If you're a Gay.com user, you've surely grown tired of seeing the above message upon trying to access their website the past few weeks. They "revamped" their website -- including their chat utility -- edits that have been largely panned by users. They originally only planned to be down for 24 hours or so -- but have been rocked by repeated outages in the past two weeks from bugs in their scripts and kinks in audience reception.

While only one of a number of popular online gay networking sites (Adam4Adam, Men4Now, Manhunt, etc), it's the only chat-based network -- the others are all profile/e-mail based sites that seem to focus more exclusively on meeting guys for sex. I've always preferred Gay.com because of that; it feels less anonymous, more connected generally. Of course, many guys despise it for that reason, and have bailed to other sites where more efficient sex-finding is possible. To each their own, I suppose. But the new sites blows. It's totally user-unfriendly. Slow to load. "Biolines" -- sort of Twitter-like mini-profiles that gave a short schpeel for each user -- have lost all their former utility. The "chat room" focuses on what people are saying in the room, not on who's actually inside the room (most users don't actually chat in the rooms -- but rather focus on "private messages.")

All in all, it's a bust. And they need to fix it fast, especially given their rapid decline in traffic over the past few months: