The new gay.com survival guide

It's kind of odd—when you own a boy, even living several states away, there's not as much angst in your life. Well, there is at times, but it's about helping him through things and missing him, not about the existential nature of existence itself. I can't wait for his next visit.

In the meantime, he can play with permission, and I can play at will, because I'm the owner and that's how that works. So I still usually leave a spare computer (if there is one) logged into gay.com. Like everyone else, I've dealt with the ups and downs of the new site launch, and I'm not as pleased with the results yet as I was with the previous system.

Nonetheless, the pure amount of bile and anger expressed by guys online who don't want to know the truth is both astounding and depressing. Every day, I read angry people shouting "This is so much worse than the old system! They shouldn't have fucked with it!"

Well, no. You lose, no turtle wax for you.

Nearly everyone who's pining for the old system wasn't actually using "gay.com chat." They were using Chat Client, or Chattage, or Gaysenger, or another third-party program to chat on gay.com's servers. These programs were not written by the people who run gay.com. They were not endorsed by gay.com, and not supported by gay.com. They worked mainly because, behind the scenes, gay.com was using a network of more-or-less standard IRC servers behind the scenes to manage the chat.

These third-party programmers did network snooping, figured out how to log into the servers, and wrote their own front ends. It's clever, and I used one myself, but it's like riding a skateboard while holding a rope tied to the back of a car. If the car stops or turns, you're shit out of luck—and the guy driving the car may not know you're even there. And if he knows, he may not care. It's his car, not your skateboard towing service.

So if you didn't want to use one of those clients (most of which only worked on certain computers or operating systems), you were stuck using the browser-based interface to gay.com chat. If you hadn't used that in a while, let me remind you:

gay.com's browser-based chat sucked donkey dicks.

It used a Java-based application that was slow, unreliable, and unfriendly. It spawned six billion windows and, even for premium members, covered up everything with ads. It was awful.

And things "weren't just fine" before the upgrade. It seems like several times per night, half the guys in a room would "disconnect," just to "reconnect" a few minutes later, if you were lucky. I think that was an IRC split—where multiple servers around the world lose their connections to each other. A split divides the network into two parts, and you get to keep chatting with the guys on your part, but not with the other part. And you don't get to choose which part you're on.

On top of that, the server side of gay.com was creaky and needed improvement. Only ten pictures? Sign-up procedures that let automated bots all but take over the chats by creating new headless "guys" every day to use for ads? Pig, pig, pig slow operations and searches? At least once this past year, the "old" and "just fine" gay.com completely thrashed my bookmarks, and I logged in one day to find that the site had bookmarked about 120 guys I'd never even seen. Given its pig-slow operation and bad interface, it took me a couple of days to fix it. (Did you ever notice that half the time you'd click on a "bookmark" or "hot list" link, gay.com would take you to an empty page using the old appearance from pre-2006? And not actually do what you told it to do? Wasn't that fun?)

Have you noticed that you can now have blank lines in your profile again, after three years of no blank lines and no URLs in an attempt to foil bots with the older servers? That's a good thing.

So yeah, the infrastructure was old and crusty. They needed to upgrade the servers and ditch the insane Java-based chat. The new browser-based chat is worlds ahead of the old browser based chat. And while the performance isn't everything I want, the interface is actually better than Chat Client was. Now I get miniature pictures in the user list, and mini-profiles, and it doesn't feel like I'm reading chat in TextEdit or emacs. If guys can't see that, they're just fucking stupid.

That said, there's plenty that gay.com needs to do. It's still too slow, and it's way too unreliable, with system outages every damn day. If they were going to rebuild this system, they should have done it with third-party capabilities built in so that the Chattage and Gaysenger people could make their own supported clients, either for a licensing fee or for agreeing to show ads in a less-obtrusive way. It's not flexible enough—I should be able to turn off pics in the user list to save space if I want, and it's transferring too much data for what it's doing.

So if you want the least painful experience on the new gay.com, follow a few simple rules.

• Use Firefox. Yes, it should work with Internet Explorer 6 and Opera and Safari and whatever else, but thinking about more than two browsers is apparently more than gay.com can do right now, and I keep seeing people using unspecified versions of "IE" (even on Vista) having trouble. So bite the bullet and download Firefox 3 and use it for gay.com.



• Consider using a browser only for gay.com. Firefox isn't my default browser, so I set Firefox's home page to gay.com, and I launch Firefox only for gay.com (usually). That way, when I do other things or click on other links, they don't open in Firefox and screw up the chat.



