2011/Jan-Jun/Announcements/Staff Updates

January

04 XMas Grants Ending

• Topic XMas Grants Ending - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Tue Jan 04, 2011 12:58 pm

XMas Grants Ending

Hello everyone, if you haven't taken the time to get your XMas 2010 item grants from the XMas event page, today is your last day to do so! At midnight PST the links for your free event items will be disabled.

04 "Blocked Images", Profile URLs, Avatar Images

• Topic "Blocked Images", Profile URLs, Avatar Images - Posted: carbonphyber Tue Jan 04, 2011 2:02 pm

"Blocked Images", Profile URLs, Avatar Images

• The "Blocked Images" feature has been improved. Just click on the icon of the policeman. to unblock an image and the images around it. This should help prevent "phishing" login messages if you have a safe "Display Images" setting in your account preferences.
• Profile URLs are a little longer than they used to be. Please update your bookmarks soon. No need to worry: the shorter URLs are still supported and you can continue to use them for a long time coming.
• Backend code changes to the way we link to avatar images all over the site. If you see any broken avatar images, please report that page you found them in the Bug Reports forum. Thx!

13 Checked Labs Lately?

• Topic Checked Labs Lately? - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Jan 13, 2011 7:05 pm

Checked Labs Lately?

Have you checked labs lately? We just added a new experimental floating footer that allows you to IM your friends.

There is also tons of other stuff in labs -- for example, there's an option that allows you to sign up for dev notices and see them immediately -- which means you would have seen this very notice just that much faster. So meta!

(We'll be making a global announcement to remind people about labs in the next few days).

19 Dumpster Dive Test

• Topic Dumpster Dive Test - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Wed Jan 19, 2011 3:21 pm

Dumpster Dive Test

Dumpster Dive has been soft launched and will be undergoing additional testing on our production servers. It will remain inaccessible to most Gaian's while this testing is conducted.

20 Zombie Fish

• Topic Zombie Fish - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Jan 20, 2011 12:27 pm

Zombie Fish

There have been many reports of zombie fish -- that is, fish that won't die. We've been looking at the problem for the past week and hope to have a fix soon; when we know more we'll do another dev notice.

For now, please do NOT submit a support ticket if you haven't already -- we're hoping to fix it for everyone at the same time.

20 Dumpster Dive Open

• Topic Dumpster Dive Open - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Thu Jan 20, 2011 5:16 pm

Dumpster Dive Open

Shortly Dumpster Dive will be opened to all users, also the donation limit will be increased from 1k to 10k.

If any issues arise we may need to close it again, otherwise... happy diving!

21 Experimental Toolbar Updated

• Topic Experimental Toolbar Updated - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Jan 21, 2011 5:08 pm

Experimental Toolbar Updated

For anyone using the new experimental IM toolbar in Labs -- based on user feedback, added Messages and Friends and Outfits (if you also have Outfits enabled in Labs).

We still plan to add editing of quick links sometime next week.

(Also, since some people were confused: the new toolbar REPLACES the old one, so you have to both a) have your toolbar on, and b) have turned on the new toolbar in Labs).

28 Zombie Fish Update

• Topic Zombie Fish Update - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Jan 28, 2011 7:46 pm

Zombie Fish Update

We've pushed out a fix for the zombie fish (thanks, Edy!), but there is a small glitch that you should know about. If you come into your tank and there are fish that are due to be expired, then you may get a warning that "There was a problem with your tank." All you need to do in this case is reload your tank, and you will should find that a) the zombie fish have been removed, and b) you will have drops for the dead fish in your inventory.

If you run into problems please report them in this aquarium glitch thread.

28 Zombie Fish / Meebo

• Topic Zombie Fish / Meebo - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Jan 28, 2011 8:04 pm

Zombie Fish / Meebo

Whoops, one more thing on the fish fix: we only check your tank for dead fish once per day. So, if you had already checked your tank today, the fix will not affect you until tomorrow.

Also: pushed out minor fix for Meebo that will fix some users that were having problems.

28 Return Of The Zombies

• Topic Return Of The Zombies - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Jan 28, 2011 9:01 pm

Return Of The Zombies

Okay, after trying out our fix and taking a look at the logs it's looking like there is another edge case with the caching that we need to fix. We've returned to the previous fix and will try pushing out an updated fix on Monday. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

31 zOMG Video Preroll

• Topic zOMG Video Preroll - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Jan 31, 2011 3:24 pm

zOMG Video Preroll

Given that users were having so many problems with the zOMG preroll, we've reduced the length back of the mandatory delay. We appreciate it if you do watch the video, but for those users that are having problems seeing the videos, you'll be able to continue to the game after 5 seconds.

31 Zombie Fish Update

• Topic Zombie Fish Update - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Jan 31, 2011 7:33 pm

Zombie Fish Update

We have a fix for this that we had hoped would go out today, but it just cleared QA and it outside our launch window, so instead we will get it out around 12:30pm tomorrow (PST). We'll make another dev announcement tomorrow when it goes live.

February

01 Let the flushing begin!

• Topic Let the flushing begin! - Posted: edy Tue Feb 01, 2011 7:16 pm

Let the flushing begin!

We've released the fix for Aquarium zombie fish. You should be able to flush your dead fish and receive their drops. If you've already tried to flush them today, then you'll have to wait 24 hours and try again.

01 Zombie Fish Redux

• Topic Zombie Fish Redux - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Feb 01, 2011 7:22 pm

Zombie Fish Redux

Once more, with feeling.

Backend changes for the aquarium are live -- going into your aquarium should retire any dead fish, and you will get drops from your poor deceased pets.

Note that we only run the check once per day, so if you've already gone into your aquarium today, your fish won't be fixed until tomorrow.

01 Meebo Ads

• Topic Meebo Ads - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Feb 01, 2011 7:27 pm

Meebo Ads

We've updated the Meebo Instant Messenger toolbar in Labs so that it does not display ads if your ads are off for the rest of the site.

(And, sorry for the duplicate message about the aquarium fix!)

03 Saving Outfits

• Topic Saving Outfits - Posted: edy Thu Feb 03, 2011 4:26 pm

Saving Outfits

The bug with outfits not equipping all items is fixed. You'll have to reequip, and resave any outfits that had the problem.

The outfit thumbnail shows the items, but some items weren't saved in the database.

03 New Manga Out

• Topic New Manga Out - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Feb 03, 2011 6:07 pm

New Manga Out

You asked for more storyline, you're getting more storyline! A whole bunch of manga is headed your way, released a page a day.

Revel in the appearance of Gambino's younger, tougher brother, Rambino. Be shocked at the poignant deaths of two beloved characters. Ponder the startling secret that Rufus uncovers and its implications for every single person in Gaia.(*)

(*) Events listed in this dev notice are not canon and bear no resemblance to the events actually portrayed. Just go and read the manga!

04 Salon Closed Temporarily

• Topic Salon Closed Temporarily - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Feb 04, 2011 4:40 pm

Salon Closed Temporarily

... while we resolve issues with the new eyes that were released.

04 Update on Salon Durem

• Topic Update on Salon Durem - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Feb 04, 2011 5:46 pm

Update on Salon Durem

An update on the Salon Durem problem. The TL;DR is that we expect everything to be fixed by 5:00PM.

04 Salon Durem Fixed

• Topic Salon Durem Fixed - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Feb 04, 2011 7:28 pm

Salon Durem Fixed

It's fixed! Store is back on, your eyes and hair should be on your head where they belong, and for your trouble we've refunded any gold you've spent in Salon Durem on the problem items. (Many, many thanks go to [72], edy, and DARKNRGY for the amazingly quick turnaround for the fix).

07 Manga Schedule

• Topic Manga Schedule - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Feb 07, 2011 4:22 pm

Manga Schedule

The difference between weekday and every day has been tragically made clear to yours truly by the writers and artists.

Henceforth, the manga pages will be released every weekday, which means there will be a new manga page every weekday until the beginning of March!

