Chattage and gay.com

In the past, I've complained on this blog about how annoying it can be chatting on gay.com due to the presence of 'adverts' in the chat rooms, also known as 'bots'. But a few weeks ago I discovered a solution.

I'm logged into the gay.com chat rooms, but when I try to start chatting to this particular guy the following happened:

GB: hi mate, nice pix
guy: I am protected by Chattage BotShield. Please answer the following question: "What is the last word of this sentence?"

I've never heard of Chattage Botshield, but a 'shield' against 'bots' sounds like a sensible idea. So I duly obey

GB: sentence
guy: thanks, u've got nice pics urself!

As far as the guy is concerned, the initial question that he asked me and my reply aren't part of the conversation. The conversation with this guy doesn't go anywhere, but later I use google to search for Chattage BotShield and find the Chattage website.

Since then, I've been using this Chattage system to connect to the gay.com chat network and it's so much better than what gay.com provides. The BotShield is just one of the useful features. Although I would recommend it, potential users should read the FAQ, and note that on a strictly legal level, using it violates the gay.com terms of service.

If you're going to use it, there are a couple of problems that I've noticed, that I've reported to the Chattage support team. Sometimes it seems to go into an 'infinite loop' of some sort, taking up 99% of the CPU time, and the only solution seems to be to use the task manager to kill it and restart. Another issue is that when one requests a profile from gay.com, it uses existing internet explorer windows, which means that if you're also logged into gaydar then your gaydar session gets disrupted. In fact one can use Chattage to access the summary details of all the guys in the system, including all their photos, so one doesn't usually need to look at their profile pages. So overall, the benefits seem to outweigh the problems.

Now that I've got Chattage I can see what happens when someone tries to start chatting to me when the BotShield is in place. The system tells me who is trying to chat to me, and then whether they pass the test or not. A nice side-effect of the BotShield is that it also filters out stupid people. There have been at least a couple of guys who tried to contact me that failed the test, even though when I looked at their profiles I felt sure they were not 'bots'. Of course I can choose to override the BotShield and start chatting to them if I want, but if they can't pass the simple test then they have to be particularly cute to compensate!

But maybe the bots will have the last laugh anyway. A couple of days ago, instead of using Chattage I logged in using gay.com itself. As soon as I went into the chat rooms, a guy contacted me:

kylew206: Looking for safe, discrete, no strings action.

Hmmm, a bit forward. Perhaps he sends this message to everyone to see who will respond. So I respond, to try and get a conversation started with him.

GB: hi m8
kylew206: Sorry : I am protected with BotGuard. Please type "maynard" in the box to let me know you're not a bot. Thanks!

That seems strange - once he's contacted me shouldn't his BotGuard (whatever that is) have been deactivated? Anyway, I obey and:

GB: maynard
kylew206: hi
GB: hi, r u in London?
kylew206: hit me up on boyhost.net/kylew

With that reply the only conclusion is that 'kylew206' is a bot himself!! This is just getting too weird.