Five labels run across the top of the board and every one of them is Estonian. They are short, and once you know which shelf each one opens the site stops looking like a wall of unfamiliar text.
The two shelves that face each other
The largest part of the board is two shelves. One holds adverts written by women, and the menu reaches for two phrasings for it, one of them being naine tutvub mehega, a woman meets a man. The other holds adverts written by men, and its label is mees otsib naist, a man is looking for a woman.
The two verbs are worth separating. Tutvuma means to get acquainted with someone, so a label built on it describes a meeting. Otsima means to look for someone, so a label built on that describes a search. The difference in tone is small, and either label leads to the same shelf: one is written by women and read by men, the other written by men and read by women.
The rest of the menu
Naised omavahel and Mehed omavahel cover women looking among women and men looking among men. Muud, which means other, collects what fits nowhere else, and on this board that includes massage and erotica as well as adverts that simply do not name a preference.
There is also naine otsib meest, the same shelf as the first one under the other phrasing. Posting a women’s advert to that label and posting it to the first one put it in the same place, so the choice between them makes no difference to who sees it.
Picking the shelf when you post
The category you choose decides who reads the advert, and the poster writes the advert themselves, so the label has to be right before anything else matters. A woman’s advert goes on the women’s shelf if she is looking for a man, and on the shelf for women looking among women if she is not. Adverts that offer a service go under Muud.
The form asks for an age along with the category, and for the adult shelves the age has to be between 18 and 120. Everyone on the board is 18 or over.
What a reader sees on either shelf
An advert carries a name, an age, a place and a short text, plus a contact detail at the end. The list shows the opening of the text before you click, so the first line of an advert does most of the work of getting it opened.
The board does not moderate the wording and does not check what an advert claims. The text is the whole of what you know about the poster until they write back, which is worth remembering before the first meeting.
Reading it in English
The interface switches language, and the category names stay in Estonian whichever version you are reading. English addresses follow the pattern /category/ plus the same key that the Estonian address carries after /kuulutused/, so the women’s shelf is available at both /kuulutused/naine_otsib_meest and /category/naine_otsib_meest, and the same holds for the men’s shelf. The place filter behaves the same way, with /asukoht/ and /location/ in front of the same place name.
If you arrived from a search engine and the page in front of you is in Estonian, the switch in the header is the fastest way to the English wording. It also changes the address, so the page you land on after switching can be bookmarked.
A note on the words
Two of the five labels repeat the same pair of words in a different order, and that is the part that catches people out. A woman looking for a man and a man looking for a woman are described with the same vocabulary in mirrored order, so the distinguishing word comes second. The menu gives the order as women first.