07 Trades temporarily disabled

• Topic Trades temporarily disabled - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Feb 07, 2011 8:25 pm

Trades temporarily disabled

Trades are temporarily disabled while we track down the source of the site slowdown.

07 Trades Enabled

• Topic Trades Enabled - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Feb 07, 2011 8:58 pm

Trades Enabled Trading is back on. Site should be more responsive now. Trade requests in My Gaia are disabled for a bit while we wrangle some bits.

10 Posts per Page

• Topic Posts per Page - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Feb 10, 2011 3:04 pm

Posts per Page

Tragically, a splinter fragment of the "10 Fingers, 10 Posts" activist group managed to invade our servers and inadvertently set the number of posts per page to 10. This is unintentional and it will be set back to 15 shortly.

10 Footer Bar

• Topic Footer Bar - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Feb 10, 2011 4:53 pm

Footer Bar

We're going to be doing a limited rollout of the new footer to a limited percentage of Gaia users -- primarily to test and see if the backend can handle it. If you are part of the test group, you will see a footer bar that you didn't see before.

Now, we'd like you to use the new footer, because there are a lot of neat things that we're going to do with it, but if you would like to turn it off just go to your account settings and look for an option called "Footer Display." Set that to "old toolbar" ( or "no toolbar" ) and you'll be set.

There are a few things that still need to be improved with the new footer (quick links need to be editable, among other things), but we'll roll those out next week after this test, as well as a full and official announcement about the new footer.

If you'd like to comment on this please use this thread in Labs for now.

10 Trade Notifications in MyGaia

• Topic Trade Notifications in MyGaia - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Feb 10, 2011 6:49 pm

Trade Notifications in MyGaia

Trade notifications in MyGaia are back on.

12 Bug Fixes Past Two Weeks

• Topic Bug Fixes Past Two Weeks - Posted: Panagrammic Sat Feb 12, 2011 9:16 pm

Bug Fixes Past Two Weeks

• - Profiles: "View all Friends" page users avis/names link to wrong profile
• - Bug in PropertyReader caused Aquarium Drops not to work
• - Marketplace: graph image has bad URL (and displays as broken image or nothing)
• - Clean the XHTMLz in the 120x600 and 160x600 ads
• - Flower Exchange not finding user's inks
• - Meebo tweaks for donators
• - Updated back end solr job for user indexing - added user interests. Updated interest saving to kick off user indexing solr job.
• - One line fix for inks showing up in multiple exchanges.
• - Added seed data for zOMG Buddies in item_norm default_properties
• - Fixing "-3, User not authenticated" in towns when you shake something and get gold.
• - Facebook Login & Registration
• - Global Search: Added Interest searching, prompt for interest matching on MyGaia
• - session pages and bootstrap optimizations
• - migrated /guilds/index.php and sister files to private/circuit-apps/config.php
• - Make Guilds landing pages SEO-friendly
• - Removing the World of Style from image
• - JS optimizations and cleanup of Guilds landing pages

14 Forum Post History

• Topic Forum Post History - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Feb 14, 2011 6:38 pm

Forum Post History

The post history was prematurely pushed; we're reverting it for now.

There are some changes that we want to do first: a. show more granularity on post time than just "Today." b. order the posts by post time, not by forum. c. change the icon if there have been new posts in that thread. d. Fix some of the moderator tools that were using that page.

For maintenance reasons we are, however, going to be making some changes to the page:

• - the look and feel will be updated. This helps us bring the My Posts page into a maintained template and means that we don't have to maintain the old template code. This also helps us take care of some security issues on the page, which was the initial impetus to changing the page.
• - the entire post will not be shown; this helps reduce server load for us. Ditto images and whatnot -- by not displaying them we make the page load faster and we can fetch less data.
• - Instead of going to "My Posts" and doing a Ctrl+F, page, Ctrl+F, page to find a post with a particular word however, you can use search to locate your post.

15 Old MyPosts

• Topic Old MyPosts - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Feb 15, 2011 4:15 pm

Old MyPosts

The old My Posts functionality is now available under /forum/myposts.

15 Sparkles Reloaded

• Topic Sparkles Reloaded - Posted: edy Tue Feb 15, 2011 4:22 pm

Sparkles Reloaded

The inventory (and avatar page) sparkles have been updated. If you like using them, but had problems with them, give them another try.

They no longer cover the whole image, but instead take up just a small area on the top right portion of the item thumbnail. You should no longer have the sparkles jumping onto another item.

15 DARKNRGY Dolls

• Topic DARKNRGY Dolls - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Feb 15, 2011 8:49 pm

DARKNRGY Dolls

DARKNRGY, one of the Gaia founders and a key person behind many big features on the site (search being the latest, but he's worked on a wide range of stuff including trade, marketplace, guilds, and the item norm system that runs the very foundation of Gaia), is feeling unappreciated because his DARKNRGY dolls on the marketplace are priced so low.

If any of you kind Booty-Grab-enriched souls could purchase them or bid them up, and maybe post on his profile thanking him for keeping Gaia running, that would be most appreciated.

Thanks.

15 DARKNRGY Recap

• Topic DARKNRGY Recap - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Feb 15, 2011 11:13 pm

DARKNRGY Recap

Okay, the notice about DARKNRGY was meant to be a light-hearted, humorous injection of some random comedy, not some dire plot to manipulate the marketplace.

(It's an inside joke at the office about the marketplace value of various SD dolls -- but that is as much the supply available as anything else.)

So, please go ahead and congratulate him in his profile, but do not do anything in the marketplace other than what you would do naturally.

I apologize for the notice, and will now return to the previous information-dense, non-humorous format in dev notices.

16 Event Ending

• Topic Event Ending - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Wed Feb 16, 2011 11:11 am

Event Ending

So many Valentines cards have been sent from the event that Diedrich says if it keeps up Gaia will explode... since local governments aren't down with explosions of gargantuan proportions, we'll have to take down the event tonight at midnight PST. So if you haven't already, send someone a card, and don't forget your free postage wing sticker!

16 Guild Modifications

• Topic Guild Modifications - Posted: [NPC] Bildeau Wed Feb 16, 2011 1:56 pm

Guild Modifications

• // humor-module: off
• // metaphor-overlay: off
• // content-checked-by: customer service, marketing, exec staff
• // content-not-checked-by: writers (REASON: couldn't make bail)

begin change-notification.

• code-section: guilds.
• modification ecc0f4a887fccfdffe16135702c926ebc47aeb3e (+15 lines / -11 lines): Put guild notifications back in the bubble.
• modification d4fa22ab4ef356a2bbb87ff4d36a86191bc2eaf5 (+63 lines / -1 line): Now give notification if someone replies in your guild thread.
• modification 29a86cd91f768f0f887ba6277fb766465a0912d1 (+184 lines / -102 lines): Guilds quote notifications
• end code-section.
• end change-notification.

17 Post History Modifications

• Topic Post History Modifications - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Feb 17, 2011 3:12 pm

Post History Modifications

Various modifications done per request from a random sampling of user feedback from different Gaia forums.

• Sort order has been changed from using the forum ID as primary key to using timestamp as primary key.
• Exact time of posting is now displayed, rather than a vague and informal time-period referent
• Icon for a thread with new replies is now distinguished from the icon for a thread without new replies by a distinctly symmetrical 7x7 starburst pattern, with predominantly red and orange tones. Exact hex values can be provided for persons with downlevel visual receptors.

01001000010001010100110001010000

17 Breaking News! - Bieber Fever

• Topic Breaking News! - Bieber Fever - Posted: [NPC] Cindy Donovinh Thu Feb 17, 2011 8:56 pm

Breaking News! - Bieber Fever

This just in! Gaia has seemingly been stricken by an outbreak of Bieber Fever, a highly communicable disease that inflames the tween gland. Medical professionals advise us to stay calm, as the disease has a very short half-life and usually works itself out in a few hours.

