Membership Requirements & Frequently Asked Questions

• How old do I have to be to join?
• Do I have to pay to be a member?
• How do I join?
• Reporting an abusive member.
• How Do I Block a Member from contacting me?
• Is this site only for Christians?
• Why does a Christian web site include some of the Life Style and Interests selections that you have?
• Some sites have thousands of members who haven't even been online for months. How long do you keep inactive members?
• Do I have to have an Email Account to participate?
• What type of browser do I need to use this site?
• Do I need to have cookies turned on?
• Are there any known problems when using Web TV?
• How do I read messages sent to me?
• How Do I Search For a Member When I Know His/Her Alias Name?
• How do I delete my account?
• I forgot my alias and/or password. Help!
• How do I change my Email Address?
• How do I change my Alias?
• I'm having problems not listed here.
• I'm trying to log-in. It keeps looping me to a Sorry screen.
• I made a payment, but I'm still not a member. Why?
• I noticed that my answers to the comments are not there. Should I compose them again?
• I tried sending carbons to myself, but haven't received them.
• What is Computer Cupid?
• How did Shining Star Christian Singles start?
• Do you offer special membership plans to those suffering financial hardship?
• What is the Trial Period?
• Why is personal contact information stripped from our comments and Free member online correspondence?
• Why is the Search form "My Race" for racial preference needed?
• How can I contact you?
• My Internet Explorer on my Macintosh is locking up on the Search form.
• Can I view this web site in a different language?
• I am getting an Error Message...
• Mail and Smile selections are missing on the page.
• I am not seeing the drop down menus! (Using NoScript or a Script Blocker.)
• Thank you to these sites!

You must be 18 years or older to participate.

Membership is free. You may submit your profile free. Your initial trial period offers you the ability to try some of the reserved features. Upon expiration of the trial period, your account is not removed. Your account is only removed due to inactivity, a bounced-back email, bad behavior, or at your request. We offer UNLIMITED JEWEL Memberships, however, those are for members who wish to utilize the reserved features of the site. See MEMBER PLANS for more details.

To submit your FREE profile, simply select the JOIN link from the home page. You will enter your email address and password. You will then create your alias and complete the rest of your profile. New members receive a 14 day FREE TRIAL.

If you wish to become a full UNLIMITED member, visit the PAYMENTS page.

If a member has been abusive to you online in your online mails or in the chat rooms, please report them to us. We have records of this and will review those mails or logs at your request. If we agree, we will delete the account.

However, some members interpret abuse differently than we do, and take what someone says in a very negative fashion, and there are times when we disagree that the person has been abusive. For instance, a woman once felt a man was abusive because she had told him he was too far away. He responded that if she changed her mind, to please contact him. She was highly offended that he would write her back at all and wanted his profile deleted. We disagreed. She left our site, but that was fine, because we don't really need someone who interprets everything as unChristian.

If you are reporting a member who you feel is abusive, based on information we cannot find ON our site, there are different steps you must take. We have had numerous reports of ex's who simply make up lies trying to get another member deleted. We've had a member tell us a lot of evil things about another member, then come back later with an apology that those things were all made up. Our worst case was when a member was reported as being a rapist, dog killer, woman beater, and was on probation and could not leave the home without an escort and in cuffs. ALL of these were found to be lies. You may read this account here: Vicious, Evil Rumors!.

We are sorry for your offline experience with any members, but there is just no way we can prove whether these are true, or part of someone's sick, vindictive, nature. We are here to protect those who would be slandered, as well as those who have been abused, so here is our policy:

Have a law enforcement officer contact us with proof, using our CONTACT US form, and we will take action. In spite of being told that the FBI and/or police were involved in this situation, after we requested that those law enforcement officials contact us, we have NEVER had any contact us.

You may think that a member's behavior isn't serious enough to call in the law, but is serious enough to warn others. Again, there is no way of proving that from our end and we are not a detective agency and don't have the time and resources to follow-up on any methods of "proof" you may provide. It is our member's responsibility to find out all that is necessary about a potential mate. We always recommend that a member contact the person's pastor and church office. If they refuse to provide this information, then you have your red flag.

