Attempting to use italki as a dating site is a violation of community guidelines:
http://support.italki.com/hc/en-us/articles/206353468
Please report them, for the good of the community:
http://support.italki.com/hc/en-us/articles/206353458-What-should-I-do-if-I-m-being-harassed-
It's a real problem as ultimately it will harm the usefulness/popularity of this site.
I don't think removing you picture will have any effect.
I think we should be allowed to vote a user up or down. If a user gets too many negative points they should be suspended/banned. I know that might sound harsh but as I said, we see complaints like yours far too regularly and we hear stories from our own language partners so something should be done.
For what it's worth, stick with the site... once you get past the weirdos and pervs, you'll find some really helpful people here. Always check how many points they have and look at their activity to see how they earned their points (you can score points for writing creepy posts, so always read some of their posts).
Good luck.
@ Scott
I don't think that the Skype groups are taking any business from teachers away. Many users can't afford to pay for lessons and have difficulties in finding a suitable language partner as their might be a higher demand for their target language than their mother tongue. This isn't just a market place for teachers, but also a place where you find a language partner, ask questions and get corrected - all for free.
Holly, I'm afraid that this happens every where on the internet, but I hope it makes
you feel better to know that after a while on italki, you'll stop recieving those messages,
and they become rare. I agree with Phil, Saqib and zaeanderson on how to deal with
this problem and overcome it.
@Scott Brassel: I hope you take a look at the community tab, it includes "language
partners", so no I'm not frustrated! In fact I'm happy everytime someone finds a suitable
language partner to learn and practise with, and I think italki is available for exchanging
languages as much as finding teachers/ tutors to learn from. I don't see any problem
at all learning a langauge for free if it was effective, in fact I encourage it.
Scott, I see you are pretty new here, less than a month here. I also see that you also have not had students yet. I think it is a little premature for you to state so emphatically what the purpose of italki is.
That large negative number beside your entry suggests that many, many people disagree with you and that you have managed to create a bad impression with quite a few people. I think you need to take awhile and get a better understanding of the italki.com community before assuming that this site is for tutors and paid lessons. In my opinion, this site does make money through the tutors, in the same way that Google makes money through sponsored ads. Italki must create a community that gives people value in order to have an active enough community to make money. Allowing posts with free sharing is part of creating that value.