18 Bugs Fixed This Week

• Topic Bugs Fixed This Week - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Feb 18, 2011 2:21 pm

Bugs Fixed This Week

• Fixed JS error on Journals landing page. Had no impact but still created a JS err.
• Fixed Journals landing page (only visible when logged out) links to profiles and posts
• Migrating post history into global search and deprecating old post history page
• removed extraneous fonting in nli welcome, per writers
• Removed tag system dependency on user interests, not needed since we have searching of interests through the new search system
• LIHP announcement link markup improved
• SVNetworks/Event Overrides: cleaned up template markup
• XHTML validation: improved ad template validation
• Making sparkles suck less.
• Macy's store shows for new user sometimes..and can't click on enter or go to other store
• fixes to the db monitor script
• Removed debug code that spit out "HELLO" at the bottom of some topic history pages
• Quote notifications in guilds
• Notifications when someone posts in your guild thread
• Guild Messages should go back in the bubble
• Layout, display improvements based on user feedback on Post History
• Query changes the "&" to amp

52535231 86c2dc40c2dcf2dedcca40d0cac2e440eae67e

18 Fireside Chats

• Topic Fireside Chats - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Feb 18, 2011 6:51 pm

Fireside Chats

The old Fireside chats have been moved to a (new) subforum of Site Feedback.

The next Fireside chat is planned for Tuesday at 3:00pm PST, and we'll be talking about what the site can do to support Role Players better.

We're also planning a Fireside Chat for mobile users -- we'd like to find out if people use the mobile site, what could be improved, and give people a sneak peek at something we've developed internally. We'll do a dev notice when we schedule that chat -- it will probably be later next week or the beginning of the one after.

22 Raining Giftboxes

• Topic Raining Giftboxes - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Feb 22, 2011 1:59 pm

Raining Giftboxes

Due to a temporary glitch in the space-time continuum, users were gifted a number of giftboxes in a row. This is our glitch but your gain -- we will not be taking the items back. If you wish to forward your good karma, donating to needy individuals or giving it to the Dumpster are recommended.

It must be noted that this event happened simultaneously with 18 million pieces of toast all landing buttered side up, 823 people winning the state lottery, and one particular celebrity getting hit by 23 meteorites.

22 Fireside Chat Now

• Topic Fireside Chat Now - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Feb 22, 2011 5:59 pm

Fireside Chat Now

We're having a chat on how we can improve the site for role-players, starting now, in this thread.

22 Opinions on Mobile?

• Topic Opinions on Mobile? - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Feb 22, 2011 7:58 pm

Opinions on Mobile? Please join us in a chat on mobile on March 1st at 5:00pm PST, which will include a special sneak preview on something that we have in internal development. You can sign up for an e-mail reminder at that link, as well.

23 In The Queue

• Topic In The Queue - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Feb 23, 2011 3:16 pm

In The Queue

In response to user requests to have better communication about bugs and what we're doing with them, we've decided to open up a new forum for bug tracking called In The Queue. More explanation can be found in the sticky, but basically, the Queue will represent every user-reported bug that we have in our bug system. You'll be able to subscribe to a bug to keep up on its status and/or upvote a bug if you think it's really important.

There are several ways for bugs to get into the Queue, but the best way is for you to work with our QA engineers in another new forum, Reporting Bugs. This forum will have a sticky every week where you can report bugs. Note that for a bug to be accepted into the system, you'll have to submit certain information and work with staff to make sure that the bug is reproducible.

Hopefully this will give more visibility into the open bugs, what we're doing to fix them, and give users the chance to help us with prioritization. We'll be making tweaks to this process as we go along.

23 Anniversary Forum

• Topic Anniversary Forum - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Feb 23, 2011 3:23 pm

Anniversary Forum

The Gaia Anniversary Forum will be locked after this weekend, so if you haven't already, be sure to go and wish us a happy birthday. After all, don't you like cupcakes?

23 GRS News

• Topic GRS News - Posted: [NPC] Ivan Wed Feb 23, 2011 5:20 pm

GRS News

Good news, taxpayers: the Valentine's Day event drained an amazing 1,477,804,200 from the Gaian economy! Now that's the kind of fiscal responsibility you can hang your hat on!

24 Stuff Coming In The Next Week

• Topic Stuff Coming In The Next Week - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Feb 24, 2011 3:31 pm

Stuff Coming In The Next Week

• We will be slowly rolling out a new cash page today and tomorrow. We've cleaned up the flow and added some new payment options.
• New Fishing landing page is planned for release next Tuesday
• OMGPOP is planned for this month, giving you four new flash games that you can play on Gaia. We are currently working with them to resolve some issues, but until further notice we are planning to push OMGPOP out next week (and hopefully Monday, which would make it February by a whisker).

28 Angelic Rods Granted

• Topic Angelic Rods Granted - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Feb 28, 2011 4:53 pm

Angelic Rods Granted

All angelic rods have now been granted to everyone that should have received them.

Lots of information and caveats below:

• - only users that had logged in since 2010 were on the grant list
• - rods for newly qualifying fishers will be granted on a weekly basis
• - if you're coming back to the site after over a year, you'll need to fish again to show up and be checked for the weekly angelic rod grant.

There were some questions about the exact qualifications. For reasons of gameplay we would prefer not to divulge exact numbers, but we will say this:

• - the rod does not require particular fish to be caught, nor does it depend on winning a trophy, nor does it depend on random events. It's fair from the standpoint that if you land enough fish, you'll get it.
• - fish in any lake you want -- there aren't requirements that are tied to specific lakes
• - the Gaia Fishing forum is converging pretty quickly on a fairly accurate guess, so if you're really interested there are some pretty canny guesses as to the requirements.

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28 OMGPOP Tomorrow

• Topic OMGPOP Tomorrow - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Feb 28, 2011 7:29 pm

OMGPOP Tomorrow

We're tracking down a problem with avatars not displaying correctly, and need to do some tweaks to the gold granting. Looks pretty good for tomorrow.

March

01 Nice Things

• Topic Nice Things - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Mar 01, 2011 6:45 pm

Nice Things

• 1. Do a soft release of OMGPOP
• 2. Only make a dev notice about it
• 3. The availability of 4 new cool games makes people want to subscribe to dev notices
• 4. ???
• 5. Profit!

Note: we're going to be tweaking the gold granting over the next day or two -- it may go up or down.

01 Mobile Chat

• Topic Mobile Chat - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Mar 01, 2011 8:07 pm

Mobile Chat

Fireside Chat going on now in SF if you're interested in mobile.

01 IE7 Fix

• Topic IE7 Fix - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Mar 01, 2011 9:32 pm

IE7 Fix

IE7 fix just pushed out for OMGPOP, for those users that were reporting problems.

02 Booty Grab CAPTCHA

• Topic Booty Grab CAPTCHA - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Mar 02, 2011 9:52 pm

Booty Grab CAPTCHA

There have been many complaints about marketplace inflation, and it turns out that one large gold source has been botting on BG. As a result, we're adding a CAPTCHA before you can play BG.

We're hoping this does not inconvenience players too much (since you have to hunt around for the tanks anyway), but it should greatly reduce the gold influx from the bots.

As always, we love to hear your opinions about steps we take in Site Feedback -- inflation and botting are difficult problems, and we hope to hear some good ideas as to the right way to deal with the issues.

03 BG Update

• Topic BG Update - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Mar 03, 2011 4:01 pm

BG Update

Thanks for the feedback. We've created a thread in Site Feedback to try and centralize discussion. However, there were many good suggestions, and we've made some changes as a result:

• - we've changed the CAPTCHA frequency to 1 in 4. We'll try this level for a while and see how people feel about it -- we can raise it and lower it as needed.
• - since users with slower Internet connections / computers were complaining about missing tanks all the time, we've both slightly increased the number of maximum players in a game, as well as slightly increased the glow time.

Short FAQ:

Why not put the CAPTCHA at the end?

• That is a good suggestion and something we will look at. However, the way the game is currently set up, the gold is granted at the end of the game, so a CAPTCHA after you've played would be too late to do anything.

Also: putting the CAPTCHA at the front of the game stops some classes of bots from jumping into the game -- which means it's easier to get tanks, since you don't have a bunch of bots jumping in before you.

