Why am I not surprised?!?!?

Yep, they're going down again.

Planned
System Outage - Advance NoticeBy Eric Wilsoneric.wilson@planetoutinc.com
-->
We will be taking gay.com offline on Wednesday, October 29th from
5:00am to 8:00am Pacific Daylight Time for a system software update. We will do
our best to make this update as quick as possible.
Posted by Eric Wilson on
October 28, 2008 DIGG
THIS TrackBack
(0) Back to Gay.com

This nees to be an example in MBA programs of how to NOT run an online company.

Yet again ... this time for everything!

Planned System Outage - Advance Notice
By Eric Wilsoneric.wilson@planetoutinc.com -->

On Tuesday October 28th, we will be taking the our entire network down
to reconfigure our data center. This effort involves three of our sites:
gay.com, planetout.com and planetoutinc.com. This outage is a critical part of
our on-going work to ensure site stability and up-time. As this work involves
physically moving some of our servers, it will take several hours. In order to
avoid repeated outages next week, we will be coupling this move with a software
update to gay.com. In all, we expect the sites to be offline from 1:00am to
12:00pm Pacific Daylight Time. Thanks in advance, for your continued support and
patience.
Posted by Eric Wilson on October 24, 2008 DIGG
THIS TrackBack
(0) Back to Gay.com

Of course if you don't visit the blog you don't learn anything in advance about the outage.

I remain amazed that Eric Wilson still has a job.

And yet again

These guys go down more than any guy I've ever met (and I've met some real sluts).

Planned System Outage

We will be taking gay.com offline on Friday, October 17th from 5:00am to 10:30am Pacific Daylight Time to implement hardware and software upgrades to our system. Thank you for your continued patience as we improve and stabilize the new site.

Posted by Eric Wilson on October 16, 2008 | DIGG THIS | TrackBack (0) | Back to Gay.com

At least they've started keeping to their stated down time.

MORE downtime

Yet another planned outage. It will be interesting to see if they keep to their timeline. I'm posting the announcement here so that we can keep track.

Planned Site OutageBy Eric
Wilsoneric.wilson@planetoutinc.com -->
We will be taking gay.com offline
from 6:00am to 10:00am Pacific Daylight Time on Wednesday, October 15th for
additional server capacity upgrades. We appreciate your on-going patience
through these necessary upgrades.
Posted by Eric Wilson on October 14, 2008 DIGG THIS TrackBack (0) Back to Gay.com

Letter to the Editor of Planet Out

I figure that the gay.com debacle has become legitimate news and that the folks at PNO need to be covering this, so I've sent them a Letter to the Editor as follows:

Gay.com lays giant cyber-egg!

Yes, this is now news that you should be
covering as news. Your readers deserve a detailed article on what went
wrong. Not just the "we're doing our best to bring you a great new site"
tale that we've been hearing for months.

Why does Eric Wilson still have a job? The rollout of your new gay.com site has been one MASSIVE disaster. He has become the "face" of the disaster and there is simply no excuse for the problems that the new site has. None! Maybe fault lies elsewhere,
but wherever that fault is found you need to be open with your members about the
failures and let us know what action (aka heads rolling) is being taken. The problems are obviously beyond Eric's abilities to fix/control. We now need assurances from the CEO, Karen Magee, now because Eric has lost all credibility. Probably the fault lies at the feet of CTO Bill Bain.

Whatever the cause, your readers, your members deserve to know the
WHOLE truth. This needs to be explored just as deeply as you'd approach
the screw-up of any other large gay organization (ie., imagine HRC did something
that offended and lost thousands of members). Sadly, in this case it is
the fox reporting on the hen house. But it is also your chance to shine
and let the world know that we CAN trust you as a news organization, that you're
not afraid to investigate yourself with the same objectivity you would
investigate others.

I hope you will do so and strengthen my faith in your news organization to replace the faith lost as a social networking site.

You can send one too (just remember this isn't the gay.com help desk, it's a letter to the editor of a publication) at http://planetout.com/news/features/letters/form.html

And again!

Yep, the site was down today with a LONG unplanned outage. Now that they've got the site up, they're taking it down again for another planned outage!

Planned System Outage - October 13th @ 6:00am PDTBy Eric Wilson eric.wilson@planetoutinc.com
-->
We will be taking gay.com offline at 6:00am Pacific
Daylight Time for approximately 4 hours, returning by 10:00am PDT. We will be
updating the system to remedy additional software bugs that have caused site
instability and downtime throughout the past weekend.
Posted by Eric Wilson
on October 12, 2008 DIGG THIS TrackBack (0) Back to Gay.com

I wonder if the site really will be back up by their posted time. I'm not holding my breath.

One really interesting thing about copying and pasting that entire blog post .... it exposed Eric Wilson's email address!!! I'm tempted to write him and ask him to directly address the issues here. >=)

Gay.com on Twitter

I hadn't realized that gay.com was using Twitter. http://twitter.com/gaycom

Curious that gay.com is, as of this post, following 20 other people but only 17 people are following gay.com.