• Read what's in the damn windows. Click on a guy's name in a chat room and you'll see his mini-profile. Want to see the full thing? Click "Go To Profile." Want to send him an IM? Click "Send IM." It's really not fucking hard, guys. Look at the "gay.com Messenger" window. See where it says your status? Change it if you want. Change your description if you want. It's not hard.



• Turn off all pop-up blocking for anything that ends in "gay.com". Actually, since I only use Firefox for gay.com, I turned off all pop-up blocking, and it works. Yes, that sucks. Yes, gay.com needs to fix it so that information only comes from *.gay.com and not from "pno.net" or "listen.gay.com" or "chat.gay.com" or any number of a bazillion other domains they could use. But until they do fix it, you're gonna be happier if you turn off pop-up blocking in the browser you're using for gay.com. This is another reason to use a completely separate browser for it.



• Close the Messenger window when you're done. Until you actually close the "gay.com Messenger" window, gay.com thinks you're still logged in, and other guys will think you're ignoring them. For reasons yet unknown to normal people, simply quitting the browser is not the same thing. You actually have to log out or close the Messenger window. (If you close the Messenger window, your status changes to "Online (No Chat)", but it still thinks you're logged in. That's generally good enough, because then guys can't send you IMs that you won't see. If you really want to appear offline, you must actually log out.



• When gay.com is "down", hold down alt while refreshing the home page. All browsers cache data from the Internet, and Firefox does not necessarily ask for a fresh version every time you click refresh. Hold down "Alt" (or "Option" on a Mac) while clicking "refresh" to make it ask gay.com for the home page again. Sometimes you'll find that the site is back up when you had been looking at a cached version of the "we're down" page.

These things make gay.com better, but not perfect. Here are some of my favorite absolutely boneheaded things about the new system:

• No blocking for non-premium members. And my boy tells me that he can only enter one room at a time now, instead of the two rooms he could enter before. That's a sucky way to treat your customers.



• People with "." in their screen names are incredibly fucked. For reasons I've never understood, gay.com has always (apparently) internally changed "." characters to "|" characters, and changes them back to "." before displaying them. Usually. In Chat Client, I would occasionally see guys with names like "interesting...guy" that would show up in Chat Client windows, but not in chat windows, as "interesting|||guy". Now the same thing happens in the regular (and only) chat method, using the browser. If you see one of those guys in a chat room, you can't get a mini-profile or send them an IM because it says "interesting|||guy" doesn't exist.
  
  To work around it, view the profile directly by appending it to "http://my.gay.com/", as in "http://my.gay.com/interesting...guy" and you'll get to see the profile. Gay.com rewrites the URL, but it does work.



• Requiring a face shot as a primary picture. Are they insane or just on drugs? I'm fully out of the closet, but I don't advertise my BDSM interests except in BDSM-type forums, or around local gay guys. I just don't want to deal with things like the UN Weapons Inspector who had his BDSM interests splashed all over world newspapers when he said true things like "BDSM is safe and sane between people who consent" and "Iraq does not have weapons of mass destruction." (And no, I'm nowhere near that kind of high-profile person, but I have enough to deal with in my life without explaining BDSM to people who don't undersatnd and don't want to understand, or to people who seek to discredit me for their own reasons.)
  
  I get that this is a ham-handed attempt to ban the bots with their faceless pictures, but it's just tone-deaf dumbassery.



• Not actually telling people when the system has gone down. I think it's gone down right now, after unscheduled maintenance this afternoon—my chat room is slowly shedding guys, and no one new is coming in or responding, but the home page insists it's all fine, and the chat windows stay open. They've got to have monitoring software, and time-outs in the JavaScript that tell your browser "hey, no activity in 10 minutes means the server is down."



• Still spawning dumb-ass windows. When I close the chat room window, I do not want a new gay.com home page window opened instead. When I close a window, I want a window closed. Stop opening windows that are not absolutely necessary.



• Showing no people in rooms that are split into multiple rooms. If you click on "Leather" in the "Topics" area, you don't see a list of people in the room now. You see a list of rooms, and you have to click on one of those to see who's in there. The previous way of only showing who was in the newest room was wrong also. This should all be a preference, but until it is, it should show you everyone in all the rooms for a topic or area.

Anyway, yeah, there's plenty wrong with the system, largely that by breaking all the (unsupported) third-party clients, men no longer have their choice of ways to use the chat, not that there were lots
of choices before. But while it needs to be debugged, they needed to upgrade the servers and replace the old Java-based chat. The new chat, while still sucky in too many ways, is light years ahead of the old browser-based chat.

If you refuse to understand that, you're going to be bitching about it for the next three years, and no one wants to hear that, so shut the fuck up.