What This Checklist Is — and What It Is Not
Most dating script buyers walk into a vendor demo with a mental list of features they want. That is the wrong approach. Features can be added after launch. What you cannot fix cheaply is a script that fails on admin controls, moderation, payment infrastructure, or licensing — the bones of the platform.
This checklist is an evaluation spec, not a feature wishlist. Every item below includes a pass criterion and a red flag to watch for during the demo. You should treat it as a scorecard: if the vendor cannot demonstrate a requirement in the live admin panel, mark it as a fail and factor that into your decision.
It is not a list of features that make a platform profitable, and it is not a launch or go-live checklist. There are separate resources for those. This is the spec you take into the room before you spend a dollar. If you are preparing for a demo, you should also test a dating script systematically before purchasing — a demo checklist and a requirements checklist work together.
Admin Controls: The Dashboard You Will Live In
The admin panel is the single most under-tested part of any dating script purchase. Buyers spend an hour swiping on the demo frontend and three minutes in the backend. That ratio should be reversed. If the admin panel is clunky, feature-incomplete, or hard to navigate, your day-to-day operations will be miserable — and no amount of frontend polish fixes that.
User Management
Requirement: The admin must be able to search, view, edit, suspend, and permanently delete any user profile from a single interface.
Pass criterion: During the demo, ask the vendor to find a specific user by email, suspend the account, and show you what the suspended user sees when they try to log in. This must take under 60 seconds.
Red flag: The vendor navigates to a raw database table or says the feature requires a developer to run a SQL query.
Revenue & Subscription Oversight
Requirement: A dashboard that shows active subscriptions, pending payments, failed charges, and total revenue — filterable by date range and plan type.
Pass criterion: The vendor exports a subscription report to CSV during the demo without leaving the admin panel.
Red flag: Revenue data lives in a payment gateway dashboard (Stripe, PayPal) rather than natively inside the dating script. You need revenue intelligence in one place.
Content Moderation Queue
Requirement: A centralized queue of reported profiles, photos, and messages with approve/reject/flag actions and audit-trail logging.
Pass criterion: The vendor creates a test report from the user side, navigates to the moderation queue, and resolves it in real time.
Red flag: The moderation queue is an afterthought — a single table with no filters, no priority sorting, and no action history. If it takes five clicks to resolve one report, your moderation costs will balloon as the user base grows.
Configuration Flexibility
Requirement: Toggle-able settings for registration requirements (email only vs. phone verification), profile field visibility, subscription plan creation, and language/localization without touching code.
Pass criterion: The vendor adds a new subscription tier while you watch — name, price, duration, and feature gating — and it appears on the frontend registration flow.
Red flag: Plan configuration requires editing PHP config files or database entries directly. That means every pricing change costs developer time.
Member Profiles: The Unit of Value
A dating platform is only as valuable as the profiles it contains and the data those profiles capture. Thin profiles produce low-quality matches, which produce low retention, which kills the network effect before it starts. Every field you capture is a matching signal — and every missing field is a signal you cannot use.
Profile Depth
Requirement: Profiles must support at minimum: display name, age/birthdate, gender, orientation, bio text, photo upload, and at least three lifestyle or interest fields (education, occupation, hobby tags, etc.).
Pass criterion: Create a complete profile during the demo — fill every field and save. Then search for that profile using different field combinations and confirm each field is searchable and filterable.
Red flag: Fields exist on the profile form but are not indexed in search. This is surprisingly common — the profile builder was shipped, but the matching engine was never wired to read the data.
Media Support
Requirement: Multiple photo uploads per profile with reordering, a primary-photo designation, and at minimum photo moderation (manual approve/reject). Video support is a strong plus but not a launch requirement.
Pass criterion: Upload three photos, reorder them, set a primary, and confirm the order persists across login sessions and device types.
Red flag: No photo moderation. If every uploaded photo goes live instantly, a single bad actor can turn your homepage into a liability in minutes.
Privacy Controls
Requirement: Users must be able to hide their profile from search, block specific members, and control which profile fields are visible to which audience (all members, matches only, no one).
Pass criterion: Toggle profile visibility to hidden, log in as a second test user, and confirm the hidden profile does not appear in search, browse, or recommendations.
Red flag: The “hide profile” setting exists but the profile still appears in “who viewed you” or activity feeds. Privacy is all-or-nothing — partial privacy is an illusion that will generate support tickets and trust erosion.
Matching & Discovery: The Engine Room
Matching is what separates a dating script from a glorified member directory. The algorithm does not need to be AI-powered on day one, but it does need to be configurable. A black-box matching engine you cannot tune is worse than a simple one you can control. For a deeper understanding of how the logic works under the hood, review how dating app matching algorithms work before evaluating any vendor.
