Regent's ongoing financial troubles

I've been pleasantly surprised by the increase in advertising on gay.com (not that I enjoy the ads, just that they show gay.com is managing to generate some income which may result in better business practices at the company), but just read this disturbing article on Alyson Publications (another of the businesses gobbled up by PlanetOut which was then gobbled up by Regent).

http://www.queerty.com/is-broke-regent-media-unloading-destitute-alyson-books-20100722/

Oh well.

The WRONG changes

Well, once again the powers that be have made changes to gay.com. And in the process they've broken the 3rd party chat programs that were FINALLY starting to get up to speed. Just when these programs were starting to help revive the quality and quantity of conversation online the management has, once again, cut off its nose to spite its face.

Too good to be true

Just about two weeks ago I was commenting in my usual Twin Cities room that it had been a long time since I'd noticed gay.com go down for "maintenance." Then several days ago I wasn't able to log on at all. Every time I'd try to log on using Safari I'd immediately get a "server dropped connection" message. Tonight I used Firefox instead and logged on just fine. It took me a while to notice that they've made changes to their programming again ... the look of profiles is different. I haven't explored enough to see what else might have changed. Whatever they've done has certainly broken the system for those using Safari browser and hasn't really improved the look or usability.

Oh, has anyone else noticed that a year later they still don't seem to have many advertisers other than their own other ventures (their magazines, books and movies all owned by the same company) and seem to have lost regulars they used to have, like Expedia.

Oh well.

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.