@Som

I agree with you. I have seen this pattern since I started using italki. It is hard to find a speaker partner, so I have always taken classes for conversation. People seem more interested in dating than practicing conversation. 

As a follow-up to this -- if you look at the profile pages of the men replying to women's language partner requests, you'll see that many of them are not even interested in the languages the women speak. In fact you'll often find that all of the recent comments these men have made on Italki have been replies to language partner requests by women, regardless of what language the women speak. So yes, it definitely seems like making open language partner requests is a good way to invite messages from a lot of sketchy guys. Especially if your name or profile image announces your gender as female. *sigh*

(On a related note, I find it quite annoying that the new version of Italki has removed the option of hovering your mouse over a commenter's picture to see what languages they know and are studying. It used to be easy to see if a reply in a language partner post was at least from someone with the right native language and the right target language. Now, you have to actually click on each person's profile to find out anything about them at all.)

Agreed. Recently I replied to a post on the discussion board by a woman who speaks my target language (Euro Portuguese) and wants to practice my native language (English). A few other men offered their help who aren't learning her native language or don't speak English well enough to effectively teach it. It made me feel like a bit of a creep just seeing my reply alongside theirs.

This sort of thing reminds me of a music crowdfunding website I belonged to years ago called SellaBand. People would pledge money to artists and when that pledged total hit a certain level, that money was locked in and the money was then given to the artist for the album they wanted to record. If you were a female singer with the usual photos, then you were pretty much assured of a few hundred dollars on arrival thanks to the hordes of middle aged male 'music fans' on the site.

Haha! You are absolutely correct, Blair :D

Me, I would rather look for any learner regardless of age and gender, who speaks my target language fluently AND I speak their target language fluently AND our current levels in our respective target languages are comparable. Only then can it be a win-win situation. And it is indeed a pain sometimes that you cannot delete your own comments here (or at least I haven't found a way to do so yet).

Curiously enough, when I opened the (English) discussion page this time, there were only three language requests on the first page. Perhaps it's the new, less user friendly interface, that is to blame.