Bots don't exist!

• They do. I hate to give these guys more views, so I won't direct link, but a ten-second search will reveal tons of booty grab bots, with accompanying videos. We have a bunch of these in house and have confirmed that they do in fact work (or rather, used to work).

Why so sudden!?

• We've been saying for a while that we have problem with BG -- you can see previous AtAs and such -- but we've seen a recent sharp spike in the amount of botted gold, and it has become a problem. Fixing bots is a labor intensive process by our amazing but overworked mod team: not only do we have to go through and ban the bots, but we have to undo all the transactions that the bot completed. This means going through trade logs, holding trading passes on people that received botted gold, so on and so forth. Stopping bots at the time of gold grant with a CAPTCHA is far more effective and a better use of everyone's time.

I'll change the OP in the feedback thread as more FAQs come up.

03 New mini-comic

• Topic New mini-comic - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Mar 03, 2011 5:12 pm

New mini-comic

And, now for something that will hopefully appeal to both humans and bots: new mini-comic is up!

11 Gold Grant adjustments

• Topic Gold Grant adjustments - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Mar 11, 2011 8:05 pm

Gold Grant adjustments

As part of our ongoing efforts to adjust gold granting, we have made some changes:

• the gold grants for posting have been increased substantially
• the gold grants for OMGPOP have been increased some
• a curve was added at the upper end of zOMG earnings. This should only affect about 1% of the players.

Over the next few weeks we'll be adjusting and tweaking grants all over the site.

14 Booty Grab Tweak

• Topic Booty Grab Tweak - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Mar 14, 2011 10:14 pm

Booty Grab Tweak

As an experiment, we have temporarily reduced the number of players in a tank from to 35 to 9, and increased the payout to 1:1. Note that this results in the same or more being paid to the tank owner, but opens up the competition for tanks a bit. This change will propagate across tanks in the next hour as caches clear. We will run this experiment for a day or so to see the effects.

15 Booty Grab Tweak Over

• Topic Booty Grab Tweak Over - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Mar 15, 2011 3:00 pm

Booty Grab Tweak Over

We've reverted back to 34 players / 4:1 ratio. The changes will propagate to tanks throughout the next hour.

We are going to continue to be doing a number of experiments with Booty Grab over the next few weeks, so you may want to keep an eye on the dev notices.

15 New Aquarium Subforum

• Topic New Aquarium Subforum - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Mar 15, 2011 4:43 pm

New Aquarium Subforum

A new subforum for Gaia Aquarium, Gaia Aquarium Discussion, has been added, for discussion about... yeah, you guessed it, Booty Grab and Aquariums. Use it to trade tips on maintaining tanks, tactics, tutorials, and whatnot.

15 BG Max Users

• Topic BG Max Users - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Mar 15, 2011 6:39 pm

BG Max Users

Some users are reporting encounters with tanks that are still limited to 9 players. The tanks should be reset on the next glow, which may be more than an hour. We'll continue to watch the logs tonight and take action if needed.

15 Daily Patch

• Topic Daily Patch - Posted: carbonphyber Tue Mar 15, 2011 9:01 pm

Daily Patch

The daily patch was released about 2 hours ago. I've been putting out fires and fixing issues.

Changes:

• Forum timestamps are now "relative times" rather than "absolute". This is a test for now.
• A timezone but was fixed soon after the initial change. Note: If you attempt to adblock this feature, be warned that adblocking may not work in the future, but we will give you a way to opt-out (if this feature stays).
• Animated Avatars on most of the site currently have a white background. This is a bug and should be fixed in the next day or two.
• 12 other code patches not worth mentioning

16 St. Patricks Day Event

• Topic St. Patricks Day Event - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Wed Mar 16, 2011 4:58 pm

St. Patricks Day Event

...Launch and testing in progress. If the site crashes... It wasn't me

16 Re: St. Patricks Day Event

• Topic St. Patricks Day Event - Posted: [NPC] Odanodan Wed Mar 16, 2011 4:59 pm

Narumi Misuhara

St. Patricks Day Event

...Launch and testing in progress. If the site crashes... It wasn't me

Now that's a bit of blarney blather.

16 Shamrock 2011

• Topic Shamrock 2011 - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Wed Mar 16, 2011 5:58 pm

Shamrock 2011

Event is now fully live. This event will continue until Monday.

Event Notes:

While your avatar is under the green spell from the npc other animated items (including the one granted by the npc) you have equipped will not show. This is temporary and is not a bug but simply a restriction of the way the green effect works. Animated items will display normally when you un-greenify yourself or when the event ends, whichever comes first.

16 Rally Achievements

• Topic Rally Achievements - Posted: edy Wed Mar 16, 2011 11:41 pm

Rally Achievements

The "Hang out in Rally for X minutes" achievement is fixed. Lets achieving!

17 Relative Timestamps changed

• Topic Relative Timestamps changed - Posted: carbonphyber Thu Mar 17, 2011 6:17 pm

Relative Timestamps changed

I'm continuing this test with logged-out users only. We've read a lot of the feedback and it looks like enough users depend on the full, absolute time that it's more of a hindrance than a help.

You'll be happy to know that we aren't linking/loading the extra JavaScript file if you are logged in.

For logged-out users, however, the relative time will continue to show (as it's more useful because we don't know the correct timezone for logged-out users).

This is also a good time to remind users that:

We do listen to Site Feedback

You can edit your timezone preference in Account Settings (near the middle of the left column).

18 iPhone App version 1.2

• Topic iPhone App version 1.2 - Posted: ania1899 Fri Mar 18, 2011 3:09 pm

iPhone App version 1.2

The new version of our iPhone app was released to the App Store last night. Here is what's new:

• - fixing login error for users with spaces in their username
• - limiting the number of loaded Announcements and Private Messages to prevent lagging
• - visual enhancements to the Announcements list.

Go check it out!

18 New Trade Page!

• Topic New Trade Page! - Posted: faerystrangeme Fri Mar 18, 2011 3:31 pm

New Trade Page!

The trade page has a new look! It also features an updated inventory, which includes the ability to see ALL your items (not just the first 800), and use the Inventory Search lab to find items to trade.

18 Aquarium/BG upcoming

• Topic Aquarium/BG upcoming - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Mar 18, 2011 9:14 pm

Aquarium/BG upcoming

• there is now an opt-out account setting to control whether or not you receive a daily PM about your tank. You should go turn it off now if you hate PMs from NPCs.
• we plan to deal with Methuselah (immortal) fish soon. We will do a few test runs of the script on a limited set of users; if you are in the test set, you will get an informational PM only. To be clear, you'll see what will happen, but nothing will actually have been done to your tank. We'll use this to track down any issues, and then warn people before we do the real update.
• we are going to be doing ongoing tweaks and experiments to the player payoff in BG, possibly including a game mechanism that makes the task of choosing the next tank to play more interesting. Also, we will be experimenting with the parameters so that we can get the player / owner ratio down from 4:1.

21 Shamrock 2011 Ending

• Topic Shamrock 2011 Ending - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Mon Mar 21, 2011 12:16 pm

Shamrock 2011 Ending

Hey guys, our St. Patricks Day event will be ending today at midnight PDT. So if you haven't already check it out!

22 Anime Player

• Topic Anime Player - Posted: bronstahd Tue Mar 22, 2011 12:55 pm

Anime Player

If you're a hardcore Gaian, there's a pretty good chance you also like to dip into some anime once in a while. Since it's our top priority to give you as much awesome free stuff as we possibly can all the time, we've teamed up with Starz to bring you a bountiful boatload of free, streaming anime series.

You can watch all these shows right now in our brand-new Starz Anime Player.

22 Anime Player Update

• Topic Anime Player Update - Posted: bronstahd Tue Mar 22, 2011 3:21 pm

Anime Player Update

We're having a slight problem with the ad-serving provider for the recently released Anime Player. The good news is that it doesn't seem to be causing any problems with the player itself. This is just a heads up so nobody is surprised when when ads begin to appear when the problem is resolved.

