Welcome to the new Houseboy.com

[michael]

The new site will take time for many to get use to but the site is optimized for different devices and makes it easier for all to use.  Please be patient as we make this transition.

The site will also require ALL NEW profiles to be approved by admins as we are trying to get rid of scammer is important to us.

If you find issues, or see concerns, please let us know and we will work hard to solve them.  Thanks.

Michael

 

[michael]

We have modified the My Account area. Please let me know if this works for you or is easier.

[blueskysailor]

Hi....I have been a user of the site for quite a few years and have recruited 5 or 6 Houseboys successfully in that time who have mostly been great guys to have around.

I understand that you need to change things from time to time but the latest big change does seem to be quite a backward step in a good few areas...I hate to sound negative because houseboy.com has been so good in the past and pretty easy to navigate. I will try to point out several things now which do not seem right and perhaps you can try to look at them/improve them:

1/ When I look at someone's profile now I cannot tell if they are a houseboy seeking a position or if they are an employer. Perhaps I am doing something wrong but to me, I can see nothing which indicates this info. Surely it should be in the "Basic Info" area, no?

2/ Another problem seems to be the location functions. When I logged in for the 1st time after the new changes, my location was incorrect so I have changed and saved it. However, in some parts of the site, my location is indicated as London though it is not my saved location...this happens, for example when I search by member name for my own profile....the result shows my profile picture but beneath that , the word "London" appears in pale grey though I am not located in London. Possibly your new site is attempting to use location data from my browser or something....as I have been to London in recent times but I am presently several thousand miles from there in my second home in Portugal. My location should be shown as where I say it is in my profile and not where I happen to be on my various travels....after all, that is probably what most interests someone seeking a position ( although I do admit that a bad person might fake a profile and their true location....those people can usually be weeded out by other means or feedback/flagging from other members).

3/ I used to be able to search/filter by location so , for example I could search France if I was looking for a French houseboy - or the USA where I have found several Boys in the past. This now seems impossible to do in any way. Yes, I do seem to be able to enter a location and then search by distance around that point...but that is not terribly useful as a search on "Paris" for example would get me many results in England or Belgium before some parts of Southern France. In reality it is rare that you need to locate a houseboy who is already close to you and as you will know, often they are seeking to relocate to a better life far from where they are now. Distance from where I am is somewhat useful in a purely dating App but houseboy.com's objectives are not really the same as that.

4/ I think that there is some major problem with location data being transferred from the old system to the new one. For example, many of the English profiles are listed as having a location in Lambeth (a district of London) but I am sure many are not correct and are really based in other places as I have chatted with some of those guys before and they are not based in Lambeth.

5/ This next point was the same on the old system but maybe you may wish to reconsider it: In the basic info of a profile there are 4 items relating to oral and anal sex (as in "Loads in mouth take" and "loads in ass take" etc).  In my many conversations with other members then these questions are clearly confusing for some people (especially those whose first language is not English). Some Boys have told me they take the questions literally and answer "No" to the question "take loads in ass" because they wish to only be fucked when the top wears condom. It seems there are some people for whom the question is confusing because they are prepared to be the receiver in anal sex but do not wish to literally "take a load", which to them implies unprotected sex!  I think you will find many members would prefer a clearer definition that cannot be misunderstood as I believe happens now - please give this point careful consideration because it is the one thing that has often seemed wrong to me in the past.

I hope you can fix some of the more obvious issues with the new site......however, I do not think it is generally better than the old site, sorry.

 

 

[strict4boy]

These new 'improvements' have NOT improved anything, quite the opposite they have made things harder to navigate, harder to locate the right sections of boys you are looking for and, from what I can fathom out, impossible to make changes to your own profile if needed
Also, coming on the Forum page gives a completely different profile to the one on the main 'browsing' page.......odd
Why change what was once such a great site

[michael]

17 hours ago, blueskysailor said:

Hi....I have been a user of the site for quite a few years and have recruited 5 or 6 Houseboys successfully in that time who have mostly been great guys to have around.

I understand that you need to change things from time to time but the latest big change does seem to be quite a backward step in a good few areas...I hate to sound negative because houseboy.com has been so good in the past and pretty easy to navigate. I will try to point out several things now which do not seem right and perhaps you can try to look at them/improve them:

1/ When I look at someone's profile now I cannot tell if they are a houseboy seeking a position or if they are an employer. Perhaps I am doing something wrong but to me, I can see nothing which indicates this info. Surely it should be in the "Basic Info" area, no?

