POPULATION:
First of all, Manhunt is not a bear-oriented site and has very little profile details for bear properties. There were 40406 members online at 7 pm on a Tuesday night, 456 ads online in the Dallas region (Fort Worth is a separate region), and 1406 ads online in Texas. There are 9448 members in the Dallas region and I again noticed the spikes in numbers of members at the milestone ages. 37% of the members are 18-29, 37% are 30-39, and the remaining 25% are 40 or older. Ethnically, the site is a puzzle. Around 40% of the members identify as white, while over 40% identify as "ask me" with minuscule numbers for black, latino, asian, middle eastern, mixed or other. Only 2% (200 members) overall identified their "Build" as "Bear" while another 2% (182) identified as "Heavy Set."
PROFILE:
Under "Account Info," you set your most basic information like billing, language, location elements such as State, Region, City, Neighborhood as well as your email/text messaging configuration. For your profile, you get to write yourself a headline and some ad text, upto 650 characters. You get a shortcut URL directly to your profile, unlike Men4SexNow, but similar to most bear sites. Your stats and sexual preferences are divided into 5 sections "The Flavor," "The Time," "The Position," "The Place," and "The Stats."
The Flavor is basically concerned with the sexual activities you are interested. There are 25 options ranging from JO, 1 on 1, Group Sex to Friends, Dating, LTR to Pig Play, WS, FF. Interestingly enough, there is an option for "No PNP" but no option for "PNP," not that I would encourage such an option.
The Time indicates your availability to hookup. You can always change this whenever you login as it has a special pulldown on the main page. You have 10 choices such as "Right Now!" or "After Work," as well as "Away," or "Not looking."
The Position seems pretty obvious. You have the usual choices including "Into JO Only," "Into Oral Only," hybrid choices like "Top/Vers." as well as the deliberately vague "Ask Me."
The Place seems to be a reasonably common selection. It's the classic "Your place or mine" with more choices like "In Public" or "Anywhere."
The Stats is where you get to do your self-examination. Age is a free form numeric field and we already know men lie about their age. Your "Build" can be any one of the following: Ask Me, Slim, Swimmers, Athletic, Average, Muscular, Heavy Set, or Bear. This is the only place that you can select any kind of bear characteristics. Your "Ethnicity" can be Ask Me, Asian, Black, Latino, Middle Eastern, Mixed, White, or Other. It appears almost half the guys will select "Ask Me" just because it is the first choice and "White" is hidden way over in the last column. You get a number of choices for eye color, hair color and HIV status. Finally, you can set your height in feet & inches or centimeters. There is no entry for weight.
For pictures, you can upload a primary, always public picture and/or upto 11 other pictures that you can specify whether they are public, private or inactive.
SEARCHING:
The basic searches on the site let you see "men online," "new profiles" or "all profiles" for your country, region, and city, all of which are adjustable at anytime. An odd effect of these searches is that the "ManhuntServiceMan" always appears in the results for "men online" in the city of "Manhunt HQ."
The Advanced Search is restricted to paid members. It allows you to search all those fields you specified for your own profile as well as keywords from the ad text, "only members online now" and "only members with pictures." You get several types of geographical search to help you narrow things down. You can use the zip code radius, specific city names or just the larger region. Once you have your criteria locked down, you can save your searches with a 12 letter name. You can have and edit multiple saved searches. This is a fairly versatile search. It uses the profile data very well allowing multiple selections on many search fields.
If you want to search by username, that's a completely different search and you do get to search on a partial username.
MESSAGING:
Manhunt has both an IM style messenger and e-mail style mailbox. You can disable the instant messenger if you like. You can control how frequently you are externally notified of messages in the mailbox. The mailbox offers 10 days of history or 500 messages for the inbox and sent items, upto 45 saved messages and a trash folder that auto-empties every 24 hours. Announcements, special offers and other site specific information comes to your inbox from "ManhuntServiceman."
You have your basic Buddy List that you can add or remove friends with the cool option of being able to choose which of the buddy's photos to use in your view of the list. The buddy list also includes the handy notes field.
PREMIUM:
The Full Access Membership is available for 7 Days for $7.00, 30 days for $12, or 90 days for $30. I like that they offer multiple duration memberships, such as the one week trial. Free users have different limits to their mailbox, but the main feature that free users don't get is the "blocked list." Remember that free users don't get access to the advanced search, nor do they get access to the mobile site.
MOBILE:
Mobile.Manhunt.Net is actually the best looking mobile hookup site I've seen so far. It has appropriate sized graphics, a great layout and features that make sense for a mobile device. The biggest drawbacks that I've seen are the "Men Online" query uses your state instead of your region or city, so you get a lot more hits outside your area and that you can't "add buddy" from the mobile interface. You have access to your Saved Searches, so you should create saved search for your most common mobile interests. For example, if you live and work in very different areas, you might have a saved search about "men online near work" and one about "men online near home" using the zip code radius and any other useful criteria you might want. You have to work out your mobile searches in advance since the advanced search is not present on the mobile site.
WARNINGS:
In conclusion, I really can't recommend Manhunt to bears whether they are looking or bears or chasers. There's not really any mechanism to find anyone interested in bears or chubs nor is the bear or chub population sufficient to attract chasers or admirers. I really don't find the overall population diverse enough based on the very goofy selections members have made. 85% white doesn't match my world or my experience. If you are young, white, and athletic and that's what you like, this is probably a good place with over twice the "online now" membership of gay.com.
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