Don't worry, they should be short and shouldn't annoy. XD

22 Inventory pagination fixed

• Topic Inventory pagination fixed - Posted: carbonphyber Tue Mar 22, 2011 5:37 pm

Inventory pagination fixed

If you had issues clicking on page 2, 3, 4, etc at the bottom of /avatar/, /inventory/, or /trade/, I've fixed a lot of these issues. As always, there might be a momentary blip while thee servers update but if you get any glitches more than once, please report them to the Bug Reports forum and I will try to address them quickly.

Also, Mods, your tools are getting a backend upgrade. Please let me know if anything changes for the worse.

25 Line Spacing in Forums

• Topic Line Spacing in Forums - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Mar 25, 2011 3:30 pm

Line Spacing in Forums

TL;DR: we're changing it back; you'll potentially need to make some minor changes to your RP posts at some point in the near future.

The long story, based on much laborious research by Carbonphyber:

We've been modernizing the HTML markup on the site; this has a number of benefits, including making it easier to maintain and also rendering faster on modern browsers.

However, the new markup is more strict, especially in the area of what tags can be nested. This is what was causing the problem in RPs -- tags that were okay to nest in the old markup (i.e., lists inside fonts) are invalid. (Basically, nesting block-level elements inside inline elements is a no-no).

We're evaluating a number of options, including redoing the BBCode parser(*), but we may not be able to solve this problem completely without some minor changes to the RP posts themselves -- for example, a globalfont tag that mirrors font but works at the block level instead of the span level.

Watch Barton Town and/or dev notices for more information.

(*) this is in the queue to be completed anyway, due to prompting by the C&T regulars, but it doesn't 100% completely solve the problem

28 Aquarium Cleaning

• Topic Aquarium Cleaning - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Mar 28, 2011 7:08 pm

Aquarium Cleaning

Aquariums will be cleaned of dead fish this Wednesday, March 30th, starting at 9pm PST. Aquariums / BG will be down for the duration.

29 Bugs We'd Like Help On

• Topic Bugs We'd Like Help On - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Mar 29, 2011 12:30 am

Bugs We'd Like Help On

Two bugs came up in the ATA today that we'd like some help tracking down: one where Salon Durem doesn't show up, and the one where people are unable to change their avi. If you can easily reproduce either of these bugs and can help our QA department narrow them down, please go to the Reporting Bugs forum and give us details.

29 Avatar/Inventory fix

• Topic Avatar/Inventory fix - Posted: edy Tue Mar 29, 2011 5:51 pm

Avatar/Inventory fix

We found the problem and fixed it. You should be able to equip your avatar, and click on items in your inventory.

31 Maintenance Underway

• Topic Maintenance Underway - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Mar 31, 2011 12:21 am

Maintenance Underway

We will be doing aquarium maintenance tonight. We will keep aquariums/BG online if possible, but there may be extended outages.

31 Maintenance Delayed

• Topic Maintenance Delayed - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Mar 31, 2011 5:42 am

Maintenance Delayed

Due to Murphy's Law and the inherent perversity of the universe, the cleaning of the aquariums is delayed. To minimize impact on tank owners, we're going to do a rolling expiration over the next 24-48 hours without taking BG / aquariums offline. Keep an eye on dev notices for more information.

31 Tweaks

• Topic Tweaks - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Mar 31, 2011 7:00 pm

Tweaks

You see, the artists weren't quite buying our explanation that having manga notices pop up every five minutes was a good thing, and that they should view it more as a manga advertisement than a manga notice...

• manga notices tweaked for 100% more truthiness, rather than coming up every five minutes
• clicking on the manga/dev notice should go directly to the right place
• rolled out spiffy new notice icons, courtesy our art team

31 Gaia and Internet Explorer 9

• Topic Gaia and Internet Explorer 9 - Posted: edy Thu Mar 31, 2011 7:20 pm

Gaia and Internet Explorer 9

If you're using Internet Explorer 9, you might notice a few changes:

1) Meebo has turned off the bar for IE9 while they test and make sure it works fine with the new IE. This means that the bar will never show up.

2) Drag and drop in certain areas do not work. In the shops, you wont be able to move the preview window. We're waiting on Yahoo to update a JavaScript library which we use throughout the site. They've said it should be released in early April.

Achievements and Profiles have been upgraded to a newer Yahoo JavaScript library, so drag and drop will work fine with IE9.

If you have IE9, but want to use the Meebo bar, or really want to move around the shops preview window, then you can push F12 (top right) on your keyboard, and change the Browser Mode to IE8.

There will probably be other stuff that crops up. If you find that something doesn't work correctly in IE9, please report it in the Bug Reports & Technical Support forum.

April

02 April Fools Event

• Topic April Fools Event - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Sat Apr 02, 2011 6:06 am

April Fools Event

Hey everyone, hope you enjoyed our April Fools event!

The event will continue over the weekend however I will be disabling the forum cat heads,emoticons, and wordfilter changes so that everyone doesn't get to distracted by all the cuteness.

The remaining elements of the event will remain active until Sunday at midnight.

So long and thanks for all the fish!

-Meowbook Staff

02 Aquarium Cleaning Started

• Topic Aquarium Cleaning Started - Posted: Panagrammic Sat Apr 02, 2011 6:57 pm

Aquarium Cleaning Started

Our feline overlords have informed me that they are hungry, so the aquarium cleaning has been started.

How it works: We're slowly cleaning out everyone's tanks in the background, without having to take down aquariums or Booty Grab. When you get a PM, that means that we're going to be adjusting your tank in the next half hour or so.

I'll put out another notice after the process is complete, but it'll take a while; there are about 4 million tanks that we need to process (seriously).

03 Aquarium Cleaning Completed

• Topic Aquarium Cleaning Completed - Posted: Panagrammic Sun Apr 03, 2011 10:54 pm

Aquarium Cleaning Completed

We've finished running the main scripts, but are taking a look at some potential glitches and edge cases. There is a small chance (1%) that you may get a follow up PM later tonight correcting some errors, but for the most part the tank cleaning is complete.

• Total tanks scanned = 4 million
• Total tanks updated = 75k
• Fish updated = 100k
• Fish expired = 50k

06 Page Titles fixed + some more

• Topic Page Titles fixed + some more - Posted: carbonphyber Wed Apr 06, 2011 3:35 pm

Page Titles fixed + some more

Page titles are restored. You should no longer see the "x | GaiaOnline" as the titles of your browser tabs or windows. We've updated a lot of old "page titles" code.

"Gold Mountain" and "Trade" are now available in the "Search" bar (if you start typing "Gold Mo..." or "Tra..." the search feature will suggest the link for you).

Guild forum list pages are now a little bit more efficient.

We've made a change that will hopefully fix the Dev Alerts bubble link. It should take you directly to the correct page and post now.

The "next"/"prev" buttons on the Manga page should work for more browsers.

If you had a sqhished animated avatar in the header on the Dumpster Dive, that should now be fixed.

As always, if you have issues with features on the site, please post/reply to a topic in the Bug Reports forum and we will look into it.

06 Macy's MStyle Lab

• Topic Macy's MStyle Lab - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Wed Apr 06, 2011 5:11 pm

Macy's MStyle Lab

Hey everyone, some of you may have noticed that the Macy's MStyle lab was temporarily re-opened. Not everyone was able to see it, currently it's undergoing testing and while in this stage some people may be able to enter the store and get the grants.

We ask that you do not purchase the items from the marketplace at this time. When we complete the testing and it goes live, everyone will have access to the space and the grants. For now the items have been soulbound and will be un-soulbound once the sponsorship is ready early next week.

Thanks,

Sponsorship Team

07 Two New Labs

• Topic Two New Labs - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Apr 07, 2011 12:18 pm

Two New Labs

• Checked out Labs lately? There are two new labs, both of which we are seriously considering promoting to the default for the entire site, so now is a good time to check them out and provide feedback.

Booty Grab Glowing Indicator

• Did you know that 90% of tank owners would prefer you to play their tank rather than tip them if they've said something sparkling and witty in the forums? It's true! (The other 10% prefer gum).

