Previous post on matchmaker form enforcements and ghosting here.

I don't like implementing new rules and regulations, unless there's some clear need to, such as when there are clear inefficiencies in matching, and in our case, online date matching (please forgive the economics - matching design is literally one of my research interests). So the question is whether or not certain behaviors harm the efficiency of the process, and if imposing rules will provide a net benefit.

From this, I will impose one new rule: if you sign up for the Matchmaker Form, you must participate if you get matched. We've had a bunch of non-respondents and people who "just realized they weren't ready to date". That doesn't harm only your match, but it also harms others, as fitting you into the matching meant shifting around others' matches to be perhaps less optimal for them, or even not giving them a match at all. So if you sign up, you must participate, at the consequence of a temporary ban, as explained in the first post in this series. Attempts to evade this, and false accusations, will be met with permanent bans.

This leads us to ghosting, and whether or not we ought to regulate it. Unlike the behavior mentioned above, ghosting behavior is not inefficient in that sense. Ghosting implies that you two talked, and one person didn't find the other desirable enough. This is normal and not inefficient. The difference is that ghosting is frowned upon, as opposed to providing closure that you don't like the person. Is this worthy of regulation?

After discussing and praying about it, we will not directly penalize ghosting. A small majority of poll respondents from Part 3 wanted action taken against ghosters, but were split in whether to issue a ban or to make ghosting history public knowledge on spreadsheets. The rest of the non-neutral people, mostly, wanted to stay hands-off on ghosting. And that makes sense. For one thing, among multiple things, ghosting can occur between a few minutes of talking and years of a relationship. At what point does responsibility shift from us to participants, if we penalized ghosting? So my personal policy will be that I'm hands-on in the matchmaking and initial participation, but once the participants start talking, I'm hands-off (except in extreme cases like predators or creeps, which will be met with a ban). Hence I will not police ghosting.

However, because ghosting is heavily frowned upon, I will add a question to matchmaking forms about whether or not you can commit to not ghost your match if it doesn't work out. This is obviously an honor code question, but it can hopefully provide some form of self-selection and incorporate ghosting into people's ranking decisions.

It's impossible to please everyone, though I hope this ghosting policy can improve things a bit.

TL;DR: Our one rule (among a bunch of unwritten rules) is that if you sign up on a Matchmaker Form, you must participate if you get matched. Ghosting will not be regulated, but there will be a question about it on the form.