Now I'm PISSED OFF!

I just logged on to gay.com and got this message:

You are locked out of that account for 1 hour.

WTF is that about?!?!?!?

Another disaster!

For starters the new look is pretty damned senseless. Anybody with half a brain will tell you that a web site using a black background is basic bad design. @Anon4, I hadn't seen the here.tv site before, thanks for pointing that out.

And, of course, the new look hasn't been up and running for even 24 hours before they announce:

Gay.com will be offline on September 16, 2009 between 5:30 AM and 9:00 AM PST for scheduled maintenance.

JEEZ!

Yeah, all my hopes that Regent would fix gay.com have just gone down the drain. A sad day indeed!

They've GOT to be joking

Please, PLEASE tell me that this is a bad joke:

Planned Outage
Gay.com is happy to announce that new and exciting features will be coming to the site. Along with a new, modern look, Gay.com will provide more unique opportunities to remain engaged and to connect on the site. In the Gay.com tradition, the site will continue to offer members immediate access to over 10 million profiles. Members can also continue to communicate with one another in any of over 750 chat rooms.

Of course they don't say WHEN it is planned for. I mean, it's been less than a year since their last horrible "upgrade" and we still haven't recovered from that. We're just now starting to get 3rd-party chat apps that work (sort of) and now they're going to screw everything up again?!?!?!

Down again

Yep:

gay.com is currently experiencing technical difficulties. We are aware of the problem and are working to fix it as soon as we can. Please bear with us, we will be back online soon.

As usual they also have their standard line:

For news on the gay.com site, check out gay.blogs.com/gaycomblog

But there's nothing much there (latest post August 18), and certainly nothing about the outage.

The really sad thing is that aside from seeing lots of !here and Regency Media related adverts on gay.com (and very little other advertising) there doesn't seem to be any improvement happening (or even announced future changes/improvements) since the buyout. All the links, etc. are still to "PlanetOut, Inc." as the owners and no updates on www.planetoutinc.com about the new ownership/company name. I had hoped that by now the new owners would have done something to put their mark on gay.com. Oh well.

BIG OOPS!

I was chatting away on gay.com tonight and suddenly, boom, no more chat. I got this instead:

Messenger Disconnected

Oops! Either you've been away for a while and we signed you out, or we had a server glitch.

Yeah, guess which one it was.

The competition is getting smart

I just got this email:

From: Webmaster [mailto:noreply@outinteractive.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2009 2:49 AM
To: _______@_________.com
Subject: Gay.com Down For Upgrades :(

Dear _________,

Gay.com will be down for upgrades today. Don't be left with no where
to chat. I would like to take this time to remind you that
www.maninsider.com
has chat rooms as well. www.maninsider.com always has 100's of chatters in
it's chat rooms with many local rooms for most areas.

All you have to do to chat is as simple as 123.

1. Log in to www.maninsider.com .

2. Click on the 'messenger' tab on the main menu.

3. Once the messenger has loaded click on the chat button to begin
chatting.

I hope that you have fun in the chat rooms. You must have java
installed to chat. If you do not have java installed you can get it
by clicking here .

Happy Hunting,

ServiceMan

At least gay.com did manage to be back up and running when I first checked at 11:30 a.m. PDT.

Been quite a while ...

... since I've seen one of these, but they do still happen more often than they should EVER need to.

Planned Outage
gay.com will be offline on July 28, 2009 from 9:00am to 11:00am PDT for scheduled maintenance.

Not down, but still ...

This interesting banner is at the top of all gay.com pages tonight:

Premium Members
We're experiencing trouble with our toll free number at this time. Please
contact us via email or LivePerson chat until our telephone issue is
resolved.

Ordinarily I'd blame the CTO, but ... they don't have one! Maybe they just couldn't pay the bill and it got cut off?? Wouldn't surprise me.

