GAY STUFF: Gay.com Drying Up

Up and down, up and down. You'd think with the weekend traffic, the people over at gay.com would at least try to keep the website up for the weekend. Well, they can't even do that. After revamping their site, the hugely popular (most popular) gay chat site  has been going up and down for almost two weeks. 

My guess is that their "new design" was getting bad reviews from customers and they decided "you know, let's say we're having technical difficulties and fix all this shit that people hate." 

NOTICE TO GAY.COM: WRITE THE CODE FOR THE SITE, THEN JUST PUT IT UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. 

Duh.

Thanks to TrevorHoppe for posting this, showing Gay.com's traffic via Alexia, and demonstrating how important it is for gay.com to get their shit together:

IE: Gay.com is losing its share of gay sex online and they need to turn the tide, and fast. 

In fact, I just tried to log on and my name is not getting online. Hrm. Thanks, so now the website is up but you can't get online. 

This the letter that appeared in my mailbox this morning:

Dear gay.com Members,

Since the launch of the new gay.com, the site's performance has been up and down. For those of you who have experienced the site during an outage or when it is slow, we want to apologize. We know that you expect more from us. Many of you have let us know that directly, and you are right. Weare listening. 

Not only are we listening, but we are literally working around the clock to give you the experience you expect from gay.com . Site speed and performance are rapidly improving each day. Still, we are not yet where we need to be.

So what can you expect in the days ahead in terms of on-going improvements and our communication to you about them?

1) We are adjusting our hardware configurations and software code to further speed processes. Despite extensive pre-launch testing, a site of the scale and complexity of gay.comis virtually impossible to emulate in a test lab. Additionally, we have seen new usage patterns from the site that we could not model and are adjusting our hardware and code to streamline and improve performance. With the addition of more servers earlier in the week, we have seen positive results in overall site speed. We continue to monitor site performance and may add additional capacity as necessary.

2) We continue to identify and fix the bugs that have resulted in unplanned system outages.

3) We are committed to customer service and getting everyone on the site. We have received a tremendous number of phone calls and emails with your questions and suggestions. We are working to meet your needs as fast as we can. We also know that many people still cannot get into chat for technical reasons. Should you need help immediately, we keep an up-to-date Known Issues link on our blog at http://gay.blogs.com/gaycomblog.

4) We promise to be as open as possible in our communication to you. We know these changes (both the relaunch itself and the follow-on outages) can be confusing and frustrating. We will do our best to let you know what is happening, and when and how it may affect you as a user of the site. Given the changes that we need to make, we know that we will need to have a few more planned outages. We will do everything possible to give everyone adequate advance warning of these outages. Whenever possible, planned outages will be conducted in off-peak hours.

Many of you have called upon us to revert back to the "old" site. While the launch of the new site has had its own early challenges, we strongly believe that the new site will be more stable, more flexible and more capable of rapidly meeting your needs, especially when we have worked these last kinks out.

To that end, the feedback we are getting about our new features is valued and appreciated. Yes, there are things that we still need to do (i.e., restoring the ignore and /me features in group chat), but we also have received a lot of positive feedback on many of the changes. Please keep it coming. We really are listening.

We hope this letter helps you better understand what has been happening since the launch. Our first priority throughout this time has been to get all of you on the site and having a great time. We know that we have work to do to get there.

We appreciate your continued patience and support and will do our best to promise you are not disappointed.

The management team of PlanetOut

Want to know the latest, give us your thoughts or need to contact us? 
Here's how:
For news on the site, go to http://gay.blogs.com/gaycomblog
For comments or feedback, click on the Feedback link on the top of very page of the site
For customer service, click on the Help link on the top of every page of the site.

In other words, we're fucking up hardcore. Hold on, it may get a little bumpy.