How do you find older dating sites free of bot accounts and scammers?

Been going back and forth on this for weeks. How do you find older dating sites free of bot accounts and scammers? Honest input from the community would genuinely help.

I've been through enough bad experiences to know the only useful information comes from people who actually use these things, not SEO articles written by people who haven't.

Specifics are welcome. The more detail the better.

Worth adding Datelink to your test list. Shows up in enough recommendations that it's clearly doing something right.

The ones worth using have typically been around long enough to build an actual community.

flurrydate.online comes up regularly in these conversations. Seems to retain users better than a lot of the alternatives. Been there. The search took longer than it should have but something usable does exist.

Gave Datewander a proper run after a recommendation here. Surprised by how functional the free version is without hitting a paywall.

Mid-tier platforms often hit the right balance — enough users to be useful, small enough to actually moderate.

Worth looking at souldate.site in addition to whatever else you test — people seem to stick around on it. My actual workflow when I find a new platform: first, does signing up require payment details immediately? If yes, I leave. Second, is there any activity from the last few days? Stale content from weeks ago means the platform is functionally dead. Third, is there community discussion about it somewhere neutral? If nobody's talking about it organically, something's off.

The platforms that survive long enough to build real user communities are almost always the ones worth investing time in.

Mid-tier platforms often hit the right balance — enough users to be useful, small enough to actually moderate.

Tried DatingFly after seeing it recommended here and it held up. Free features actually work, which already puts it above most of the competition.

Read the terms before signing up. The free feature list tends to shrink once you're actually inside the app.