Down again

Just tried to log on and got this:

System Outage

gay.com and Planetout.com are currently experiencing technical difficulties. We are aware of the problem and are working to fix it as soon as we can. Please bear with us, we will be back online soon.

Interesting that it says gay.com and Planetout.com, but Planetout.com seems to be just fine.

Chat Client 9.0 is in beta testing!

HOORAY!!!! We're getting closer and closer to finally having a 3rd-party program to use for chatting on gay.com!!

Jean-Guy has Chat Client 9.0 in beta testing. You can follow its progress here http://www.gayboi.org/ and clicking the "Forums" link in the upper right corner.

The program is not available to the general public yet, but some people are getting in on the beta testing.

Maybe this will be the salvation of chat on gay.com

Didn't we just do this two days ago?

On gay.com tonight:

Planned Outage
gay.com will be offline on May 5, 2009 from 4:00 am to 8:00 am PST for scheduled maintenance.

Well, maybe if they do it more often they won't be down 8-12 hours at a time. Although this is going to cut into their international prime time usage.

"Scheduled Maintenance"

So, I see today they have posted:

Planned Outage
gay.com will be offline on May 3, 2009 from 6:00 am to 8:00 am PST for scheduled maintenance.

Translation:

OOPS!
We found something else wrong with the system so we'll be offline for at least 8 hours trying to fix it.

Last night, around 10 p.m. Central time users couldn't pull up profiles at all. Chat rooms were working fine, but if you tried to open someone's profile the browser just "hung" waiting for the page to load.

There is currently no mention of the maintenance at their official blog, but I'm sure that they'll post something at around 10 am PST when the site has been down 2 hours longer than anticipated (this is their usual MO).

The merger with Here/Regent still hasn't been finalized and they've extended the deadline from April 30 to May 31 (SEC Filing). It makes me wonder if Regent is realizing just how little the gay.com name is now worth. Let's face it, the domain name is about the only real asset they have. There is no customer loyalty to the brand, so the existing subscriber base is worthless (everyone who subscribes would gladly jump to another site). The existing web site is a mess and will need to be completely reprogrammed to be useful (the goal of trying to keep out adbots with the new site was circumvented within 2 days of the release of the new site). Any gay.com staff that might have been of benefit to Regent have been laid off or resigned. The stock that was selling for over $1.00 at the time of the agreement hasn't sold for over 25 cents in the past 3 months.

Maybe Regent is just waiting for gay.com to go bankrupt and then buy the domain name at a firesale price.

Okay, not so shocked

Once again a poorly planned "upgrade" has gay.com down during prime time (at least for the U.S.). Yeah, the work that was supposed to be done in 8 hours is now over 16 hours. While they announced this upgrade in advance on gay.com they didn't bother to make any mention of it in their blog until the site had already been down at least 5 hours longer than anticipated.

Site Update - April 7

We are in the midst of a major system upgrade that will improve performance on gay.com. Unfortunately, given the complexity of the maneuver, it’s taking a little longer than we expected.

Thanks for checking in and please bear with us as we work to get gay.com up and humming for you again soon.

Posted by Jason Herrick on April 7, 2009

I'm wondering if the Regent/here! management will have the balls to admit the failures that the old PlanetOut management refused to acknowledge?

Shock!

This is the first time I've seen one of these in a long time.

Planned Outage
gay.com will be offline on April 7, 2009 between 2:00 AM to 10:00 AM PST for scheduled maintenance.

Of course I haven't been online as much as I used to.

Long time!

It's been more than 6 weeks since I've noticed an outage worth blogging about ... although the past two days I've had a helluva time staying connected to the group chats. Sometimes it's my computer/browser that acts up. Several times it's that I've been logged out due to "inactivity" despite the fact that I'm one of the most chatty guys in the room.

It's also been more than 6 weeks since I've heard much of anything about the Regent takeover of PlanetOut. PO's CEO resigned. They have NO executive officers listed on their corporate web site (http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=179769&p=irol-govmanage).

