I regret to inform you that this site is now off line. Development of Chat Client has ceased and will no longer be offered. I would like to thank everyone who has used my software as I enjoyed working on it :). Here is a short history of the client for those interested.

I started Chat Client back in 1999 as an experiment to help me chat on the Gay.com network without having to open the web browser and use the Java-runtime libraries that where quite slow back then. At that time the client used Volanochat protocol. I spend a lot of hours reverse-engineering the interaction between the web client and the servers to be able to replicate the interaction on a Visual Basic / C++ project. I was also a heavy user of Gay.com chat having been recently out and this software proved useful to myself and as I found out many others. I offered the software for download on my website and soon it snowballed into tens of thousands of users in a short time. Chat Client stabilized and grew in features over time. I supported used by answering emails within 72-48 hours and monitored Gay.com and chatted daily.

Gay.com made the first major update to the chat infrastructure by changing from a third party application to an in-house chat network built off Internet Relay Chat (IRC) back end and a Java client. After a couple of weeks an updated client was made available for download that worked but was very buggy. Gay.com was also fixing many bugs and this caused a flood of updates over a short period of time. I also added support for Mac users, In fact due to a bug on the Java client Gay.com users on macs had to use Chat Client! This put more pressure on the development of the mac version. In my opinion the Mac version superseded the Window version. I also introduced a Linux version based of GTK 2.0. Due to the time I was putting into this and the fact I was paying more for hosting it. I decided to add a donation system. I obtained a PayPal account and developed an automated system for issuing serial numbers to users that made a donation. Shortly after doing this I had numerous problems with PayPal due to the claim that gayboi.org violated the terms of service because it was .gay. in nature therefore considered pornographic. After this I was approached by Gay.com to place banner ads, this was nothing special as many people do banner .Trading. on the web revenue sharing programs etc. I made it clear to them that I was not going to subject my users to a barrage of ads. I did implement a banner that would display only to non-paid (gay.com members ) that could be dismissed for the remaineder of the chat session. Also I agreed to remove support for other sites like Gaydar.co.uk etc. Chat Client was exclusive to Gay.com. However they in no way shape or form provided any technical support or .special. access to me aside from beta access to Gay.com itself at one point. Gay.com and Volano also copied some methodologies used initially in my client such as BotGuard and some UI elements. My use of chat started to decline as I started moving to other interests and I changed jobs to a manager position that demanded a lot of my time. Email response time was greater then one week on average as there where no major bugs in Chat Client at this point.

Chat Client continued to run until the last major infrastructure change at Gay.com in the fall of 2008. They again contacted me and spoke of offering assistance or an inside Application Program Interface (API) into the chat back-end. However this never materialized, as usual Gay.com spoke a great deal and had no problem having me sign NDA's but never put out when it came to getting things done. In addition to the issues with Gay.com I also lacked the time, When Chat Client was initially developed I had a lot of free time and little responsibility at work. A lot of things changed over the years, I stopped chatting on Gay.com and I switched jobs and all this took a hit into my schedule for Chat Client. With little interest in Gay.com and due to the fact they have no interest in helping I decided to let this go to someone else. I am now developing iPhone and Blackberry applications for a SAS provider.

There are many other Client developers out there, I have seen some great progress and work put into reverse-engineering the .new. Gay.com that is based off Ajax. If you are one of these developers drop me a line and I will post a link to your site here. I am unsure what I am going to do with this domain, but if you need to contact me you may do so via my hotmale (miss spelled on purpose) address. My user name is yoshiegg2000. I will chat with anyone on messenger just add me and send me a intro so I know your not spam.

Thanks again everyone, sorry it took so long for me to post this.
JG

Links to other Chat Client like applications for Gay.com

  1. chatlinQ.com - Standalone Gay.com chat software for Mac and iPhone