2/ Another problem seems to be the location functions. When I logged in for the 1st time after the new changes, my location was incorrect so I have changed and saved it. However, in some parts of the site, my location is indicated as London though it is not my saved location...this happens, for example when I search by member name for my own profile....the result shows my profile picture but beneath that , the word "London" appears in pale grey though I am not located in London. Possibly your new site is attempting to use location data from my browser or something....as I have been to London in recent times but I am presently several thousand miles from there in my second home in Portugal. My location should be shown as where I say it is in my profile and not where I happen to be on my various travels....after all, that is probably what most interests someone seeking a position ( although I do admit that a bad person might fake a profile and their true location....those people can usually be weeded out by other means or feedback/flagging from other members).

3/ I used to be able to search/filter by location so , for example I could search France if I was looking for a French houseboy - or the USA where I have found several Boys in the past. This now seems impossible to do in any way. Yes, I do seem to be able to enter a location and then search by distance around that point...but that is not terribly useful as a search on "Paris" for example would get me many results in England or Belgium before some parts of Southern France. In reality it is rare that you need to locate a houseboy who is already close to you and as you will know, often they are seeking to relocate to a better life far from where they are now. Distance from where I am is somewhat useful in a purely dating App but houseboy.com's objectives are not really the same as that.

4/ I think that there is some major problem with location data being transferred from the old system to the new one. For example, many of the English profiles are listed as having a location in Lambeth (a district of London) but I am sure many are not correct and are really based in other places as I have chatted with some of those guys before and they are not based in Lambeth.

5/ This next point was the same on the old system but maybe you may wish to reconsider it: In the basic info of a profile there are 4 items relating to oral and anal sex (as in "Loads in mouth take" and "loads in ass take" etc).  In my many conversations with other members then these questions are clearly confusing for some people (especially those whose first language is not English). Some Boys have told me they take the questions literally and answer "No" to the question "take loads in ass" because they wish to only be fucked when the top wears condom. It seems there are some people for whom the question is confusing because they are prepared to be the receiver in anal sex but do not wish to literally "take a load", which to them implies unprotected sex!  I think you will find many members would prefer a clearer definition that cannot be misunderstood as I believe happens now - please give this point careful consideration because it is the one thing that has often seemed wrong to me in the past.

I hope you can fix some of the more obvious issues with the new site......however, I do not think it is generally better than the old site, sorry.

 

 

1. You are right, we will fix this.

2. i have not seen this.  Can you send me a screen shot of your My Account location and what you see in the search for London?

3. If you move your location in My Account to the area you want to search, it will show for you everything close by.  Search are now done by distance and not by city.

4. I think this is the result of the member not logging in and changing location.  Do you see this with members who have logged in in the past week?

5. What is your suggestion?

Thank you for the comments and patience.

[michael]

15 hours ago, strict4boy said:

These new 'improvements' have NOT improved anything, quite the opposite they have made things harder to navigate, harder to locate the right sections of boys you are looking for and, from what I can fathom out, impossible to make changes to your own profile if needed
Also, coming on the Forum page gives a completely different profile to the one on the main 'browsing' page.......odd
Why change what was once such a great site

We had no choice but to change. The old code was messing up in new browsers and on all devices.  We had to change it to make it consistent.

The forum page profile can be set by you and the photo can be set by you as well. We no longer take those from the main site and put the photo here.

[michael]

5 hours ago, michael said:

1. You are right, we will fix this.

2. i have not seen this.  Can you send me a screen shot of your My Account location and what you see in the search for London?

3. If you move your location in My Account to the area you want to search, it will show for you everything close by.  Search are now done by distance and not by city.

4. I think this is the result of the member not logging in and changing location.  Do you see this with members who have logged in in the past week?

5. What is your suggestion?

Thank you for the comments and patience.

1. We have made changes on each area to display Houseboy or Employer.  I hope this helps!

[blueskysailor]

On 4/9/2018 at 10:32 AM, michael said:

1. You are right, we will fix this.

2. i have not seen this.  Can you send me a screen shot of your My Account location and what you see in the search for London?

