Site News

I fixed most of the problems last week; lots of new photos have gone up. I'm still working on the last stubborn ones. I'm talking directly to those of you affected, and will keep posting updates. Thanks as ever for your patience.

Jeff

I'm still working on the bugs that hit while I was sick. Our login page should be working well again, and I hope to finish fixing image uploads today. I've turned them off in the meantime. You can follow my progress and see other updates at https://oldergay.men/issues.

Jeff

Hi. Just a quick note to say that I'm aware that a bunch of bugs have crept in lately. But I've been even more aware that I contracted a virus which knocked me on my ass. I spent most of last week in bed, and one afternoon in the bathroom. 🫤 I started to bounce back yesterday, and have spent two days patching things up, but I can't report the success I'd hoped to report tonight. I'll be back on it in the morning, and hopefully things will be looking better as the week goes on.

Thanks for your patience as always,
Jeff

Some image pages are mysteriously not showing. I thought I'd found the underlying cause, but after fixing it, we still get blank pages and no error messages to follow up. I spent the day on it, will get back to it tomorrow, and will post updates here:

https://oldergay.men/issues/10

OlderGay.Men turned 29 last Friday. I didn't get around to commemorating it in the newsletter that day, so here's something to celebrate:

I added a public bug tracker at https://oldergay.men/issues. Like most pages on the site, each issue's page will have an "Add a comment" button if you're logged in, so please use them if you find something that might help (or just want to commiserate with other members waiting for a fix).

I have a stack of requests piled up; I hope this will make the work more visible and let me communicate better with everyone. It's plugged into our GitHub issues, showing any I label as "public" (no one else needs to hear about ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid: PG::UndefinedColumn: ERROR: column "users_count" does not existLINE 1: ...scourse_user_groups" SET "users_count" = COALESCE("users_cou...). Tracking problems there will be better for me, too. GitHub has good tools for creating branches related to issues and resolving the...

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We're adding more features that will include email notifications, so I added a system to let members subscribe and unsubscribe from all the types of email we send. At the bottoms of messages, you'll now see a link that takes you to a page which will unsubscribe you from that type of mail, and present a link to quickly sign you up again if you clicked by mistake. You can manage all your subscriptions at once in your profile settings at https://oldergay.men/settings.

Doing this has been a two-week slog that uncovered a lot of tangential problems in the process. After I pushed the changes up to the site last night, a few things broke, most notably sending email notifications of new messages (though the messages themselves still went through on the site). I'm sorry for the rough sailing; I fixed everything today, and will keep patching as new leaks spring.

I'm glad to have this in place and to get back to the new features that will take advantage of it. Hope all your projects are...

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When you go to a video chat room now, you'll find a form that lets you say when you'll be visiting the room. You can see the list of all the chats guys have scheduled, and can add yourself to the list if the time is convenient and you'd like to join in. Hope this helps with guys passing each other in the night.

When you look at someone's profile now, you should see a "Video Chat" button that takes you to a room only the two of you can access. The other person can click "Video Chat" on your profile to reach the room, and there's also a form there you can use to send him a message giving the link and asking for a time to meet there. Please give it a try, and let me know how it goes. (And, of course, please be courteous with anyone who doesn't want to chat.)

Jeff

We've added a group video chat room to the site:

https://oldergay.men/chat

Please come give it a try, and let us know if you run into any problems with it. If no one else is there when you arrive, feel free to keep the chat open in a side window until someone comes along. I'll continue working on setting up individual, private chats between members.

Jeff

For the last month, some OlderGay.Men members have had trouble deleting their pictures and accounts. It started when I found a problem with how we linked photos to the people in them. While fixing that was an unqualified good, it exposed problems that needed much more digging, and which inconvenienced guys trying to "just delete the damned thing". If you're having trouble sleeping, the tedious details are here:

https://talk.oldergay.men/t/deletion-problems/275944

(If you haven't seen it, I've been cataloging my work on the site at https://talk.oldergay.men/c/site-updates/.)

I've kept at the problem while manually intervening for guys who reached out for help (including the one who found someone here (🥳) and wanted off the market). I think I've now restored everyone's autonomy to delete his own stuff, but, as ever, let us know if you run into any trouble.

Jeff