Gay.com, for those with no reason to be aware of it, is a chat site oriented primarily towards gay men. Some go there to gab, some to pick up their next ex-husband, and others to pick up the fling du jour. Sometimes folks even go there to kill time on a weeknight without the annoyance of driving across town to a bar. A lot of folks combine one or more of the above in their personal gay.com mission statement.
They just upgraded, in what has got to be one of the most ass-backward so-called upgrades consisting of take-aways, bandwidth-nuking, and idiocy promotion I've had the misfortune to be an end-user for - thus, the poison pen came out to play. Enjoy.
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Good god.
Flaming hatred from the Seattle room. Were a decision-maker revealed, it appears many would support stringing them up by their balls over a slow fire. Much talk of terminating premium memberships, with the gist generally "I paid for the old gay.com, the one that worked - not to be some goddam beta tester for a piece of maggot ridden crap pretending to be a chat program"
IRC looks positively charming compared to this, and with none of the ads. You have a very short time-frame before migration begins at a significant level...
Losing the ignore lists that protected us from stalkers, lunatics, assorted bastardry, and adbots is simply unacceptable.
Randomly eliminating regional and local chatrooms does not improve user experience. Eliminating the ability for users to create their own rooms suddenly makes systems like IRC, which is wide-open to such things, much more attractive. Those servers are still up - the only thing gay.com has ever offered is ease of use, and the ability to rapidly access profiles and pics.
With the slowing of the site caused by forcing everyone through an over-burdened and unpleasant web interface, much of the advantage is gone - when someone can simply go to MIRC.com, download a thin client, and log into efnet or undernet.
Add to that, the breaking of the ability to pvt/IM someone internal to the site, and you can suddenly make a strong business case for roll-back to the last working backup (one hopes you have preserved backups) either permanently or untile these and other issues can be resolved - before making your entire user base unwilling and unwitting beta testers of a fundamentally dysfunctional system.
That business case is simple - gay.com and planet out depend on premium memberships for revenue, and perhaps survival (given your rather public fiscal challenges). Doing something that pisses off your customer base for those memberships with even half this level of thoroughness is an active of active boneheaded stupidity worthy of expulsion from the corporate clubhouse and removal of the washroom keys for every person involved from coders on up through whichever dippy Vice President that signed off on this suicidal idiocy.
I paid for a working system. Granted, the java client was so fouled up as to be useless, but there were functional alternative chat clients that left me with a reasonably pleasant user interface. One that worked, and made up for Gay.com's fundamental inability to produce a good user interface.
Now I'm left with a partly used membership for a broken and slow system, with no effective alternative way in.
I'm going to be wanting my money back right soon.
5 comments:
I couldn't agree more. Gay.com exerts high pressure, unfair marketing and billing practices (e.g. autorebilling credit cards and not issuing full refunds). The "upgrade" has prevented me from using Chat Client (another chat package). As a result, I've lost touch with friends I've accumulated over years of chatting. The ".com" in gay.com stands for commercial, not community.
I marked my calendar to cancel my premium membership once it expires and wrote them a letter and told them they were nuts to eliminate the iRC chat.
WTF were they thinking?
Well, this latest change in gay.com came right around the time of my premium membership renewal. After seeing that the chat client was no longer useable, the lack of ignore features on the chat (which is the only thing that can make some people in the chat seem tolerable or pleasant) made me rush to change my credit card info and stop the renewal of the premium membership. Even if they have a huge SALE on membership, unless the ability to use a 3rd party, non-browser based chat client, and the ignore and bot protections that were available before they will never see another premium membership dollar from me, and I've been a premium member for many years now.
If you are not on dial up and are being frequently disconected from group chat in gay.com, please call 1-866-313-6373 to report the problem. I called and was told it was only happening to me, despite the fact that several other members told me it was happening to them also. The tech documented that I was on dial up after I told him I was not. If enough people call in to report the problem they may start looking at their website in stead of blaming user's isps.
You do have many choices out there. Several new sites are coming out that offer much more. I own one of those sites. If you are tired of 10 year old technology and promises that never happen, give guyquestlive.com a try. We have re-invented everything from the ground up. The internet is capable of so much more than what is out there. I find it funny that people are wasting their time on some of these sites when its known that gay sites overall lag far behind the mainstream (the mainstream isnt so hot either sometimes) and are charged a lot more because they feel we have no choices. We do have choices and with new advances in technology, the choices will shock you in the near future. My advice is to hold off on paying for premium memberships anywhere and see what is out there first. You would do it for any other product you buy. We offer 50 images in galleries, the ability to view all images inside of a micro-gallery inside the chatrooms, not just the first. We will show you the last 100 people that viewed your profile. over 6,850 chatrooms are now online with more planned. The entire site is seamless and uses a unified web 3.0 system that we invented ourselves. We programmed and designed 100%. We offer all of this for free, and more. I guarantee you will never find all the features we have anywhere else. All of our system updates automatically and alerts you of updates. Words cant describe all of the things we offer. The entire system is over 70,000 lines of code and over 2,000 pieces of artwork and graphics hand coded from ideas we have received from people like you over the past 8 years. You have nothing to lose by checking out something new.
I apologize for talking about an external site on here, but I did make this site because I had the same concerns as a lot of people in these forums. I am one of you. I did something about it. Someone needed to. :)
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