What the Green, Red and Grey Dots Mean on Badoo

A green dot next to someone's photo on Badoo means she is online right now, a red dot means she was online within the last few hours, and grey means she is offline. You can hide your own online status in Control your experience, but if you do, you can no longer see when anyone else is online either.

The dots sit next to a member's photo and only ever tell you one thing: when she was last on the app.

• Green: she is online now.
• Red: she was online recently, within the last few hours.
• Grey: she is offline.

Nothing else is in there. The dots say nothing about whether she has read your message, whether she liked it, or what she thinks of you.

If you would rather nobody saw when you are active, you can hide your online status in Control your experience.

The trade is built in. Once your status is hidden, you cannot see anyone else's either. Badoo treats it as a two-way setting, so you either share your status and see everyone's, or share nothing and see nothing.

This is where the dots cause the most trouble. You send a message, you see her go green, and no reply comes. It feels like an answer.

It usually is not. She may be answering a friend, replying to other men, or opening the app for ten seconds between meetings. Women on dating apps get far more messages than they can answer, and an active woman is being written to by a lot of men at once. A green dot tells you she is on the app. It does not tell you she has seen your message or decided anything about it.

The mistake is to react. A second message because she is green, then a third because she is still green, turns a normal delay into you looking anxious. a dating coach's view is that every text you send carries a little neediness, so a text with nothing to gain is a text to skip.

dating advice makes the case for turning off read receipts when you text women. Seeing that someone read your message and did not reply mostly just makes you upset. Hiding them removes that source of stress and gives you time to think before you answer.

Online status works the same way. If you catch yourself checking whether a woman is green, hiding your status takes the dots away from you completely. You lose a little information, and in exchange you stop reading meaning into a colored circle. For a lot of men that is a good trade.

The dots do have one fair use. They can help with timing.

If a conversation is going well and you have a reply ready, sending it while she is green can catch her while she is still in the app. That can keep the back and forth moving. Use the dot to choose when to send a message you were going to send anyway. Never use it to decide whether to send another one.

Sometimes a chat that was going well just stops, and her dot has been green or red a dozen times since. Now what?

Give it a day or two. If the conversation was fun and she simply went quiet, send one light message that picks the conversation back up. Make it about something new, a small callback to a joke you shared or an easy question, not a "hello?" or a "did you get my message?" coach points out that sometimes you have to double text through no fault of your own, because life gets in the way on her side. A single friendly nudge is fair.

If that one gets no reply either, let it go and spend your time on the women who write back. Her dot will keep changing color. That no longer has anything to do with you.

The dots measure time. Her replies measure interest.

A woman who is interested answers with more than a word or two, asks you things back, plays along with a joke, and says yes when you suggest moving things forward. The real test is whether the chat heads toward a number and a plan, and with an interested woman coach expects that to happen within a few short exchanges. If she gives you her number and agrees to a plan, you know where you stand, whatever color her dot was an hour ago.