We will investigate a member's online activities, and we will flag their account with a note with what you have reported to us. If we receive multiple reports from different sources, then we will feel more comfortable taking action, than just on one report.

An exception to this rule is: If a member of our site sends you a Nigerian money scam, or similar email offline, please forward us the email received by you (as an attachment, so we can see the file header and IP address of the member), and we will delete this account immediately and notify all members who have had correspondence with this individual.

See the paragraph below for how to BLOCK a member from contacting you.

If you are offended by someone's offline behavior and do not wish to have them contact you, please BLOCK this member. To block someone from sending you messages online, please LOG IN, go to one of the mails in your mailbox or search for their alias, and within the mini profile it will have a link to BLACK BOOK SETUP. Click that and it will open the screen to select various radio buttons. Select the one to BLOCK them and scroll down to the bottom of the form to save the changes. Then they will no longer be able to send you online messages.

Our members come to this site to meet others with like interests and beliefs. We hope that all of our members will conduct themselves in a Christian manner. We cannot guarantee that all of our members are Christians. It is up to you to use common sense when meeting members.

Even though you and I may uphold high standards as Christians, there may be some who join Christian web sites who do participate in pornography, illegal drugs and various other activities which we do not. On our web site, with those items listed as Life Styles and Interests, those of us who do not approve of them may include them in our EXCLUDES so that we will NEVER be matched with those who do participate in these lifestyle choices.

This was a major request on our site so that members could eliminate those who approve of things which they themselves would never approve of. It does NOT mean that we are promoting these things. But in a real world, these things exist and this will help you with your matching. We want to help our members find the right person who also lives up to their standards.

Isn't it better to know in advance, than to find out after it's too late because you simply never dreamed you should ask?

We also use this for profile screening so that we may inform the user that there other other websites more suitable to their tastes.

Please use the MY EXCLUDES and PREFERENCES links on the Profile Menu to exclude those Interests which you are strongly against and include only those Life Styles which you would accept.

Each day we delete members who have been inactive. This helps us keep our membership list filled with only active members. We don't want anyone to have to muddle through thousands of inactive members with invalid email addresses and who may already be married or seeing someone. You will find that our web site goes to a lot of effort to ensure a membership base of singles actively looking and to ensure valid email addresses. Even though we have thousands of members for you to meet, we are more interested in quality members, rather than quantity. Inactive members are sent an email inviting them to log in in order to update their last log in date, thus "reactivating" their account. If they choose not to do so, several days later, their accounts are removed as inactive. We periodically send emails to our members, and if they bounce back for any reason, we flag those accounts as deleted. If the member attempts to log in, they will be notified and may request their account be reactivated, if they update their email address.

You must have an email account to participate. To ensure your privacy, we never publish your email address. You will utilize an online form to submit your online mail message anonymously to other members. They will be sent a notification message via email that they have received mail on our site. They must then return to this site to reply to your message. We do not sell our email list or give it to others for advertising purposes.

Also, your email address will be used by our web site to send member announcements. These announcements are also sent as a probe to make sure that you have a valid email address -- if the mail bounces back, we know the account is invalid. If you DO NOT WISH to be sent member announcements or probes, please do NOT join this service.

If you don't have a computer or email and perhaps are using this site from a public library or university, you may still join by obtaining a FREE email account from the many places on the internet that provide free email. One example is Hotmail.com.

You need to be using an Internet Explorer 4.x or greater or Netscape 4.x or greater or equivalent browser. We do NOT recommend the Netscape 6.x browser. Your browser must support cookies and javascript.

Free Browser:

Click here to and see if it supports cookies and javascript.

You must have a browser that accepts cookies. You must have cookies turned on. It simply allows us to keep track of your user log-in ID when moving from page to page in our application. If you choose to turn off cookies, you will not be able to utilize this web site.

If you select the checkbox on log in to remember you for the next log in, a cookie is stored on your machine for each time you log in.

See our COOKIES instructions and explanation.

We have many WebTV users. Some never report any problems, whereas some do report problems. We have programmed our site to try to provide you a wonderful WebTV experience.

Our Chat page provides instructions for using our chat room with Web TV.