• We've added a lab to provide an experimental, lightweight indicator if a tank is glowing -- it'll show up as an orange button right next to the tip button. This should make it easier for users with slower computers / connections to catch the occasional tank, as well as hopefully getting more plays for the low- and mid-level tanks.

Manga Alerts

• Since we've been doing more consistent manga updates, it seemed to make sense to add an alert whenever a new page is added. The manga alert will show an icon in your bubble whenever a new page is added, meaning that you will be completely up to date and can sneer on those pour souls who are a whole page behind in the storyline!

11 Macy's Soulbound Items

• Topic Macy's Soulbound Items - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Mon Apr 11, 2011 12:55 pm

Macy's Soulbound Items

The campaign has gone live. The items have been unbound and should be tradeable/sellable shortly.

11 Popular Tags in Aquariums

• Topic Popular Tags in Aquariums - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Apr 11, 2011 2:52 pm

Popular Tags in Aquariums

As an experiment, the "popular" tags have been turned off in the aquarium forum to see if it makes a difference in the spectrum of tanks played.

Also: the inline booty grab indicator in Labs has been tweaked to hopefully get around some caching issues with some browsers (mostly IE).

13 Results of BG Experiments

• Topic Results of BG Experiments - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Apr 13, 2011 12:40 pm

Results of BG Experiments

Thanks for your help. The results of two recent experiments:

• removing the "popular" tags in aquariums did not appear to open up the variety of tanks played, at least not to a 95% confidence level. We'll let it run for a day or two to be sure, but it looks like this didn't make a big change.
• the BG inline indicator was driving about 700 - 1000 plays/day from the (typical) 3% lab usage rate among the Gaia community. Making this the default for all users would probably mean about 4k - 10k more total plays per day at a 30% usage rate. We've disabled this feature per community feedback.

13 Ongoing Aquarium Changes

• Topic Ongoing Aquarium Changes - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Apr 13, 2011 2:06 pm

Ongoing Aquarium Changes

If you're interested in a detailed view of ongoing Aquarium / BG changes, please keep an eye on this thread in the Gaia Aquarium Discussion forum. We've been adjusting glow rates and fixing issues as we prepare for the Phin Phan reopen, and everything is documented in that thread. Major changes will still be communicated via dev notices.

14 Site instability

• Topic Site instability - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Thu Apr 14, 2011 8:37 pm

Site instability

Angry...cats...everywhere....eating....server...wires.....

We're recovering from some database errors, please bear with us while we chase these angry Meowbook cats away....

15 New Mini-comic

• Topic New Mini-comic - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Apr 15, 2011 5:36 pm

New Mini-comic

New mini-comic is up!

18 Easter 2011

• Topic Easter 2011 - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Mon Apr 18, 2011 11:20 am

Easter 2011

Launch in progress. The event will be rolling out slowly, look for the announcement to know when roll-out is complete.

18 Overseers back in tank

• Topic Overseers back in tank - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Apr 18, 2011 7:54 pm

Overseers back in tank

The overseers have been placed back in the tanks where they belong, along with the backgrounds they had "borrowed."

19 Salon Durem Update

• Topic Salon Durem Update - Posted: edy Tue Apr 19, 2011 4:15 pm

Salon Durem Update

For a while now, some users with slower connections have not been able to access Salon Durem due to the number of items in the store.

We just released an update that should fix this problem. For everyone else, the stores should load a little faster, but otherwise, there is no change.

22 Phin Phang Delayed

• Topic Phin Phang Delayed - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Apr 22, 2011 5:51 pm

Phin Phang Delayed

To avoid potential load issues with the Easter event and also to do some final play balance tweaking, we're delaying the Phin Phang reopen until next week. We'll make another announcement on Monday with the exact day that the store will be reopened.

25 Phin Phang Opens Tomorrow

• Topic Phin Phang Opens Tomorrow - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Apr 25, 2011 9:13 pm

Phin Phang Opens Tomorrow

We're planning to reopen Phin Phang tomorrow; there will be many changes, such as fish for gold, the return of some popular fish to the store, and substantial changes to BG.

26 Easter Event Over

• Topic Easter Event Over - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Tue Apr 26, 2011 1:56 pm

Easter Event Over

Hey guys, the Easter event has (obviously) ended. Our team of Advanced Decimal Manipulation Engineers (Team ADME) is working hard to sum up the event and declare a winner. When they finish we will award the winning team their item and announce it to all the world MUAHAHAHAHAHA *cough* *cough*...

The item grants will probably take a couple of days but once complete you may stand proud as Easters victor.

27 Soft Launch / Phin Phang

• Topic Soft Launch / Phin Phang - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Apr 27, 2011 1:01 am

Soft Launch / Phin Phang

Soft launched Phin Phang with a collection of fish for gold -- we'll roll out the fish for cash at the same time that we make the announcement about the changes coming to BG.

27 Booty Grab Work

• Topic Booty Grab Work - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Apr 27, 2011 10:47 am

Booty Grab Work

We'll be making some global changes to BG over the next few hours; you may see some glitches in play as we make the changes.

27 Booty Grab Changes

• Topic Booty Grab Changes - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Apr 27, 2011 2:24 pm

Booty Grab Changes

There is an announcement coming, but until then, there are some changes to BG gameplay that you'll start seeing immediately:

• - the number of gold sprites on screen has been decreased by a factor of 4. This means gold earnings will also drop.
• - to compensate, the player : owner ratio has changed from 4:1 to 1:1
• - this means that owners should be making about as much as before, but the tanks will be substantially less laggy
• - the notion of a player bonus has been added; this is a multiplier that is added to the player's earnings only. For example, a 2000/500 game before would pay the same as a 500/500 game with a player bonus of 300%. (Note that this will report as a 2000/2000 game, but the bonus is only applied to the player's earnings).
• - We'll be tweaking the player bonus to try and get player earnings to about what they were before. You'll be able to see the player bonus under the tank when you play.
• - We will be gradually decreasing the player bonus over the next several weeks as more users open up tanks. Our intention is to get it as close to 1:1 as possible.
• - Why? Because a 1:1 ratio allows us to a) offer dolphin-level fish again, b) offer fish for gold, c) offer much cheaper fish, and in the long run d) makes it much easier to balance the game.
• - If you have feedback on these changes please direct them to the Site Feedback thread.

27 PP / BG Glitches

• Topic PP / BG Glitches - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Apr 27, 2011 8:28 pm

PP / BG Glitches

Numerous glitches fixed in some of the new fish and Phin Phang -- probably too numerous to detail but a list of all gameplay changes will always be kept in this thread.

One last glitch we're trying to narrow down is one where the gold is reported, but the gold is not granted. We believe we've fixed it, but if you run into the issue, please let us know in this thread so we can track this down and fix it ASAP.

27 Easter Rewards are Going Out

• Topic Easter Rewards are Going Out - Posted: ubermegAtrOn Wed Apr 27, 2011 9:53 pm

Easter Rewards are Going Out

Now that the winners of the Easter Event have been announced, the victors are receiving their spoils! The Monarchs of Easter should be granted within the day to everyone who collected eggs for the Easter Bunny. To commemorate the losers' participation in the event, those who foolishly followed Diedrich to failure shall get runners-up prizes.

28 Easter Rewards Have Gone Out

• Topic Easter Rewards Have Gone Out - Posted: ubermegAtrOn Thu Apr 28, 2011 3:59 pm

Easter Rewards Have Gone Out

Congratulations to the robo-winners, and better luck next time to the small, green, valedictory runners-up. All of the secondary prizes for participating in the Easter Egg hunt have been granted, and those lucky enough to have been caught in the crossfire when the Easter Bunny was spraying additional prizes get to keep them. Congratulations all around on a successful Easter event.

28 Hidden Easter Bonus!

• Topic Hidden Easter Bonus! - Posted: ubermegAtrOn Thu Apr 28, 2011 8:25 pm

Hidden Easter Bonus!