3. If you move your location in My Account to the area you want to search, it will show for you everything close by.  Search are now done by distance and not by city.

4. I think this is the result of the member not logging in and changing location.  Do you see this with members who have logged in in the past week?

5. What is your suggestion?

Thank you for the comments and patience.

Good evening. I am happy to give suggestions if it can improve the site. Further to the previous points raised:-

2. and part of 4. -Your question does not entirely make sense to me but have attached pics below - I have attached a snipped picture of part of my screen. I got to that point by doing a member name search on my own name (blueskysailor) and then clicking on the small picture on the left which was the result of the search. I imagine any user can search my name in this way. After that, my profile appears on the right, as you can see but the word "London" appears beneath my main profile picture. I am not in London but am thousands of miles from there in Portugal where I have a second home and the word "London" appears nowhere in my profile data so far as I know). Actually the only reason I did this search was to understand how my profile looks to another site user/member. I can see no other way to do this but it is actually quite helpful to know how my profile is actually seen by others (usually I try to do this to double check the layout of wording etc looks OK) - maybe you could even have a "how does my profile appear to others" button as some sites do.

The second pic attached is of the only way I can find to see my location in my profile - I would much rather just have the name of my town or district but the site forces me to pick an exact location on a map which has to be a street address with house number....even if I follow through from my initial choice of" Lagoa, Algarve, Portugal" which I can see in a pulldown picklist if I enter "Lagoa, Portugal" which is my town ( actually my street has no name or number so there is no other way to search other than my zipcode or district name).

If I do a member search and select the search location as "London, UK" with the distance set at 5 miles radius then the search returns 62 results (allowing all other search parameters to the maximum). The results include employers and houseboys.  Of the 62 results returned, 58 of them say they are in Lambeth (a small district in south London); 1 says the person is located in France and the others just say London without specifying a district. Many of the Lambeth ones have not logged in for a good while but some have logged in in the past few hours. There are none listed anywhere else in London or 5 miles around. This just seems very wrong it cannot be right and a couple of them are guys I have chatted with previously who are , so far as I recall in towns far away from London. When I have done this London search, my own profile does not show up in the results even though I have showed you a picture that indicates my location as in London (which is not correct). If I do the same search but make the search radius 100 miles around London then I get 88 results returned, 50 are listed in Lambeth but the rest are much more than 100 from London....such as 2 in the USA and 1 in France. This is clearly very wrong and not working at all correctly.

5. I will think a bit more about this and try to make a useful suggestion.

Sorry about the long message.....but I really want to help you fix these newly made problems. I do not think you quite realise how badly the site is currently functioning.

[michael]

We are looking into both areas.  I'll have details soon about the location issue.

We will also move all profiles to replace the Give and Take Loads to just: Safe Sex with 5 options.  I'll have to set it to No Answer at first and then send a PM to all to check and change.

Thank you for your suggestions and we are working fast to implement changes to make the site better for all.

[bacha]

it's a shame you guys don't have the money to make the site more functional.

editing our profiles now is really hard since the window is only a line or two tall.  

[michael]

11 hours ago, bacha said:

it's a shame you guys don't have the money to make the site more functional.

editing our profiles now is really hard since the window is only a line or two tall.  

Sarcasm aside? LOL

Attach a photo here of what you are seeing.  I have checked on IPhone, IPad, Laptops and desktops with no issues.

[blueskysailor]

Dear Michael/houseboy.com

Thank you for implementing some of my suggestions and attempting to improve things.

There are a couple more issues which you might want to look into.

1/ When I use the site, I nearly always (perhaps it is always) have to login twice - When I log in the first time, I am seemingly in the site....and my profile pic is displayed small in the top right corner of the screen....but then if I do anything , such as attempt a search then the login window re-appears and I must enter my name/password etc for a second time before I can continue.

