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.