Matching Algorithm Configuration
Requirement: Admin-configurable parameters for at minimum: age range preference weighting, location proximity radius, gender/orientation filtering, and interest/lifestyle tag overlap scoring.
Pass criterion: The vendor changes the location radius from 50km to 10km in the admin panel while you watch, and the match results update accordingly on the user side.
Red flag: Matching parameters are hardcoded. If you cannot adjust the radius, age weighting, or interest scoring without a developer ticket, you are locked into a matching logic that may not fit your niche.
Search & Filtering for Users
Requirement: End users must be able to filter profiles by age range, gender, location (country/city), and at least one lifestyle or interest tag. Results must be sortable by recency, proximity, or activity.
Pass criterion: Apply three filters simultaneously (e.g., women, 25–35, within 30km), confirm the result count changes with each filter, and verify the sort order switches when you change the sort dropdown.
Red flag: Filters are applied client-side via JavaScript after loading all results. This works fine with 50 profiles and breaks completely at 5,000. Ask the vendor how many profiles are in the demo database and whether filtering happens server-side.
The Cold Start Problem
Requirement: A profile-seeding or demo-profile system that populates the platform with realistic-looking profiles before launch so early users are not staring at an empty feed.
Pass criterion: The vendor shows you the admin interface for uploading or generating seed profiles — how many, what demographics, and how they appear in discovery.
Red flag: No seeding tool exists, and the vendor suggests you should “invite friends” to solve the cold start. An empty dating platform dies on day one. Seed profiles are not optional.
Payments & Subscriptions: The Revenue Infrastructure
If the payment system fails, nothing else on this checklist matters — you have a hobby, not a business. The requirements here are not about which monetization models to use (that is a separate conversation about dating app monetization models) but whether the plumbing can collect money reliably and transparently.
Payment Gateway Coverage
Requirement: At minimum, Stripe and PayPal integration. For dating platforms specifically, CCBill support is strongly recommended because it specializes in high-risk and subscription-billing merchant categories that mainstream processors occasionally flag or freeze.
Pass criterion: The vendor initiates a live (or sandbox) transaction through each gateway they claim to support, and the transaction appears in the admin revenue dashboard within the script — not just in the gateway’s own dashboard.
Red flag: A gateway is listed as “coming soon” or “available via custom integration.” If it is not working in the demo, treat it as absent. “Custom integration” means you pay a developer to build what the vendor should have shipped.
Subscription Plan Management
Requirement: The admin must be able to create multiple subscription tiers with different prices, durations (weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual), and feature-gating rules — all from the admin panel without touching code.
Pass criterion: Same as the admin-configuration test above, but specifically for recurring billing: create a plan, subscribe a test user, confirm auto-renewal logic, and cancel the subscription — all verified in both the admin panel and the payment gateway.
Red flag: Plans are hardcoded in a PHP config array. Every pricing experiment requires a deploy, which means every experiment costs money and time.
Credit/Wallet System
Requirement: If the script offers à la carte purchases (profile boosts, virtual gifts, visibility upgrades), there must be an internal wallet or credit system that tracks balances and purchase history per user.
Pass criterion: Purchase credits as a test user, spend them on a boost, and verify the remaining balance updates immediately in the user’s wallet and the admin revenue log.
Red flag: Credits are tracked client-side or via cookies. If you clear your browser cache and your credit balance resets, the wallet is fake.
Safety & Moderation: The Non-Negotiables
Safety features are not “nice to have” on a dating platform — they are legal, reputational, and operational requirements. A single incident that could have been prevented by a missing safety feature is enough to destroy a platform and expose the operator to regulatory liability. For the full legal picture, pair this section with a dating app legal requirements checklist that covers GDPR, age verification, and jurisdictional compliance.
Identity Verification
Requirement: At minimum, phone (SMS) verification at registration. A photo-verification or blue-check badge system is a strong plus for trust signaling.
Pass criterion: Register a new account, complete SMS verification during the demo, and confirm the verified status badge appears on the profile and in search results.
Red flag: SMS verification exists but is optional and can be skipped silently. Optional verification is not verification — it is a checkbox that bots will ignore and real users may skip, defeating the purpose entirely.
Reporting & Blocking
Requirement: Every user profile, message, and photo must have a one-click report button. Blocking a user must be immediate and bidirectional — the blocked user cannot see or contact the blocker, and vice versa. All reports must surface in the admin moderation queue.
Pass criterion: Report a profile from User A, block User B from User A, and verify that User B cannot find User A in search, browse, or chat — and that the report appears in the admin queue within seconds.
Red flag: Blocking is one-directional (blocked user can still view the blocker’s profile) or reports are sent via email to the admin instead of appearing in a structured moderation queue. Email-based moderation does not scale past 100 users.
