of straight couples. Compatible Partners, which must launch by March, will use the same questionnaire as eHarmony — but the company admits it has no idea if it will work to find good matches. Compatible Partners users will see a warning to this effect: "The statement lets customers know that eHarmony, Inc. has not conducted research on same-sex couples so that they have the information they need to decide whether to use our service." If anyone shows up that is; eHarmony will give away 10,000 free accounts, but it's hard to think that a dating service chaired by a conservative Christian will prove much more popular than, say, Manhunt, the gay personals site whose chairman donated to John McCain's campaign. The politics of sex aside, the website's clearly going to suck. This should sound so familiar to people who build websites for a living: A poorly thought-out product, based on insufficient research, rushed out on an artificial deadline. But in this case, it's the government, not inept managers, who are ordering it up. They're from the government, and they're here to help your dating life! If gays can't get married in California, don't they at least deserve the benefit of their own pseudoscientifically valid hookups? (Photo via Magicmud.com)

You remember Brett Petersel. He's the self-promoting Silicon Alley tech-meetup organizer who opened widened himself to public ridicule by posting a Facebook note offering $25 to anyone who'd set him up on a date. Maybe you felt bad for him. Don't. So far the Lodwickesque exhibitionism is paying off. Petersel says his Facebook inbox is jammed full and yes, gay-hating dating site eHarmony gave him a free membership. But then came Petersel's really bad idea.

Time has deigned to inform the public of the 5 Worst Websites on the Internet. Yes, the same magazine that named YOU the Person of the Year in 2006 is telling you the five sites to avoid. But first, we'll add a sixth to the list: Time.com, for wasting so many expensively edited words on five websites that clearly don't deserve them. After the jump, we read Time's list so you don't have to.

eHarmony wants Craig "'s List" Newmark to find true love — so badly that they failed to delete the account that he didn't even sign up for, after promising twice to do so. Craig tell us that he's "committed and happy, thx," but can we really blame eHarmony for assuming the casually geeky Craig needs some love in his life?