Let me preface my remarks here by saying that I use gay.com (and other chat programs) a lot to keep up with friends online. I’m on regularly 4-6 nights a week, and I happily pay gay.com for full access to their site. But I am incredibly displeased with this new implementation they’ve brought up this week. Unhappy enough to consider dumping the subscription if they don’t get it fixed.
I think I spent a grand total of 40 minutes on “the new gay.com” this evening in two different installments, after it seemed like I spent about the same amount of time trying to convince the web site that no, really, I didn’t have a pop-up blocker stopping their wretched pop-ups from popping up. Verdict: It sucks elephant butt.
Let’s catalog the deficiencies:
- It runs too slow (to be expected with a new system).
- There’s no way to ignore bots in the chat room now.
- There’s no way to turn off the entrance and exit alerts, so you frequently end up with a screen full of “so-and-so entered,” “so and so left” crap that you don’t need.
- You can’t zip through the list to find folks easily by hitting the first letter of their screen name - you’re forced to scroll through the entire thing.
- It takes forever to bring up a screen name when you want to click on their profile or view their photos.
- No clicking through to links in chat, you’re forced to cut & paste.
- Because it’s run through the browser, if someone sends you a link in another program (AIM/Yahoo/MSN/etc.), chat ends up getting shut down if you click on the link in the other program because the new page opens in your chat browser window (or whatever window you have open).
- There’s too much wasted space in the windows - they take up too much screen real estate.
- Even after full disabling the pop-up blocker and getting their pop-ups to work, Every Single Window that popped up continued to display the “you need to turn your pop-up blocker off” message, blocking the screen that I was trying to see until I could hunt down the tiny little “X” that would turn the message off.
In other words, the thing sucks elephant butt.
I’ve left feedback with them, and will continue to do so. The stand-alone chat program worked so, so much better than any browser based crap they could throw up there. I can understand that perhaps they wanted more ad revenue by bringing users back onto their site, but there are ways to do that (force users to go to the profile page on their site to see pictures - more ad revenue/hits right there, without breaking up the other features that made the program work so much better) and still make the experience user-friendly. I realize the company is (probably still) losing money like mad, but driving away core, long-time users by making the site unusable is not the way to fix that.
