SITE NEWS
May 31st, 2011
UMN 2011 SILAS 'MANSCAN' SURVEY
The University of Minnesota is conducting a paid-survey on the impact of gay bars and online activity in driving alcohol/drug use related HIV infection in the Gay/MSM community.*
November 30th, 2010
ASIAN / PACIFIC ISLANDER SURVEY
The University of Houston is conducting a survey on the impact of discrimination and internalized homophobia on Asian and Pacific Islander LGBT.*
October 26th, 2010
MORAR NEW RELEASE
New version of the free Gay.com chat room interface software is available. Some new features include Temporary Ignore, Grouped Tabs and Exit Confirmations.
Download, discussion and support can be found at MorarChat.com*
September 21st, 2010
MORAR RESUMES
Development for the free Gay.com chat room interface Morar software, has resumed. Further information can be found on the site.*
April 28th, 2010
WASHINGTON BLADE RETURNS
This past November the Washington Blade filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy; the staff immediately regrouped to continue publishing as DC Agenda.
At
a cost of some $15,000, DC Agenda bought the rights and archives of the
Washington Blade and will be publishing again under the original name.*
CALLING ALL GAY GEEKS
Bryan Ochalla is seeking "gay geeks" to interview for an upcoming article in a North American LGBT magazine.*
YOUR GAY CHAT NETWORK
YGCN is opening a new gay chat network. See their page* for details, or our page* for more information about IRC networks.
April 25th, 2010
MORAR DISCONTINUED
Development for the GDC chat client Morar has ended.* Future login problems may be repaired. Remaining projects are listed here.*
April 12th, 2010
FABULIS PRE-LAUNCH
New social site called Fabulis bills its self as, "the network that connects gay men with amazing experiences down the block and around the world."
Management says it will be something more like Facebook and nothing like a hook-up service.*
March 2nd, 2010
GAY INTELLECTUALS SITE UPDATE
Google free-hosting migrated this site from their legacy Pages service to their new Sites service. This has introduced a few temporary glitches and formatting issues, but the overall site remains functional.
January 20th, 2010
PERRY v SCHWARZENEGGER
The United States District Court of California* is hearing a challenge to Proposition 8. Summaries are available on LawDork* and Wikipedia*; transcripts from AFER.*
January 16th, 2010
SOCIAL ANXIETY SURVEY
Study
aims to understand the ways in which social anxiety among gay men
differs from the general male population. Study ends June 10th and is
unpaid.*
January 15th, 2010
CHASE COMMUNITY GIVING
Please
vote on Facebook for the Matthew Shepard Foundation in the Chase Bank
Community Giving awards. They stand to win $1 Million. Voting closes
January 22nd.
November 16th, 2009
WASHINGTON BLADE CLOSES
The Washington Blade recently celebrating 40 years of service, and 5 other publications owned by Window Media, closed when the parent company filed Chapter 7.*
Immediately after, the former staffs of 3 papers have regrouped to continue on under new names, one being DC Agenda.*
October 30th, 2009
THE ADVOCATE IN DANGER?
The Advocate and HIV+ (owned by Regent/Here Media, which owns GDC) has just laid-off top staff and reduced its self to a ~34 page "accompaniment" to Out magazine.* A former editor has thoughts here.*
October 18th, 2009
GAY.COM INTELLECTUALS ROOM
We are working on drumming up more interest in the GDC Intellectuals chat room. Let us know what ideas you have that can help. It seems the chat crowd just isn't interested in board forums, but the links section is getting regular use.