2/ You recently sent a message to all members about recent changes and in that message you said  " We are also not an escort site and any offers for escorting should also be reported.   ".  HOWEVER, in the search options there is a selection box to choose Yes/No to the question of if the member is an  Escort!  This clearly seems to have a data flag against some profiles to indicate that some members are escorts because one gets different results if one changes the search criteria to "No" from when it is set to "Yes". Either the member is somehow indicating that they are an escort or perhaps the data is coming from another (linked?) website such as Boytoy.com (is that one of your sites?) as some of the search results with "Yes" to the question "is escort" have the same pictures and profile names as members on Boytoy.com - a site where escorts can also indicate that they are also a houseboy. Perhaps this is just a coincidence and the Boys have just re-used a profile name/pics. I am not complaining about this but I suspect you may have legal reasons to not want to talk about escorts on the houseboy website. After all, I am not so naive to be surprised that some houseboys have at some point done escort work in their lives, perhaps through necessity - Though they would seem to be a small minority of all the members on the site.

3/ Can you make the time-out of each login session a bit longer please? More than once I have been logged out whilst I was writing a message and then had to start again. I am aware that others have had this problem too.

4/ Lastly, and it seems rather odd to me that you have a "Looking to relocate" (yes/No/Maybe) box for employers as almost all of them are never going to relocate. After the recent changes, I noticed that my this option was not correct on my profile so I have changed it to "No". Almost all members who are employers seem to have yes or maybe set for this question. Is this a error? This does not seem right or even logical.

Anyway...keep up the good work. I hope you do not lose too many members from the new changes.

 

[TronicJon]

2 bugs

 

1) I’m not able to click the profile name hyper link to view the member that sent me a message. (See attached screen shot of error message that pops up)

 

2)  I’m not able to add new photos   Over the past couple weeks I’ve tried uploading a few new photos every several days. New uploads initially immediately appear as a thumbnail next to the approved photos but once I navigate away or check the next day the new photos are gone as if I never uploaded anything  

 

[michael]

5 hours ago, TronicJon said:

2 bugs

 

1) I’m not able to click the profile name hyper link to view the member that sent me a message. (See attached screen shot of error message that pops up)

 

2)  I’m not able to add new photos   Over the past couple weeks I’ve tried uploading a few new photos every several days. New uploads initially immediately appear as a thumbnail next to the approved photos but once I navigate away or check the next day the new photos are gone as if I never uploaded anything  

 

That usually means the user was deleted. We will try to fix this message.

On 4/14/2018 at 9:36 PM, blueskysailor said:

Dear Michael/houseboy.com

Thank you for implementing some of my suggestions and attempting to improve things.

There are a couple more issues which you might want to look into.

1/ When I use the site, I nearly always (perhaps it is always) have to login twice - When I log in the first time, I am seemingly in the site....and my profile pic is displayed small in the top right corner of the screen....but then if I do anything , such as attempt a search then the login window re-appears and I must enter my name/password etc for a second time before I can continue.

2/ You recently sent a message to all members about recent changes and in that message you said  " We are also not an escort site and any offers for escorting should also be reported.   ".  HOWEVER, in the search options there is a selection box to choose Yes/No to the question of if the member is an  Escort!  This clearly seems to have a data flag against some profiles to indicate that some members are escorts because one gets different results if one changes the search criteria to "No" from when it is set to "Yes". Either the member is somehow indicating that they are an escort or perhaps the data is coming from another (linked?) website such as Boytoy.com (is that one of your sites?) as some of the search results with "Yes" to the question "is escort" have the same pictures and profile names as members on Boytoy.com - a site where escorts can also indicate that they are also a houseboy. Perhaps this is just a coincidence and the Boys have just re-used a profile name/pics. I am not complaining about this but I suspect you may have legal reasons to not want to talk about escorts on the houseboy website. After all, I am not so naive to be surprised that some houseboys have at some point done escort work in their lives, perhaps through necessity - Though they would seem to be a small minority of all the members on the site.

3/ Can you make the time-out of each login session a bit longer please? More than once I have been logged out whilst I was writing a message and then had to start again. I am aware that others have had this problem too.

4/ Lastly, and it seems rather odd to me that you have a "Looking to relocate" (yes/No/Maybe) box for employers as almost all of them are never going to relocate. After the recent changes, I noticed that my this option was not correct on my profile so I have changed it to "No". Almost all members who are employers seem to have yes or maybe set for this question. Is this a error? This does not seem right or even logical.

Anyway...keep up the good work. I hope you do not lose too many members from the new changes.

 

1. We have worked on this. Is it still happening?

2. Escort removed from Search options.

3. We set it for longer last week.  Is this working better?

4. Agree but not easy to change in database.  Will look into this.

Thanks for the suggestions and the comments!