The Easter Bunny and Diedrich have issued a joint statement alerting users that some of their secondary rewards were accidentally hidden along with the Easter eggs, and they need to go looking for them. Any users that should have gotten their Fail Book and Easter Crown but did not will receive, but not today. Probably tomorrow. Enjoy!

29 Booty Grab Lab

• Topic Booty Grab Lab - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Apr 29, 2011 5:47 pm

Booty Grab Lab

The lightweight Booty Grab glow indicator is back in labs. Please try it out and let us know your feedback in the feedback thread.

For those of you that hate the very idea of this feature and consider it it all things anti-puppy and rainbows, we suggest that you do not turn it on. Thank you.

29 Editing Posts

• Topic Editing Posts - Posted: edy Fri Apr 29, 2011 7:10 pm

Editing Posts

We have resolved the problem that some of you had recently with editing posts. Please let us know if you have a thread that's still not working and we'll look into it.

30 No title

• Topic No title - Posted: ubermegAtrOn Sat Apr 30, 2011 1:08 am

Fat Diedrich and the Easter Bunny have issued a joint statement alerting all Gaians that the second batch of Easter items have gone out, and everyone that participated has been given their items. Have a good weekend!

May

06 Cool Down in Towns

• Topic Cool Down in Towns - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Fri May 06, 2011 5:41 pm

Cool Down in Towns

I don't know about the rest of the world but here at Gaia HQ it's hot ...So what better way to cool down than a nice swim! I hereby declare the pools in Towns open, head over and take a dive!

06 iPhone App version 1.3

• Topic iPhone App version 1.3 - Posted: ania1899 Fri May 06, 2011 7:10 pm

iPhone App version 1.3

The new version of our iPhone app was released to the App Store today. Here is what's new:

• - NEW! Marketplace: item search with bid and buy now options, my Store with listings' management, store log, watchlist and wishlist
• - Notifications: status update, request' management, easier navigation
• - Login: fixed issues related to multiple login password failures
• - Required OS: now also for iOS 3.0 or later

Go check it out!

11 Daily Chance Fixed

• Topic Daily Chance Fixed - Posted: Panagrammic Wed May 11, 2011 5:32 pm

Daily Chance Fixed

Thanks for the bug reports; we've pushed live a fix for the "no reward" message that some people were getting in the Daily Chance. As a nice side effect, you will find that you will be getting a wider variety of items in DC in the future.

11 Dumpster Dive Going Offline

• Topic Dumpster Dive Going Offline - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Wed May 11, 2011 6:06 pm

Dumpster Dive Going Offline

I will be taking Dumpster Dive offline tomorrow between 8:00 - 11:00AM PDT for an update to related systems. I apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.

12 Dumpster Dive Offline

• Topic Dumpster Dive Offline - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Thu May 12, 2011 11:57 am

Dumpster Dive Offline

Dumpster Dive is now going offline while I update related site code.

12 DD & Inventory Update

• Topic DD & Inventory Update - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Thu May 12, 2011 12:45 pm

DD & Inventory Update

Update is complete, the following was changed:

• Ability to trash items restored, trashing and donating are now two separate flows
• You can trash items under 1k
• You can donate items under 500k (may increase later)

Known Issues

• It's possible to keep diving while others see the dumpster not full page. I'll look into this further when I have more free time.

Dumpster Dive will be back online shortly... Enjoy!

19 Monster Galaxy Soft Launched

• Topic Monster Galaxy Soft Launched - Posted: Panagrammic Thu May 19, 2011 5:42 pm

Monster Galaxy Soft Launched

Monster Galaxy has been soft launched, and is available on the games page -- thanks to the Moga team for the great game!

There is some (understandable) confusion about the requirement for Facebook Connect. You do need to have an account on Facebook but you do not need to connect your Gaia account to Facebook if you don't want to -- just log into Facebook at the appropriate time and you'll be able to play.

Why the requirement to have a Facebook account? Simply because that's what the game was originally written for, and we wanted to get the game out earlier rather than later.

20 Account Security Improvements

• Topic Account Security Improvements - Posted: Panagrammic Fri May 20, 2011 3:33 pm

Account Security Improvements

We'll do an announcement next week when the writers have time to craft my poor semblance of sentences into an announcement, but here's an early heads up for both of you that have dev alerts on.

Not one, but two changes for your account protection pleasure.

First, changing your e-mail will send an notification e-mail to the old account, so at least you'll get a warning that someone is potentially doing something nefarious to your account. This is in effect for all accounts.

Second, we are making available an additional security measure available to users. In Account Settings there is now a checkbox for "IP Verification." If you click this checkbox, you will get an e-mail with a) a link to turn it on, and b) an emergency link to turn it off. Neither link requires you to be logged in. IP Verification will not be turned on until you click on the first link.

Once IP Verification is turned on, logging in from a new location won't work right away. Instead, we'll give you a message that says:

"Hold it! Your login IP has changed and your account settings tell us to check with you first. Please verify this change of IP by clicking the link e-mailed to you. If you do not want to verify this IP, please use the previously verified IP to login."

If this has happened, then we have detected you logging in from a location that we haven't seen before. You'll get an e-mail with a verification link; you'll need to click the verification link before you can log in from that location.

Now, this is more bothersome if you change locations frequently, but on the other hand it makes your account significantly more secure. This option has been mandatory for staff accounts for a while, and it has really helped cut down on the number of problems.

23 BG Tweaks

• Topic BG Tweaks - Posted: Panagrammic Mon May 23, 2011 2:14 pm

BG Tweaks

• submit button and explanatory text added for CAPTCHA
• no longer show comments if tank is glowing
• fixed end-game display to show proper player / owner payout

23 Shops Issue

• Topic Shops Issue - Posted: Panagrammic Mon May 23, 2011 2:26 pm

Shops Issue

We're trying to track down an issue with shops wherein the items don't show up. At this point we suspect it may be a CDN issue with one area of the country -- for anyone that has submitted a report to Reporting Bugs (and thank you for taking the time to do that!) can you please let us know your approximate geographic location? Thanks.

23 Shops Issue Question

• Topic Shops Issue Question - Posted: edy Mon May 23, 2011 5:53 pm

Shops Issue Question

If you had problems with the shops not loading recently, could you please check out this thread:

http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/bug-report-technical-support/were-the-shops-broken-for-you-we-d-like-to-know-some-info/t.71938145/

We'd like to find out more information about what caused the problem.

25 Profile Panels Glitch fixed

• Topic Profile Panels Glitch fixed - Posted: carbonphyber Wed May 25, 2011 4:14 pm

Profile Panels Glitch fixed

If your ("current" / "v2" profiles panels (the features that are aligned in 3 columns) were missing, the bug has been fixed and they are reset to the original settings.

The consequence of this fix is that you lose whatever panel titles / custom panels you previously had.

We're still working on a more elegant solution to preventing the problem. For now, be cautious and only use numbers and English letters (no accents, grammar characters, or foreign characters) in panel titles to ensure your panels aren't reset on accident.

26 "Playing Another Game"

• Topic "Playing Another Game" - Posted: Panagrammic Thu May 26, 2011 5:59 pm

"Playing Another Game"

The "Playing Another Game" warning / lockout in Booty Grab has been reduced from 16 to 2 minutes.

27 Whitepages / Unreachable Threads

• Topic Whitepages / Unreachable Threads - Posted: Panagrammic Fri May 27, 2011 6:49 pm

Whitepages / Unreachable Threads

The issue from this morning wherein certain forum threads would whitepage and/or unreachable has been fixed. It would have affected poll threads, among others.

(The fact that your thread was unreachable should not be taken as a statement by Gaia as to the appropriateness, grammaticalness, stylishness, or timeliness of your thread.)

30 Sponsored Treat Error

• Topic Sponsored Treat Error - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Mon May 30, 2011 9:26 pm

Sponsored Treat Error

The sponsored treat (the TV icon in the header) had an error where clicking on the card game caused it to fail with an invalid interface error. This was caused by an in incorrect id being passed through the card game. A fix for this has been pushed live and should take effect shortly.