Please view this page for information on Web TV issues and support.

Clearing your WebTV Cache

The only option presented by WebTV support is to power off your WebTV terminal, unplug it, plug it back in, and turn it on again.

However, I received an email on 8/31/05 from a woman who shared this with us:

I cleared my webtv cache after it looked like this set was a goner. You can clear it completely. I found this with a google search and they either don't know or they aren't telling at web tv. Know your call in phone numbers and your password. Turn off set. Wait till light goes out. Press options 3 times, then enter 32768. Lights on set will flash. If lights on set don't flash do it again. Turn the set back on and follow instructions to set it back up. Call waiting and all tv selection screens have to be reset. My set is now working like new. Before the "page is too big to be shown" got to the point it was the only thing on the top of the page and I had been turning it off so often I was looking for a new one. I have a Philips Magnavox plus, but the instructions didn't say anything about what kind of set it worked on and if it made a difference. I was desperate. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Please go to MAIL BOX to view a list of messages sent to your IN BOX. You may select the OUT BOX link options to view mail you have sent. Click on the message Subject in order to read and reply to the message.

From the SEARCH tab is a link for ALIAS SEARCH where you may enter "Rain" and pull up "Rainbow," "Rainmaker," "Rainman" or all members with names starting with "Rain."

Use the DELETE ACCOUNT to enter your email address and password. Your account will be flagged for deletion.

Go to the FORGOT PASSWORD link found at the bottom of all pages and fill in your email address and your alias and password will be emailed to you.

From the PROFILE tab, select the MY CONTACT INFO menu option. Scroll down to the email address and insert your new email address. Then be sure to select the [Submit] button to save your changes.

From the PROFILE tab, select the CHANGE ALIAS menu option.

Please send a detailed description of your problem with step by step instructions in how to reproduce the problem via our CONTACT US form. We will try to reproduce the problem and/or provide an answer as soon as possible.

Our site requires that you have a newer browser which supports cookies and that you have cookies turned on in your browser options. If you do not have cookies turned on, then your login information cannot be saved within your session and it will loop you to a screen explaining you must have cookies turned on.

Please Log Off or close your browser after making your payment. Then log in again. This will activate your session as Paid. Your credit card payment should apply immediately, but you may need to log off and back on to activate your session as paid.

If your payment is still not activated, please email us via the CONTACT US form and provide the transaction ID of your card payment, along with your user alias.

You will need to reenter them. Please be sure to use the "SAVE" button before exiting the page. You might try one and SAVE it, just to be sure you are doing it correctly.

Sometimes we get bounces back from email services such as hotmail, yahoo, aol, juno, et cetera. Sometimes these sites are having difficulties and they bounce the mail back rather than trying to send it on. Some reasons are "the user's mailbox is full." If you are using a service, keep your mailbox cleaned out, if that is a requirement.

If you are from Australia or perhaps another continent, you may need to get a mail service such as those above within the USA, because mail delivery from the states to Australia is intermittent.

We have no control over how the mail reaches your site once it leaves our site. Unlike the U.S. Postal Service, the Internet cannot be depended on to get your mail to you 100% of the time. We use 6 redundant connections and do our best to ensure that the mail makes it to the receiver.

However, your original mail is stored on the site for the member to read, so they will still get the mail, even if you fail to get your carbon copy.

Computer Cupid was begun in 1993 as an affordable Christian Dating Service. In October 1997 we decided to go live on the Internet to allow users to do their own searching, change their profiles at any time, and easily communicate with other singles every day. We hope our existing members enjoy this new format and welcome your suggestions and ideas. As a part of this change to the Internet, we decided to change our name to Shining Star Christian Singles.

In 1992, my mother wanted to join a Christian Singles dating service, but the cost was so high she just couldn't afford it. I had been programming database applications for years and said, "I'll program a service for you and make it affordable to everyone. I'll make it a safe place where women can meet Christian men." So in 1993, Computer Cupid was begun as a home operation. Every month our family would perform the mailing from our kitchen table. The girls would put on the stamps, and rubber stamp the return address. Larry would stuff the envelopes. And some lucky person would get to seal them with a sponge (me!). Larry would haul them all down to the Post Office for mailing and pick up the daily mail. For several years we had 600 to 800 active members and have been informed of nearly one hundred successful matchings resulting in marriage.