A total of 7 posts made so far. Interesting that their first post, made Oct. 6 says:

Visit our blog at: http://gay.blogs.com/gaycomblog/ for updates on what's going on with our new site! We'd love to hear from you. 12:56 PM October 06, 2008 from web

That "we'd love to hear from you" sure didn't last long once they realized the response was overwhelmingly negative.

Never forget!

Since they've started deleting entries on their blog about outages, I've decided to start archiving them here. This is the latest:

Unplanned System Outage

Sunday October 12th 3:30pm PDT - The gay.com site has been offline since 1:45pm PDT this afternoon due to a database error. We are working on the fix and will bring the site back online as soon as possible.

Posted by Eric Wilson on October 12, 2008 | DIGG THIS | TrackBack (0) | Back to Gay.com

Down again

Sunday, October 12, 3:40 pm Central.
They're down again with "technical difficulties." Nothing on their blog about this outage.

Update 8:58 pm
Still down! At least now they have an entry on their blog about the outage. This entry has none of the "we're striving to make the site better" bullshit.

Interesting to note that they've now removed all entries about the previous planned outage. I guess they think that if they don't leave evidence behind of their failures that we won't remember how much they've screwed up.

PlanetOut ties to Bill Gates

Turns out that Bill Gates owns a big chunk of gay.com! Interesting stuff to be read at http://valleywag.com/tech/planetout/bill-gates-goes-gay-again-274889.php

Where to go?

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Chat design

As someone said on the official gay.com blog (before they turned off the ability to add comments), "Grey is not the new black." It is just plain POOR DESIGN to have grey letters on a white background. It makes it hard to read, particularly next to the HUGE orange user name. And those cheesy square smilies ... UGH!

Photo Review

So, they now won't let you post an "adult" photo as your main profile photo. Seems silly for an "adult" site. But even more ridiculous is what they seem to now classify as an adult photo. A pal of mine has had this picture for years. They have deleted it THREE TIMES in the past two weeks as "adult."

But they will let you make your entire profile private. I just don't get it.

Feature Loss

The 3rd party chat programs brought many additional features. I loved Chattage. Here are a few of the things I miss:

• Automatic logging of both public rooms and private chats
• Botguard (The new gay.com version is weak)
  
• Ability to automatically highlight usernames and key words
• Automatically capture all profile photos
• "Hammer" room even if you're not a premium member
• Separate list of buddies, hotties, and ignored
• Automatically logging in to chat when launching the program
• Ability to have multiple rooms and multiple private chats open in separate windows to watch all of them at once
• Sort the list of folks in the room by name, arrival time, or classification (buddy, hottie, etc.) in ascending or descending order
• Ability to turn on or off arrival and departure notices in the room
• Ability to have a custom bio line (and it would be remembered from session to session)
• Ability to scroll back on a conversation and have the window stay where I am (gay.com jumps to bottom of the window the moment a new line is displayed making it impossible to read previous lines)
• Notify you when someone is being blocked by your botguard
  

I don't miss the sounds. They were just annoying, but could be turned off.

What do you miss?

P.S. I've been adding to this list over time and it has already doubled in size from when first posted

Credit where credit is due

Yeah, a couple of days ago, after at least the 3rd outage I sent a complaint to their premiumservices@gay.com address. They apologized and gave me an extra month on my premium membership, but that really was too little too late. They should have given ALL of their paying members that credit a week ago as a goodwill gesture.

Breaking Chattage and others

Let's face it, more than 80% of the guys chatting on gay.com use some 3rd party program. The Java client sucked big time. And while I'll give gay.com credit for improvement over the old chat system, the new one still pales in comparison to ALL of the 3rd party programs. Hopefully Chat Client will return. Chattage, my favorite, sadly will not survive the change.

Were the folks at PlanetOut THAT clueless about their users? Or did they feel they were losing ad revenue when we used those other programs that avoided the ads? Sadly the end result is going to be far fewer users seeing ANY of their advertising simply because we all avoid the site entirely.

Screwed the Pooch

As someone else said, gay.com has screwed the pooch. The "release" of their new website has been a disaster on the scale of New Coke. They've seriously misunderstood their core customers and continue to refuse to listen to them.

They have their own blog at http://gay.blogs.com/gaycomblog/ but the feedback comments became so universally negative (there were more comments than the host system could display) that they've turned off feedback. That's why I've decided to start this blog, to give loyal gay.com users a forum to vent their frustration.

Let's start with the fact that NOT ONE of their announced down times has been met. They've always been down at least 25% more than the announced time. Combined with the fact that just yesterday they said "Whenever possible, planned outages will be conducted in off-peak hours" yet today's outage is during peak hours. At least in today's post they admit that it will be during peak hours, but they also violated their own promise that "We will do everything possible to give everyone adequate advance warning of these outages." Yeah, they announced today's outage on Thursday, but then changed it to "Postponed."

More rants on other subjects to follow.

Cut loose guys, here's your place to vent!