There's a really interesting article online about how gay print media is "going bust." http://www.ontopmag.com/article.aspx?id=3516&MediaType=1&Category=28 The glossy mag Genre just closed up shop. Apparently there's been some "corporate raider" behavior of regional gay publications being bought up, stripped and dumped.

Then there's some interesting information about how one holding group now owns more than 25% of PlanetOut, recently buying more half of their stake at 6 cents a share.

They've been notified (again) by NASDAQ that they don't meet minimum listing requirements (http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2009/03/16/daily1.html).

I'm just wondering when (or if) the merger/purchase will be completed.

Nothing special ... just for the record

Saw this posted. Just trying to keep a log of up & down.

Planned Outage
gay.com will be offline on February 10, 2009 from 3:00 am to 8:00 am Pacific Standard Time for scheduled maintenance.

The Gay Hulu?

Many thanks to "Anon4" for his comment about new info on the gay.com merger with here! During yesterday's conference call with stockholders they presented where the new executives want to take the company in the future. You can see the "slides" used during the call which include some mockups of what the new new gay.com may look like by clicking here. The plan seems to tap synergies between their social networking sites and their programming from here! I'm still not sure how their print publications fit into it all, except maybe for source material for online services and guaranteed print advertising for online services. Gay.com seems to be an established online audience for the programming they're already selling via "subscription video-on-demand" through most cable providers.

Hopefully the Here Media revamp of the site will learn from the mistakes made by the PlaneOut management. The fact that Hulu is already out there with a working business plan and growing audience (including fun programming like "Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog") helps ease my fears.

A positive indication is that the new executives are getting a $1.00 salary for the first year (although we don't know at the moment what salary they've been guaranteed for future years). And I'm not sure what they will really be able to accomplish within that first year. These things take time.

One thing I don't comprehend is how they can offer current PlanetOut shareholders this "Special Stock in Here Media [the new merged company] which provides certain limited downside protection of $4.00 per share value." My knowledge of this sort of thing is pretty limited, but this sounds like they're going to guarantee that this special stock will never be less than $4.00 per share, which seems strange for a stock that's lately been under 40 cents a share. Also the current PlanetOut shareholders will own 20% of the new company, while current here! owners will get 80%. It takes a lot more math to wrap your head around all of this than my poor little brain can handle at the moment. I'm trying to figure out how many common shares (or fractions of a share) of the new company I would get for each share I currently own in PlanetOut. How many shares of the "special stock?"

Makes my poor little head hurt.

And, sadly, until Here Media can fix gay.com we're stuck with a site that requires enormous amounts of "scheduled maintenance" when it isn't having an "unplanned outage." Maybe, maybe PLEASE, they'll release an API that lets 3rd-party programmers develop their own chat programs that work with gay.com, even if they do so on a simpler level specifically designed to ease the load on their servers.

Something about 10:30 p.m.?

The system went down tonight just before 10:30 p.m. and others have commented that it seems like it has gone down at that same time several nights. There's a joke that when a site goes down at night "it must be lunch time in India" but 10:30 here is 10:00 a.m. there. Maybe they go to lunch early?

Putting my money ...

... where my mouth is. Today I became a shareholder in PlanetOut, Inc. (LGBT). It took forever for e-trade.com to get my newly open account going (I opened it two weeks ago and they sat on my money until yesterday before they'd let me invest it ... nice racket!). I bought 200 shares at 42 cents each, which proptly dropped to 32 cents then closed at 39 cents. I'm already well on my way to losing money. But I figured it's worth it just for the laughs while I can still buy stock on the open market.

Better late than never

Thanks to an anonymous reader of this blog for letting me know that they've canned the CTO, Bill Bain, the guy most responsible for the disasterous upgrade.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1287258/000095013409000555/f51106e8vk.htm

Sadly they're also laying off about 33% of their total workforce. No specifics in the SEC filing, but I fear that the bulk will be in their IT support, which needs all the help it can get just to keep the site running.

