Changes at Gay Longhair Board

Changes at Gay Longhair Board
 Posted by Bill on August 28, 2003 at 11:57:25: Previous Next

Five years ago after talking to Victor who runs this Hyperboard, I set up the Gay Longhair board so people would have a place to put personal ads instead of here. Another guy was going to put up a board for straight longhairs and women who like them, but he never got around to it, and Victor put up his personals board you see on his site here now. This all came about because Victor and I both agreed that personal ads and "what goes on here" don't really mix well.

A lot has happened in five years....

Gay youth have become more accepted among their peers, so they enjoy being with their own generation which is all here on the Hyperboard. There has become less of a reason to run a G-rated operation over there because of that.

Two years after we set up the Gay Longhair board, Yahoo groups came on line and many adults flocked to them, the group "BrosOnLine" in particular, because they could trade more suggestive pictures. BrosOnLine has been a particularly nice community because it has involved a lot of conversation and discussion, not just trading of images. A lot of longhairs have celebrated the common culture we all know, there.

People on the Internet have changed and the Internet environment has changed. Most people aren't geeks and they don't have paid-for web sites anymore, so they can't share pictures by linking them. That is the way this board and the Gay Longhair board did it. It was essentially the same software.

Over the years I had made significant improvements to the software. It allowed users to upload photos from their computers right into their messages. I culled out over half the text - superfluous stuff that gets sent with every page viewed - to double the web board's speed. But no one was using it because they were on Yahoo.

Slow, annoying Yahoo. You can't make a move there without cursing the interface. It is always foremost in your mind, rather than the material of the sender, which is what you want to be thinking about.

Last week Yahoo quit letting people share attachments on their group web sites. This frustrated the BrosOnLine crowd to no end. As we all know, longhairs like to see what each other's hair looks like, and BrosOnLine, which was always frustratingly slow, now couldn't handle the guys' photos without even more clicking around through all the ads and junk.

Meanwhile, I had a very fast and usable piece of software sitting useless because it was on a non-adult server, being kept "clean" for a crowd that didn't need it anymore.

John S., a dear longhair friend in Michigan, mentioned that he had his web pages on a server which would take adult material, and the lights went off in my head. "Let me give you the board and it can give the community a place to congregate now that they need it!" I said. John accepted.

We moved the site yesterday. It is now at the very easy to remember URL: www.gaylonghair.com

For those of you inclined to visit such a site, you should pay it a visit. The software at first glance will look very much like this one, but you'll see a LOT of enhancements. You can put photos that are in your computer right in your messages. There is also a user database. Once a user gets himself listed, his photo will appear in the upper left corner whenever he posts. If you click on that, you will instantly be taken to his web page or profile (like at Yahoo) - whatever he asks to put in there. This makes it really easy to keep all the users apart in your mind, and if you want to know more about a user, the info is just one click away!

You can also view the database itself - just a page of smiling faces with manes. Click on any one of them you choose, and you're off to his home page. The database is small, having just been started yesterday, but it already has enough guys in there that you can get the idea.

It was like losing a friend, to let the site I've nurtured for five years go. But it has great hopes in its new location, and that should bring happiness to the community as a whole. After all, Victor doesn't own this board and I never owned mine - they are owned by the community. All we are, are caretakers of a trust.

The community should get a lot of enjoyment out of the new Gay Longhair Board.


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