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.