Two nights in a row

Down again tonight?

gay.com is currently experiencing technical difficulties. We are
aware of the problem and are working to fix it as soon as we can. Please bear
with us, we will be back online soon.

When will they realize that this "upgrade" has been one huge mistake?

More weirdness

Online chatting right now I tried to open a "mini bio" from the user list and got this:

Planned System Maintenance
gay.com and Planetout.com are
currently down. This is a planned outage for system upgrades and we should
be
back online by 7:00am Pacific Time.
In the meantime, please visit our
sister
sites:
Gay Sports Blog — www.gaysportsblog.com
Gay TV Blog — www.gaytvblog.com
Gay Music Blog — music.gay.com
Hot Topics — hottopics.gay.com
Gay Travel Blog — travel.gay.com
For news on the gay.com site, check out gay.blogs.com/gaycomblog
Thank you for your
patience.
Eric WilsonVP, Product Planning and Strategy

Although just going to http://gay.com/ you get:

System Outage
gay.com is currently experiencing technical
difficulties. We are aware of the problem and are working to fix it as soon as
we can. Please bear with us, we will be back online soon.
In the meantime,
please visit our sister sites:
planetout.com — www.planetout.com
Gay Sports Blog — www.gaysportsblog.com
Gay TV Blog — www.gaytvblog.com
Gay Music Blog — music.gay.com
Hot Topics — hottopics.gay.com
Gay Travel Blog — travel.gay.com
For news on the gay.com site,
check out gay.blogs.com/gaycomblog
Thank you for your
patience.
Eric WilsonVP, Product Planning and Strategy

without the BS about it being a "planned" outage. So, where is the product "Planning and Strategy" in all of this???? Oddly enough chat continued to work for a few minutes after those errors.

These people can't be fired too soon.

How much planned maintenance can one website need?

Yeah, I just went to log on and saw this:

Planned Outage
We will be taking gay.com down on January 10, 2009 from 4:00
am to 7:00 am Pacific Standard Time for scheduled maintenance.

Good grief! Is there any website out there that needs this much "planned maintenance" that takes down the entire site for so long?

Fire Sale!

Thanks to those of you who let me know about PlanetOut being "merged." I'd wondered why the stock had started to sneack back up the past few days (so much for me being able to buy a piece of the company at bargain basement prices). Although at the close today the stock was down consdierably from yesterday's close.

It is interesting that this is being considered a "merger" with the company that recently bought PlanetOut's publishing interests. Also interesting is talk "suggesting that plans are already afoot to offload the company for a low price within the next four years."

http://www.c21media.net/news/detail.asp?area=4&article=46905

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/PlanetOut-Here-Networks-and-prnews-14011236.html

Let's hope that the new management is smart enough to dump Bill Bain (http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=179769&p=irol-govBio&ID=167554), the PlaneOut CTO who has so thoroughly botched the "upgrade" and Eric Wilson (http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=179769&p=irol-govBio&ID=153438) who has been the guy feeding us all the bullshit about the upgrade.

And yet again

So:

Planned Outage
We will be taking gay.com down on January 8, 2009 from 2:00 am
to 9:30 am Pacific Standard Time for scheduled maintenance.

Didn't we just have this?

Another Planned Outage

Here we go again:

Planned Outage We will be taking gay.com down on January
6, 2009 from 5:00 am to 9:00 am Pacific Standard Time for scheduled maintenance.

Seriously, the site was never down this much for "maintenance" before.

"News"

gay.com's standards for news are sinking as low as their stock price. Today one of their "top stories" promoted on their home page is about underwear fashion very conveniently also promoting one of their few advertisers, FreshPair.com.

http://style.gay.com/2008/12/new-years-resol.html

Ya know, it wouldn't be quite as bad if they'd done the fashion bit and then included a small mention that "these styles are available at ..." but they put the vendor name in the promo on the main page. I wonder when we'll start getting the same treatment for travel articles including Expedia by name?