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.
1 comment:
Here is an interesting observation from somebody else about another change made during this "update":
http://www.gayboi.org/gbforms0001/showthread.php?t=612What on earth were they thinking? Things like that only anger the few remaining users they have.
This is not good considering that more and more people seem to leave gay.com every month since this new system was rolled out, but the last couple of weeks the number of people online has gone down dramatically. They need to be adding features, not removing them.
Manhunt.net was offering half price memberships. Perhaps that is why fewer people have been on gay.com recently?
If you really want to barf, check out the gay.com Twitter page. Who the heck at gay.com has time to update that so frequently considering how many people they have laid off?
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