GDPR & Privacy Compliance
Requirement: Consent management checkboxes at registration (not pre-ticked), a user-accessible data export function, and an account deletion flow that actually removes personal data — not just deactivates the account.
Pass criterion: Request account deletion during the demo and confirm the profile, messages, and photos are no longer accessible — not hidden, removed.
Red flag: The vendor does not know what GDPR or equivalent privacy regulations require, or the script has no data-export function. Even if you are not in the EU today, privacy regulation is expanding globally — build for it from day one.
Source Code & Licensing: What You Actually Own
This section is short because it is binary. Either you can access, modify, and keep running the code on your server indefinitely — or you cannot. What to verify when buying a dating script goes deeper on licensing, but the core requirements are these:
Pass criteria:
- The license is perpetual — you can keep running your installation even if you stop paying the vendor (hosting costs aside).
- Full PHP source code is included, not encoded or obfuscated — you can open the files in a text editor and read every line.
- The license permits modification for your own platform — you can add features, change the design, and integrate third-party services.
Red flags:
- Source code is ionCube-encoded or delivered as a compiled binary. You cannot audit security, fix bugs yourself, or customize anything.
- The license is a renewable subscription with no perpetual fallback — stop paying, and your platform stops working.
- The license prohibits modification. Some vendors sell “source code access” that is read-only — you can look but not change. This is not ownership.
How MooDatingScript Maps to This Checklist
If you are evaluating MooDatingScript (also called mooDating or MooDateScript) against this requirements spec, here is where it stands factually — strengths first, then real limitations.
Where it passes: The admin panel includes user management, subscription oversight, moderation queue, and configurable plan creation. Member profiles support the full set of fields listed above — name, age, gender, orientation, bio, photos with ordering, video, job, and education fields. The matching engine (v1.7+) is AI-powered and location-based, with search and filtering by age range, gender, location, and lifestyle tags. Payment gateways cover CCBill, Stripe, and PayPal — the three gateways recommended above. Safety features include SMS verification, a blue-check badge, a reporting/blocking system, and GDPR consent management. Full PHP source code is included with the $149 one-time license, and it is not obfuscated.
Where you need to verify during the demo: The profile-seeding tool exists but you should confirm it populates realistic, region-appropriate demo profiles — not just 50 placeholder accounts with lorem-ipsum bios. The AI matching is in v1.7, but “AI-powered” is a broad claim — ask for a walkthrough of the admin-side configuration options so you know which parameters you can tune versus which are opaque. The PWA mobile app is a $100 one-time add-on, not bundled — if mobile is critical for your launch, factor that into your budget from the start.
What it does not do: The license is nontransferable. If you build a dating platform and later want to sell the business, the license does not follow the sale — the buyer would need their own license. This is standard for commercial source-code licenses, but it is important to know before you treat the platform as a sellable asset. Also, the license covers your own internal use on one domain — you cannot use it to build dating sites for clients or offer a hosted white-label service.
For most independent founders launching a single dating platform, these limitations are irrelevant — but if your business model involves selling turnkey dating sites to clients, MooDatingScript is not the right vehicle, and you should know that before the demo, not after.
Checklist Scorecard
Print this or keep it open during the demo. Mark each item pass or fail while the vendor demonstrates it live.
| Category | Requirement | Pass/Fail |
|---|---|---|
| Admin | Search, suspend, and delete any user from the admin panel in under 60 seconds | |
| Admin | Export a subscription/revenue report to CSV without leaving the dashboard | |
| Admin | Resolve a reported profile in the moderation queue with audit trail visible | |
| Admin | Create a new subscription plan and confirm it appears on the frontend | |
| Profiles | Fill every profile field and verify each is separately searchable and filterable | |
| Profiles | Upload, reorder, and set a primary photo — persistent across sessions and devices | |
| Profiles | Hide a profile and confirm it disappears from search, browse, and activity feeds | |
| Matching | Change match parameters (radius, age weighting) in the admin and see results update | |
| Matching | Apply three user-side filters simultaneously with correct result counts | |
| Matching | Populate seed/demo profiles through an admin tool — not manually | |
| Payments | Process a transaction through each claimed gateway and verify it in the admin revenue log | |
| Payments | Create a recurring subscription, confirm auto-renewal, and cancel — all verified end-to-end | |
| Payments | Purchase credits, spend them, and verify the wallet balance updates server-side | |
| Safety | Complete SMS verification at registration and confirm the verified badge appears | |
| Safety | Report a profile, block a user, and verify bidirectionally that blocking works in search and chat | |
| Safety | Request account deletion and confirm personal data is removed — not hidden, removed | |
| Licensing | Confirm the license is perpetual, source code is unobfuscated, and modification is permitted |