The following was written by Buzz in mid-2003. Buzz was invited to resume his activities as an op on the channel, and he returned a few times, but the channel was pretty quiet and he seems to have "got a life." He has again disappeared into the mists of time.
Here is the way it was:
I moved to DalNet in 1994 shortly after it was created. After a few years on EFnet I was tired of the massive crowds in the channels and the number of channel operators trying to play god.
I was amazed that you could start a channel and the Network (DalNet) would take care of it for you with Chanserv, Nickserv and the like. I registered #GayCafe and sat and sat and sat some more. Nobody came :( I kept the channel but moved on to #GayJPG and owners. But still couldn't get my own channel off the ground. After about a year of that DalNet grew and grew from about 35 registered channels to hundreds of channels some with and some without channel bots to keep the channels operating 24/7.
Well things didn't go to good in #GayTalk with me, I was more for the will of the people in the channel. The new owner of the channel put in an eggdrop bot, that in itself was not a problem, he then made a straight woman the Senior channel operator and that's when people started complaining. She was banning people for swearing and imposing her morals on Gay men. I didn't like it and told her off in no uncertain terms. I was kicked and banned and deoped in #GayTalk, which was one of the most popular channels at the time.
Determined to make a channel where Gay men could go and talk with each other the way men do and have fun and not be worried if it might offend a woman. I went back to my own channel #GayCafe. I took a few friends with me who were operators in #GayTalk and temporarily installed a mIRC bot in the channel to keep it open.
That worked for a while but not long back in the days of 500 mb harddrives and 14.4 modems and 35 megahertz it was impractical to run your system all day and all night to keep a bot in the channel and the mIRC bots were about as useful as tits on a bull.
That's when RAMbot was born, I configured an Eggdrop bot to run in the channel and be friendly, he would talk to people and in some cases get hit on by newbies who didn't know he was a bot since he was capable of carrying on a conversation. Some people told me that one of the reasons they came to the channel was to play with the bot. Of course there were those that said he was annoying, I did tone him down a little for them. For the others he still played games, insulted them (in a friendly way) and never forgot a nick, oh yeah and spoke in English, German, French, Portuguese and Italian. I got so tied up with programming him and writing new scripts for him, sometimes I was never in the channel.
After getting the bot the way I wanted it and he had over 3,000 registered users on him I got more involved with the channel again. He took care of the channel and protected the channel users while I just had fun.
#GayCafe had users from all over the world now and all the fun and problems of a real community, but I still couldn't get things the way I wanted them. I didn't want to limit my acquaintances to online chat, I wanted to organize get togethers, especially after I moved from Massachusetts to Florida, where I live now. I thought it would be great to invite a bunch of people from the channel and put them up for an outing to GayDays at Disney World. In 1996 I tried to do that for the following year, after a year of planning and trying to organize it, the numbers of people that said they would attend dwindled from about 35 to 0. I got a little discouraged and after a lot of soul searching decided that this life of IRC was not having a life. I offered the channel and the bot to any of the operators that would take over. There were no takers. RAMbot was put to sleep. I kept the channel registered in my name so that it would be there and visited once in a while to say hi. The visits got to be fewer and farther between and the 30 day limit was reached and I lost the channel. It was picked up by one of the regulars, a high school kid from Ocoee, Florida and I wished him well and that was when I stopped going to IRC.
I met a lot of nice people on IRC and some that I met in RL and would love to see again, Joe_Fl is one of them in Florida here and of course BozoBoy, who I was madly in love with and had a relationship for about a year. Of course that had to end when I moved to Florida a move that was planned before I met him and I couldn't really back out of. He didn't want to leave New York City. Davi, who I never met in person but had many conversations with on the phone. My adopted son Billy, who visited BozoBoy and myself at my home in Massachusetts. There were many others, but with all those nicks it's hard to remember them all. If any of you read this I am truly sorry for not mentioning your nicks, but I haven't forgotten you or the gifts and trinkets you sent me from all corners of the globe. Thanks for the good times.
To sum it all up, I think the channel was a success because of it's lack of rules, there were some but not many, you might be called a potty mouth for language by the bot but you wouldn't be kicked or banned, it was a place to relax and tell your stories, admittedly some true and some not so true but it was a great way to spend your time away from RL.
What after that? I started designing and building web pages for a Gay Men's nudist group in Orlando, and do a lot of camping mostly at a Gay Campground near Tampa called Sawmill. Other than that I could still use a good man. ;)
-- Buzz