How to Tell if a POF Account Is Active

Jordan Read more January 29, 2020

Being one of the longest-lasting dating apps, Plenty of Fish, or POF for short, is also one of the largest as well. With over 90 million registered users, around 3.6 million people log in each day. Along with these impressive figures, POF can boast with one more significant statistic – it helps create over one million relationships every year.

When looking for a person that fits your match, or when you want to do a little spying when they’ve last logged in, POF’s powerful search engine can help with that.

Searching for the Person

Using the search option on POF is a piece of cake. Just follow the steps described below.

Open the POF website in your browser and log in with your parameters.
Click the “Search” button located in the top menu.
Choose the options that best match the person you’re looking for:
1. Select the sex of the person.
2. Narrow down their age range by selecting one year before and one year after their supposed year of birth. For example, if the person is 25 years old, set the parameters to 24 and 26.
3. Set their location of residence, by entering the zip code, city, state, or even a country.
4. If you know the exact area where they live, that would mean the above location details are pretty precise. It will be enough to set the location search distance to four or five miles. If you’re not entirely sure of their exact zip code, but you know which city they’re from, you might consider extending the search area.
5. Since you’re looking for a specific person, you can set the “Sort” field to “Name.” That will sort the search results alphabetically. If you’re trying to find people that have been active recently, you can choose to sort the search results by the “Last Visit” parameter. This information relates to when a person last logged in to POF.
6. As far as other search parameters are concerned, such as “Body Weight,” “Education,” or “Intent,” you can leave them out. Depending on whether they filled these fields honestly, search results may not include the person you’re looking for.
Once you’ve entered all of the details, it’s time to click the “Search” button.

With all the results in front of you, you can start going through the list to find the right person.

Sifting Through the Results

You might get several pages of people that suit the criteria you’ve selected. Considering the list is sorted by the person’s name, it should be reasonably easy to navigate to the right profile.

If their name starts with the letter M, and there are 15 pages of results, for example, click on the page that’s somewhere in the middle. If you didn’t find them on page 7 or 8, check which letter the listed names start with on these pages. Accordingly, go a couple of pages backward or forward until the names beginning with the letter M appear.

If you’re trying to find people that were recently active on POF, you might’ve decided to sort the results by the “Last Visit.” In this case, you’ll notice a couple of different values in the “Last Visit” column. They are quite self-explanatory:

Online Now
Online Today
Online This Week
Online Last 30 Days

If the person hasn’t logged in to POF in more than 30 days, the “Last Visit” field will be empty. But, if the person doesn’t show up in the search results, their account most likely isn’t active at the moment.

Please note, if you’re trying to find your profile so you can see how it appears in the search results, it may happen that you won’t find yourself listed here. The reason why this happens is not entirely apparent, and many POF users have reported this occurrence.

Staying Below Radar

Some people may feel that showing your last login in the search results invades their privacy. Unfortunately, this data is not something you can hide from others. POF uses this data to let others know if someone has been active on the platform recently.

However, if you’re mostly using the search option to find someone you’d like to contact, there’s a simple trick to this. Since search on POF is accessible without logging in to their website, you can do just that. Next time you want to use search, log out, and do it incognito.

Once you’ve found the person that suits you the best, you can contact them when you log in.

A Powerful Tool

Using the POF search is probably one of the most used options next to the in-app chat. Knowing how to find when someone was last active on the platform can give you a heads up if you can expect an answer soon. Also, if you’re looking for a specific person, it allows you to find out whether they still use POF. And if they do, you’ll know how recently they’ve logged in as well.

Were you able to find that person? Do you think the “Last Active” information valuable? Please share your experiences with POF in the comments section below.