We never wished to turn anyone away because they can't pay. So nearly a third of our membership always consisted of FREE members. We would also give discounts to those in "hard to place" categories as well. Computer Cupid never made a profit for us, but we felt this was a ministry in helping other Christians and we usually always broke even.

In 1996 however, our expenses for advertising exceeded our income and we decided to stop magazine advertising and phase out the service. We began to advertise over the Internet and changed our service so that members would apply first, be told how many matches they had in the system, and only pay for the number of matches. As a result of this, we found that there were many Christians on the Internet interested in an affordable way to meet other singles and so in November of 1997, I decided to rewrite my application to work on the Internet. In December we invited many of our existing members to join the Internet site, now renamed to Shining Star Singles, as beta testers. Then in January 1998, we went live.

In August 2001, we decided to combine Shining Star Christian Singles (ShiningStarSingles.com) with our Christian resource site, Christian911.com to allow members to contribute articles and web posts for a more "community feel." With the combination of the two sites, members may participate in singles matching or in contributing and reading articles and Christian resources. The new site adds many, many more features. In October 2001, we also added a new domain name as well, ChristianSinglesDating.com, in order to better describe our site.

Our hope is that this site will serve a purpose to honor God, and help others make Christian friends -- male and female. We have already made several good friends of both genders and encourage you too, to reach out to other Christians, not only as potential mates, but as like-minded friends.

We still conduct our service as a ministry, and as such, we are the only Singles dating site on the web that offers Financial Hardship plans for those who qualify. Please see the PAYMENTS link for details.

We have always tried to keep the price affordable for everyone. We began this as a ministry and strive to keep it that way. Not only do we offer FREE trial memberships for you to check out the service, but during or after your trial period, you may upgrade to our Premium Jewel Membership by using our Financial Hardship plan, if you qualify. Please see the PAYMENTS page for details.

We do not delete your membership after a "limited trial period." We encourage you to upgrade to an Unlimited Membership Plan, however, if you choose not to do so, your Profile will remain online for others to view and contact you. You may Search and View Profiles until you find someone special that makes it worth your while to upgrade to a Premium Jewel Plan.

Our system is kind of like shareware. Try it, then if you like it, purchase an UNLIMITED JEWEL MEMBERSHIP.

We have various plans and pricing. Your plan may be for one or three months. Once this time expires, the member is not removed from our system, but instead has his/her status changed to FREE BASIC, where you still have a Free Profile, Free Search and Free Chat, as well as Free Auto-notifications of new members who join that match your perfect match preferences. As well, FREE BASIC members are allowed to SEND A SMILE message any day of the week to those of interest, in order to see if they too are interested, prior to upgrading.

Unlimited members may exchange personal contact information with one another, but all such information included in correspondence with and by Free members will be stripped out.

For years we have been conducting this as a ministry and have used our programming business income to pay for expenses which were double our profits. However, with the growth of this web site, we have dedicated our entire time to support of this ministry and no longer have programming income. So now, we must have the support of those using the site in order to pay for our staff's salary, hardware, software, phone lines, web servers, hosting contracts, advertising, etc.

Our Free Trial period is like shareware, try out the system, see if you like it, then upgrade if you wish to continue to use it beyond the trial period. Internet advertising is no longer free and is quite costly. So since we have paid to bring you and your sweetheart together, it is only fair that you help reimburse us by supporting our ministry -- after all, it's less than the cost of a date!

This feature was implemented due to member request:

Have you considered adding an option ... that details racial preference? I ask this because I've found this to be a problem in my correspondence with some men. I am a very open person and race isn't an issue for me, but I've found that it is for a lot of people and perhaps if a profile itself says that a person is willing to date those of other races than their own, it might save some embarrassment or awkwardness in replying or not replying to messages. Just an idea.

And

I think that the profile should include dating people of other races. Because I am of a minority race, and although I am open to dating/marrying out of my race, many are not. So it would be very helpful imformation to know if someone is willing to cross racial lines. Also it would be a lot less time consuming, by not e-mailing someone who would rather only stay within their own race. Or just not be interested in someone of my race.