October 13th, 2009
GAYBOI.ORG MYSTERY
GayBoi
is the host site of the Chat Client project for Gay.com. It was
off-line from September 15th to October 13th due to a hardware
problem. Other active projects are available.*
August 21st, 2009
MORAR CHAT BETA
The Morar chat client software for GDC is now open for beta testing. Please provide regular feedback so the author can make any needed changes and feature updates.*
For those not familiar with chat clients, it is 3rd-party software to let you do more with the GDC chat system than what they provide.*
August 3rd, 2009
CHATLINQ BETA - MAC/IPHONE
ChatlinQ is a 3rd-party chat interface client for Gay.com which runs on Macintosh and iPhone, and has been released for open beta testing.*
July 26th, 2009
U.S. GAY CHAT ROOM SURVEY
Graduate student conducting professional survey to better understand chat room use by gay males. Results planned to be used in gay media and community campaigns.*
June 24th, 2009
MORAR CHAT
A
new GDC chat client project has emerged called Morar Chat. It is java
(multi-platform) based, currently in alpha pre-testing and has some
very promising screenshots.*
June 22nd, 2009
GAY.COM MERGES WITH HERE MEDIA
As of today, GDC announces merger with Here Media as complete. Some background: Jan.9 - PlanetOut reduces staff by 33%. Jan.11 - PlanetOut merges with Here Networks and Regent Entertainment; PlanetOut shareholders 20% stake, Here 80%. Jan.16 - CTO William Bain leaves. Mar.10 - PlanetOut reports year end loss of $17.7M on revenue of $19.8M; previous year $51.2M on $53M respective. Mar.16 - PlanetOut gets NASDAQ delisting notice.
[The streamlining with HereTV and Out seems to be keeping things stable now.]
June 15th, 2009
LINKS SECTION UPDATES
Starting
with the Iran elections, there is a Current Event section that will be
moved to Archives eventually when the topic dies.
There are also two blog additions under the News category titled Gay.com Behind the Website and Gay.com Sucks!
May 20th, 2009
HOPE PROJECT - PAID SURVEY
The following paid survey seeks answers to chat room related substance use, sexual behaviour, knowledge and attitudes about STD/HIV prevention.*
May 19th, 2009
GNATTER ALPHA
Alex of the Gnatter project has just released another alpha version for Java (meaning it works on Mac, Windows and Linux. It is buggy and unsupported, but will get you into the chat rooms. Consider it a featureless proof of concept. Visit the development forum for more info.*
May 11th, 2009
CHAT CLIENT & CHATLINQ
Chat Client is in closed beta testing with interface developers and select users.* ChatLinq has a new support site and is getting close to a releasable beta version.*
April 16th, 2009
CHAT CLIENT PROGRAMMERS
JG of the Chat Client project is seeking a .NET programmer to design the Windows interface, while he designs the communication routines and Mac/Linux interfaces.*
April 8th, 2009
GNATTER PRE-ALPHA
Alex of the GCCC Project has just released another pre-alpha version of Gnatter. It is unstable and unsupported, but will get you into the chat rooms. Consider it a featureless proof of concept. He has put development on hold until if/when he finds spare time. Visit the development forum for more info.*
March 30th, 2009
CHAT CLIENT STATUS
As it turns out, the author JG was putting double time in at his company trying to save the business, but the economy did it in. So his immediate future and Chat Client are uncertain. Let him know you appreciate his efforts and you look forward to the project if and when he can get to it.*
March 29th, 2009
GAYBOI.ORG AWOL
For the past few days, the development site for Chat Client has been unreachable. Checking with Google Cache, they have a blank page from Mar 25, 2009 18:50:08 GMT.
If I recall correctly, the author JG also runs his business SolTekWeb.com on the same server which has been offline since Mar 26, 2009 00:35:23 GMT with the statement, "Sorry we are offline at this time. We are updating this site to serve you better."
So I don't think JG has closed shop has some have guessed. He recently had GayBoi site moderators tell us that he hoped to release a beta of Chat Client soon - if GDC doesn't make any further changes.
[Site restored Mar 30, 2009]
March 7th, 2009
FEATURED LINKS
The site now has quite a bit of material to choose from. The Links section now covers featured History, Studies, Articles, Essays, Audio/Video, Reviews, other intellectual gay Forums, a focused selection of world and national News Outlets, Columnists and Net Radio streams.*
My goal is for the gay intellectual to find it a refreshing and interesting place to return.
January 11th, 2009
PLANETOUT MERGER
PlanetOut (PNO) is merging with Here Networks and Regent Entertainment to become Here Media.* Combined, they control brands such as Gay.com, HereTV, The Advocate, Out, HIV Plus and Alyson Publishing.
