Site News

One of our members is a lawyer who has kindly offered to start a column in which he'll answer questions about legal issues related to older gay men and their partners. The usual disclaimers apply — this isn't a substitute for legal advice specific to your situation — but we hope it will be of interest and use. If you have a question to ask, go here:

https://oldergay.men/law/

Click through to his bio and disclaimer (https://oldergay.men/law/disclaimer/), and you can submit your question at the bottom of the page.

Don't be confused if the Birthdays section of this week's newsletter looks unusual. It looked unusual to me, and a little exploring showed that we have over 12,000 members who use January 1st as their birthdates.

My guess? It's a combination of guys acting in the interests of a) privacy, b) online security, or c) not bothering to click the drop-down menus for Month and Day. If you know a doctoral student in Statistics, he or she might enjoy working up an estimate of how many of these dates could possibly be legitimate.

For our purposes, it comes to just over 50 men appearing in the newsletter. I guess we can put up with that for one week. I don't want to skip the real New Yearsers, and the others should get their acknowledgement sometime.

I will someday get around to talking to all the guys who are over 120 years old...

Happy Holidays,
Jeff

We received an email update from SAGE that might be helpful to our U.S. members. You can read it online here:

SAGE Suggestions

If you have trouble clicking through to their PDF guide, here's the direct link:

Holiday Self-Care Guide

The holiday season can be especially hard on our group. Festive lights and cheery advertisements can grate on those of us going through family estrangements and other isolations. This time, after nearly a year locked away with unrelenting fear, I'm sure some of us are going through the worst of the worst. I hope we're providing an outlet here on OlderGay, but if you need more contact and an ear to listen, please check out SAGE's offerings. You're not alone.

And for our younger members looking for a way to make a difference: I hope you'll check it...

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Our team hit a milestone last week: All of our listings of places now include photos. They’re both attractive and informative, a quick measure of whether a given spot could be for you or is probably not your scene.

Ramesh has opened a thread on our discussion board for suggestions of places we’re missing:

https://talk.oldergay.men/t/local-expertise-needed/52289

If you have a favorite older-men-frequented place near you or one you remember fondly from your travels, let us know, so we can share the word!

A hospital near my partner and me received its first batch of COVID-19 vaccines today. Hang in there just a bit longer, everyone, and we’ll be taking advantage of these gathering places once again. Here’s to a normal summer.

Stay safe until then,
Jeff

Holy Cow, it's been forty days since I checked in with you! As a step toward amends, I'd like to share the following message I posted to our Patreon subscribers.

But first, to clarify what's been going on and why I've been out of sight: My partner Al started having medical issues in August. Tests showed he'd had three strokes and needed surgery to prevent more, possibly fatal ones. He quit smoking, was cleared for surgery, and finally went under the knife on November 11th. He came home for a weekend... and went back to the hospital for a week because he'd had another stroke in the process. 🙃

He's been home ever since, but he's needed a lot of immediate hands-on care, as any lover of older men will eventually attest. I'm the only programmer on the site, so I hope you'll understand why there have been no great leaps forward of late.

Still, our membership has grown and the site has improved and the...

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We’ve restarted our Twitter feed, so you can follow our updates there if it’s convenient for you:

https://twitter.com/OlderGayDotMen

If you look at our places page, you’ll see we’ve started adding photos of the places we list. It brightens the site and helps you get an idea of whether you’d like to visit a venue that catches your eye (when we can go visit places again...). We’ll be adding photos for groups and events, too. This is another large, long-term undertaking like our photo editing. If you have time on your hands and would like to help, just let us know! It doesn’t require any special knowledge and whatever you can contribute would be welcome; every bit helps.

Enjoy, all!
Jeff

Please read this; it's important for anyone who recently replied to a message on the site or is waiting for a reply. I’m sending an extra newsletter this week to get the word out.

A member reported a bug in our messaging system yesterday. If you replied to a message someone sent you, instead of sending the reply, the site was moving the message to the trash. I found the problem and fixed it this morning. This was, of course, a huge bug, and I'm sorry for everyone's inconvenience.

If you've only sent messages to other members – new, first-time messages – this doesn't affect you. But if someone wrote you and you wrote back (even a new reply in an old ongoing conversation), you'll need to double-check whether your message went through. Unfortunately, the text of any reply you sent is gone.

What To Do:

1. Go to your trash folder
2. Look for any conversations you didn't mean to...

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I have some exciting news to share about photos on the site.

Two weeks ago, I started work on the next item on our Patreon-produced todo list, letting members upload multiple photos at once. For reasons too boring to detail (the way I’ve set up the collection, images have a lot of ancillary information connected to them and how do you process it for many pictures going up at once, yada yada), that’s still in progress. But while working on that, I worked up some ideas that are dramatically improving our pictures.

The first week, I made changes that optimized the image files without changing the images themselves. These changes have been applied to nearly the entire collection now, and while they don’t affect how the pictures look, you should find them loading more quickly.

This past week, I worked on a bigger challenge with bigger rewards. We can now replace pictures with improved versions, and all the links to the old version...

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Members can now upload photos which can only be seen by other members they choose to share with. When you upload a photo, you'll be asked whether you want it to be public or private. Once you have private images, when you visit someone's profile, you'll be asked whether you want to share your private photos with him. (You'll also be asked at the bottom of conversations.) This has been a long time coming, hope you enjoy it! Let us know if you run into any problems.