So we decided to go a bit further, and offer this as a search criteria to return only those who have specifically said they will meet a given race, or All races.

We prefer you send correspondence via the CONTACT US link.

Or, you can reach us via postal mail at:

Shining Star Services LLC
P.O. Box 9028
Kansas City, KS 66112-9028

We do not have a business phone and all support and correspondence is done via email. Please do not request we call you.

I found this information in Microsoft's Knowledge Base:
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q172/3/44.ASP

It says:

The application "Internet Explorer 3.01" has unexpectedly quit, because an error of type 2 occurred.

CAUSE

This problem can occur if the Downloads.html file located in the System Folder:Preferences:Explorer contains a long entry.

RESOLUTION

To work around this problem, rename the Downloads.html file to Downloads.old and then restart your computer. To do so, click the Downloads.html file name, change the name to Downloads.old, press the RETURN key, and then click Restart on the Special menu in the Finder (desktop).

STATUS

The Downloads.htm. file contains information about the files you most recently downloaded using Internet Explorer. If the information about a file is too long, you may receive one of these error messages.

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in Microsoft Internet Explorer version 3.01a for Macintosh. We are researching this problem and will post new information here in the Microsoft Knowledge Base as it becomes available.

Altavista has created a wonderful feature where you can type in our URL and it will convert our pages to a number of different languages. Please go to http://babelfish.altavista.com/translate.dyn and click the second radio button for Web Page. Then type in our URL: http://www.christiansinglesdating.com

Select the desired language "From English to ..." in the drop down list. Then select the Translate button. And voila! Our site will now come up in the new language, and you can traverse from page to page as it continues to translate for you.

This site claims to translate to and from: English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Unfortunately, we found as of OCT 21, 2002 that something has changed on their end and our session cookies no longer work if you attempt to LOG IN to our site from their translated page. So if you attempt to access a page that requires LOG IN it takes you to a page directing you to LOG IN again. However, you can still go to the above URL and copy and paste in text blocks that you wish to have translated from the pages which require LOG IN.

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request (The data is invalid).

See Microsoft's Knowledge base for symptoms, cause, and resolution of this error. "it is the Web browser that should be corrected so that it does not send an invalid content-length header."

HTTP 500 - Internal Server Error.

See Microsoft's Knowledge base. This error is generated when you try to log on by means of Microsoft Outlook Web Access and access the Exchange virtual directory or public virtual directory.

Page cannot be displayed....Connection with the Server could not be established...

See Microsoft's Knowledge base for causes and resolution:

This error message can occur for any of the following reasons:

• Multiple copies of the Wsock32.dll file are installed on your computer.
  
  
• An incorrect version of the Wsock32.dll file is installed on your computer.
  
  
• If you try to view a file (file://) you do not have permissions to view.
  
  
• Intermittent connection problems, low system resources, and dropped connections while attempting to load the Web page.
  
  
• You are using America Online as your Internet service provider, and there is not a Dial-Up Adapter installed, but there is an AOL Adapter.
  
  
• Unable to resolve the DNS name, or the DNS server returned an error.
  
  
• Corrupted cookies can also cause this issue with Internet Explorer 5.
  
  
• The Internet Explorer connection settings for the dial-up connection are configured to use a proxy server.
  

A member has reported that when using the Zone Alarm firewall application, that depending on his settings, it has caused the Mail and Smile selections to disappear from the screen. If this happens to you, please adjust your firewall settings.

A member reported that he could not see the drop down menus off of the tabs while using his Linux system. He had NoScript 1.1.4.1 running, and had to 'allow christiansinglesdating.com'. NoScript prevents popups and other things from running automatically.

Another member reported she could not see the drop down menus on her Windows FireFox browser until she added christiansinglesdating.com to her white list. She was also using NoScript.

A big thank you to FunnyGirl14 for her custom Valentine's Day logos, and for the many Smiles she creates to share with our members. You may view more of her work at her website SweetlyRemembered

A big thank you to Cybergifs.com for a couple of their animated birthday images.