Posted Jul 30, 2025 9:53PM UTC
I told you a couple of weeks ago about my hip problems. This past week, I hit another aging milestone.
I couldn't keep it up.
The site started crashing, initially from a denial of service attack. It took advantage of the fact that our users database has grown quite large and we were letting visitors go straight to one of many thousand of pages at https://oldergay.men/users. The pages were always changing because we sort, by default, on who has logged in most recently, and the database was getting overwhelmed with a flood of requests to find what's on page 2,781 now, and what's on 3,182, and...
I kept the site up as much as I could (lots of restarts) while mitigating the problems. As ever, each fix spawned a whack-a-mole of new issues. When you were able to reach the site, you probably found odd bits broken, fixed, broken again. It's been stable since last night, and I'm cleaning up the oddities. One change from all of this is that if you go to https://oldergay.men/users or https://oldergay.men/images, you won't see links to go to page 1, 2, 3... anymore.
For images, they're sorted by default by newest, so you can still go there to check the latest. I'll start adding more ways to browse the collection and discover things new-to-you. For people, we can already sort by newest, by latest updated, and by age. If you click "With Photos", you can similarly sort the results. When I get a chance, I'll make the opposite true, so "With Photos" respects any sorting and filtering already in progress.
Beyond that, I hope the loss of going straight to page 493 isn't as serious as it sounds. If you were doing it after loading https://oldergay.men/users directly, page 493 would have been different anyway, each time someone logged in. Off the top of my head, I can only think of a couple of ways in which you might want to slide over to a certain point between A and Z: To get to guys of a certain age, and to get to guys who joined at a certain time. I'll add filters to only show guys between two given ages and who joined between two given dates. Otherwise, you can search by location and do a text search of guys' names and profiles. How else could we help you run down that perfect guy? Please share any suggestions in the comments below.
I had a long chat with an OGM member at Tropics the other night. He really wants to find guys in a certain weight range, guys who are tops, bottoms, or versatile, etc. All the filters of Grindr, Silverdaddies, etc. I've tried to leave that to profile photos and profile descriptions, but he convinced me how useful it would be for him, even with all those qualifiers optional and only filled in by a few. So I'll add that when I can. If you have more ideas of how we could better help you, please let us know.
Thanks as ever for your patience,
Jeff