[In April 2006, PNO purchased RSVP Vacations for $6.5-$9.5 million and sold it in December 2007 for $2.15 million.** Once trading for $136 per share at the start of 2005, PNO now trades at $0.51 a share.*]
December 31st, 2008
GDC SOFTWARE UPDATES
Chat Client, Gnatter and ChatLinQ (iPhone client) development is starting to pick up again. ChatBerry (BlackBerry client) is still under feasibility review.*
December 7th, 2008
CHAT CLIENT MYSTERY
The author suffered an appendix rupture with life-threatening complications and was out of commission the past two weeks. He intends to proceed with development, beta testing and public release of the software as his energy returns.*
November 25th, 2008
GDC RESTORES IGNORE FEATURE
Some two months after "extensively testing" and releasing their new web site and chat servers, GDC has finally restored the chat room ignore feature.*
November 20th, 2008
CHAT CLIENT RELEASE DELAYED
The author is still beta testing and hopes to have it ready by December 1st. In addition, he has installed new hardware, reset the web site and guest accounts.*
November 15th, 2008
WEEKLY A\V MEET-UP ADDED
For those that have used chat Channel-2, many have noted how fun it is to see and hear the people they type to daily in Channel-1. To help make that a regular event, two schedules have been put up to help those in the Americas and EurAsia meet-up.*
November 10th, 2008
CHAT CLIENT RELEASE SCHEDULE
The
author of Chat Client is planning for the following release dates:
Nov.6 beta testers get access to forums; Nov.12 Mac beta testers get
first release; Windows beta testers get second release a few days
after; Nov.28 public release of Chat Client 9 for Windows, Linux and
Mac.*
October 30th, 2008
GNATTER PRE-ALPHA
Alex of the GCCC Project has just released a pre-alpha version of Gnatter. It is unstable and unsupported, but will get you into the chat rooms. Consider it a featureless proof of concept. Visit the development forum for more info.*
October 24th, 2008
CHANNEL-2 LOGIN REQUIRED
For the immediate future, the channel-2 chat room now requires a login. The reason is that anonymous users began having sex shows, a direct violation of our chat host's Terms Of Service at UserPlane. Those interested in such forums may want to visit MenChats.com that does not restrict that.*
October 23rd, 2008
CHAT CLIENT PLANNED RELEASE
The author of Chat Client hopes to release the public version of the software on November 24th.*
October 19th, 2008
CHAT CLIENT HARDWARE
In
preparation for the new Chat Client software, the author is installing
new equipment to support the home site and the anti-spam feature.*
October 14th, 2008
CHAT CLIENT BETA
Jean-Guy,
the author of Chat Client, hopes to open beta testing of the new
software November 1st. It is being developed for the iMac first, then
will be ported to Windows and Linux as things smooth out.
October 9th, 2008
GLIMMER OF LIGHT ?
The GDC Blog has an open letter* to the users. At first, I took note that ALL comments on their blog posts have been removed; so although they claim they have received a lot of positive feedback, those previously seen comments were 99% negative.
In
any case, one statement they made is that "Yes, there are things that
we still need to do (i.e., restoring the ignore and /me features in
group chat)," Now if they mean that for guests too, or only premium
members, is yet to be seen.
October 8th, 2008
FIRST BOTS SPOTTED
We have now seen the first GDC chat room spam robots. This is a good and bad thing; good that it proves a third-party can interface with their new chat servers, but of course a bad thing because GDC does not give non-members the ability to ignore them.
October 5th, 2008
NOW GOOGLE LISTED
You can now do a simple Google Search for "Gay Intellectuals"* and quickly find this site, which has links to the chat rooms and message forum. This will make it easy for users to regroup, should GDC go down without notice; a real possibility as their parent company PlanetOut (PNO)* has shed several business ventures and is delisting* from NYSE.
September 30th, 2008
CHAT CLIENT TO RETURN
The author of Chat Client, a very popular third-party software for using GDC Chat, has committed to revamping his software for use with the new GDC Chat service system. This is expected to take from a few weeks to a few months.
Chat Client and other projects are looking at their options and even sharing some mutual cooperation to get back online.*
September 28th, 2008
GDC BLOG CENSORSHIP
For reasons unstated, GDC is suppressing comments after the first 50.* So those wanting to express their thoughts on the planned changes are being kept quiet.
UPDATE - After bringing the New GDC online, the user comments are exclusively negative, but GDC isn't responding to them. Now they are 'moderating' new comments before posting.
UPDATE - Now they have removed comments all together and replaced Feedback with a canned survey.