Watching the parade

[greatbear]

It's been kinda fun watching the mass exodus from Bear411 to Bearciti. I ditched my Bear411 profile quite a while ago after getting frustrated with the dismal, unreliable interface and increasingly hostile attitude of the site owner to the very people that makes his site popular. While I sadly would lose contact with some of my friends on the site, many of them had moved on as well, so it was not too much of a loss. I pulled the plug and haven't looked back since.

I find it amusing that Bearciti is beginning to look like an extension of my friends list here as well as a repository of other familiar faces I have seen around Livejournal. To those who have 'made the switch', what are the new digs like? I see the profile pages are, or can be, a great deal more informative than what Bear411 is, the picture viewer albeit nice needs a bit of work, and the site seems to be coded a lot tighter than 411. How is the chat feature?

As much as I am glad that I closed down all my various online haunts, I gotta say I do miss the interaction some days. Convince me, one way or another. Should I? Or shouldnt I?

Comments

[robearal.livejournal.com]

There is no chat, per se, at least as we are accustomed to IMs. It's a messaging/email system. Advantage is that you can save everything. Disatvantage is that it's not all in one chat window.

Re: Joining the club...

[danlmarmot.livejournal.com]

It's not the ASP.net technology they've based it on; it's just their implementation isn't up to snuff. It's tricky to scale up and figure out where bottlenecks are. There's a number of big major sites that do this fine that I work with regularly (costco.com, musicnet.com, nhs.uk, ministryofsound.co.uk come to mind) that have figured this stuff out. It's difficult.

Bearciti doesn't apparently don't cache login info, or log every interaction from their frontend web servers into a backend wizzy fast database... which'll get around any stateless issues they have.

So with a new influx of folks, they'll work through the issues. Hopefully. Maybe they need a consultant or two...

[manticore1977.livejournal.com]

I reallllly miss the old gay.com northeastern bears room...the realtime chat was always a good time :-]

[knarfd.livejournal.com]

Ditto

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

I'm not impressed ... the interface is better but it's unusably slow. remember acoustic coupler dialup? yeah. like that.

[beefquest.livejournal.com]

Is what your looking for a chat room where everyone chats at once live in the room or sort of an AIM kind of chat?

[beefquest.livejournal.com]

Our thought about not putting in an IM is that we did not want to reinvent the wheel and Yahoo/MSN/AOL pretty much have it cornered and adding to the fact that bandwidth saving is always in the forefront of our mind.

So that is why we have an area at the bottom of the profile for users Yahoo/MSN/AOL's ID.

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

I just tried it out today, and I concur with most of the observations made by others. Still, it does have the "BETA" tag attached - so I think it's worth keeping an eye on.

Short of actual realtime chat (and by that I mean something like AIM, Yahoo!Messenger, etc.) I prefer a messaging system where I can see "what's in the queue" and pick out who I want to respond to first, like on bikermen.com or leatherbears.com.

[beefquest.livejournal.com]

We seem to have found the bug we had with FireFox 2.0.0.1
We should have it implemented on Monday.
Senior Site Admin
BearCiti

[bearlover.livejournal.com]

Checked out the place just now. I'm not impressed :( It's pretty slow and I've found numerous programming bugs in only 5 minutes. Probably won't join this one just like bear411. I'm sure they'll improve it eventually though.

[beefquest.livejournal.com]

If you wish to send me a message with the bugs you have found I will write up a ticket and have them fixed.

David
Senior Site Admin
BearCiti

[fingertrouble.livejournal.com]

I'm SO over bear/gaydar profile sites...generally the cute men are 1,000s of miles away and the locals are either non-bearded or micro-goateed, or I either know or are psychotics. Or both.

I do have a bearwww page and one on gaydar I never visit/update like my Myspaz sites; there's nothing there I'd rather pay for.

And the bear gaydar chatrooms were nice and fun before all the kiddies moved in...

I'm with ya...

[rockvillewoof.livejournal.com]

jumping ship too - look for me as RockytopBottom :-)

[jacked01.livejournal.com]

I'm sad, do a search for over fifty and you get a really big zero!

oh well I just have to wait awhile they will eventually get there ./smile

[shawnsyms.livejournal.com]

I second that.

:0)

[sparkygearhead.livejournal.com]

Do it! Now's the time to sign up so you can get the username you want. I didn't move over from 411, I'm happily on both. As far as I can tell, there's nothing wrong with 411. All the hullaballoo is just drama caused by people who expect perfection from everyone but themselves.

But I digress.

[sparkygearhead.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I think the last time I checked, Bearciti had something like 1,300 members. Bear411 had - what, a BILLION? Doesn't seem like much of an exodus...

[madlizard.livejournal.com]

I have been (and still am) without internet access at home, so can someone explain what happened that is causing this exodus?

[knarfd.livejournal.com]

I say who needs it. But then again if they don't feature stupid peripheral exploits i.e., Cutelittleblokes... Maybe. The c'mon page with the "Woof must see him again" thing is a big turn off for me. I wonder if my stalker is there?