13 September 2005

PlanetOut
Post Office Box 500
San Francisco, California 94104-0500

Dear PlanetOut:

Please tell me why I should continue to subscribe to your “Premium Personals” service on your Gay.com web site.

I have held the “Menander” account on Gay.com for the past several years. For more of that time than not, I have paid for the “Premium Personals” service. It was not simply a matter of wanting to enable the features available only to paid subscribers; I believe that if one can afford the service and one uses it, one should pay for it.

Unfortunately, I no longer feel your service is worth any of the money I have been paying. Numerous problems contribute to a horrible user experience:

• The stability of your Java-based web chat client has finally improved, but at the expense of speed.
• Most of what little e-mail I receive in my Gay.com mailbox is spam, with recognizable patterns. I am surprised that you have not attempted to filter the most obvious of these messages, which I imagine have been sent to tens of thousands of your users.
• “Spambots” have grown out of control on your chat server. I used to report these automatons to your abuse web page, but stopped after I realized that you were ignoring the reports; spambots which I reported and placed on my “ignore” list would show up the next day or later, even though many of these older scripts were associated with profiles that could instantly be associated with illegitimate marketing. While not all spambots can be stopped in advance, most have recognizable patterns, and those with profiles all share one of the same dozen or so photographs. All of these items represent patters that a competent database administrator and programmer could locate in your personals database tables. This suggests that either (1) your abuse handling system or your chat server is not designed in a way that you know how to prevent such mass incursions; or (2) Gay.com is actually in collusion with the owners of the spambots, and allows them to operate on its network.
• Personals searches sometimes result in profiles which appear under the “Search Results” view, but attempting to access the profile generates an error message, “The profile has been deleted by the user.” I presume this is because the search is performed on some index that is periodically updated, instead of against the database itself, for performance reasons. Unfortunately, the frequency of this error (at least 2-3 broken profiles per every search returning more than 100 hits) suggests that the index is not being updated or cleaned up frequently enough.
• A login is now frequently required when accessing the Gay.com web site. While I appreciate your stated need for security, your cookies appear to be expiring after only half an hour. This makes the site difficult to use unless logged into the Java-based chat client., which is unacceptable because of your toleration of spambots.

Ironically, the Chat Client which you have recently begun co-developing with Jean-Guy (http://www.gayboi.org/) is solely responsible for my last one-year membership. Had I not discovered this software, I would have canceled my membership long ago, for most of the reasons outlined above. His software made your shoddy chat server bearable. That client, however, has only forestalled the inevitable.

I have renewed my membership for another month, which should allow you sufficient time to respond to this letter. Unless I receive a satisfying response, I will simply allow the Premium Personals membership to expire after 9 October 2005.

I hope that I can continue my business relationship with you in the future, and look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

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Gregory L. Pratt