June

02 You own this item

• Topic You own this item - Posted: edy Thu Jun 02, 2011 7:46 pm

You own this item

If you've ever been browsing the gold shops, or marketplace and wondered "hey, do I own this item already?", then this is your lucky day!

When you browse the marketplace item details page, or when you preview an item in the gold shops you will see "You own this item" if the item is in your inventory (anywhere). If you mouse over that text, you'll also receive a tooltip that tells you how many of that item you currently have.

03 Glow Notices

• Topic Glow Notices - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Jun 03, 2011 1:23 pm

Glow Notices

We are experimenting (emphasis on experimenting) with glow notices to your feed to let you know when your tank will glow. These are controlled by the "aquarium health" option in your feed options. You should not get notices if 0 fish are glowing, and we'll be pushing out a fix for that shortly. If you use the notices, you may want to make sure that your timezone is set correctly.

Currently, users that have received less than 35 plays in the day will get the notice, and for comparative purposes there will be some users that will always get the notices.

We will be experimenting with different aspects of the notices over the next few weeks.

03 Sims 3 Glitch

• Topic Sims 3 Glitch - Posted: ubermegAtrOn Fri Jun 03, 2011 9:08 pm

Sims 3 Glitch

A bug with the Sims 3 Generations scavenger hunt has been addressed; age-related backgrounds (and foregrounds!) will properly display along with your avatar as it is hidden around the site. Thanks to everyone who reported this bug; I was just about ready to put baby Ubermegatron down for his nap. http://s.cdn.gaiaonline.com/images/media/sponsorship/sims_generations/baby_ubermegatron.png

06 BG Tweaks

• Topic BG Tweaks - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Jun 06, 2011 7:28 pm

BG Tweaks

Per request, the BG low-lag glow indicator found in labs now displays the number of players currently in tank.

Tank owners will be getting more glowing notifications in the My Gaia feed; for now, we are monotonically increasing the plays-per-day cutoff so we can see overall effect on play. If you'd like to turn off (or on) the notifications, it is controlled by the "aquarium health" notices option in your account settings.

07 Friend Chats

• Topic Friend Chats - Posted: edy Tue Jun 07, 2011 4:02 pm

Friend Chats

Let the private parties begin!

Friend Chats has been soft launched, so you can now rent a room and host a party for just the VIPs in your friend list, or invite anyone and they can join if they know the secret password.

Edit: There seems to be a bug where the room locks up. We're looking into it!

07 Strike Pack #4 in Shops

• Topic Strike Pack #4 in Shops - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Jun 07, 2011 4:19 pm

Strike Pack #4 in Shops

Not sure when we'll be able to do an announcement for this, but: a new strike pack #4 is in Phin Phang.

07 Friend Chats Update

• Topic Friend Chats Update - Posted: edy Tue Jun 07, 2011 8:30 pm

Friend Chats Update

Looks like we've hit a little snag with our new feature and have removed it from the menu temporarily. This is so that people don't spend gold on a feature that isn't functioning correctly.

For those who have already purchased a room, don't worry, we will be extending your room's expire date so that you get a full 3 or 7 days worth of time.

If you already have a room, feel free to keep using it, but be aware that you might encounter the bug and have your browser become unresponsive temporarily.

08 Friend Chats: Fixed!

• Topic Friend Chats: Fixed! - Posted: edy Wed Jun 08, 2011 8:55 pm

Friend Chats: Fixed!

Alright, after many long hours, and a lot of headdesking, the problem we had with friend chats is fixed! Hopefully that pesky bug is gone permanently.

Also, everyone's room expire date was extended by 2 days.

09 Miscellaneous Fixes

• Topic Miscellaneous Fixes - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Jun 09, 2011 4:37 pm

Miscellaneous Fixes

• - If you missed edy's notice earlier, friend chats is back on the menu in the "World" section -- the script timeout bug seems to be fixed. We'll do an announcement at some point, but it's available to use now to host your next discussion on 20th century philosophers and their impacts on moral relativism
• - We've put the FB like widget back in the header, but we've changed it so that it should only show up for the first 5 pages in your session. Remember, something cool happens when we hit 750k likes.
• - the marketplace white page has been fixed
• - fixed a problem with the luck chest vanishing when you click on it
• - aquarium notices are now turned on for all owners with no play count limit. Please be sure to check your time zone settings if you seem to be getting notices that are hours late, and make sure you've opted into the "aquarium health" notices if you aren't getting notices at all.

13 Fireside Chat: Arenas

• Topic Fireside Chat: Arenas - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Jun 13, 2011 5:50 pm

Fireside Chat: Arenas

Please join us on Thursday, June 16th, at 3:00pm PDT to talk about arenas and where we should go with it.

14 YouTube Autoplay update

• Topic YouTube Autoplay update - Posted: carbonphyber Tue Jun 14, 2011 4:16 pm

YouTube Autoplay update

The way our YouTube links work was recently upgraded. We now accept Any of the three most common links:

• YouTube "short URL" (starts with http://youtu.be/...
• The URL of the page where you view the YouTube video (like "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=..."
• The "embed" URL (like "http://www.youtube.com/v/..."

In the process, we stripped out the "autoplay" parameter (which apparently a lot of users like). This will be restored in 1-2 days. I will make another announcement when it is ready.

Please pass the word on to those users that don't read DevNotices.

15 Profile-YouTube autoplay restored

• Topic Profile-YouTube autoplay restored - Posted: carbonphyber Wed Jun 15, 2011 5:48 pm

Profile-YouTube autoplay restored

Good news! After two days of toil, profiles will now autoplay YouTube media. Bad news: if you lost the "autoplay" parameter earlier this week, you will need to edit your profile and re-add the "?autoplay=1" part to the end of the media URL. Note: this should only affect YouTube URLs...

We're sorry about the giltch!

Side note:

Panagrammic just fixed the missing bid/buy username in marketplace listings that have finished. Venders rejoice!

16 zOMG Servers Fixed

• Topic zOMG Servers Fixed - Posted: swarf Thu Jun 16, 2011 1:39 pm

zOMG Servers Fixed

The zOMG servers all died due to an internal network issue. Sorry for the downtime! They're all back up and running now.

Please resume your regularly scheduled fluff-squashing.

16 zOMG Servers Offline for Fixes

• Topic zOMG Servers Offline for Fixes - Posted: swarf Thu Jun 16, 2011 3:59 pm

zOMG Servers Offline for Fixes

In order to avoid the outage we had this morning we're taking the zOMG servers offline while our computer wizards conjure server sprites to exorcise the demons of downtime. Their incantations will take 30-45 minutes and then the game will be back up.

16 Arenas Chat

• Topic Arenas Chat - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Jun 16, 2011 6:16 pm

Arenas Chat

... started a bit late due to a setup problem. Join us in the stickied thread in SF if you're interested in talking about arenas.

16 Marketplace logs bug fixed

• Topic Marketplace logs bug fixed - Posted: carbonphyber Thu Jun 16, 2011 6:49 pm

Marketplace logs bug fixed

• Found+fixed a problem with marketplace listing logs. If your marketplace log was broken, it's now fixed.
• Usernames of the winners of marketplace listings are now displayed again. Phew -- I'm tired.

17 Cash Tree Update

• Topic Cash Tree Update - Posted: bronstahd Fri Jun 17, 2011 2:08 pm

Cash Tree Update

In order to give Gaians more access to free GCash, we've just added a new partner to the Cash Tree! This change will allow everyone to view 10 offers per day. Because of the increase in the number of offers, the GCash reward has been adjusted to 1 GCash per offer for the new offers - old offers are unaffected.

Just click the Cash Tree at the top of the page to get started.

17 Arena Entry Fee Raised

• Topic Arena Entry Fee Raised - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Jun 17, 2011 5:11 pm

Arena Entry Fee Raised

Starting with next week, the entry fee for arenas will now be 5k. The rewards will be scaled up as well.

21 Gold Tweaks

• Topic Gold Tweaks - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Jun 21, 2011 7:43 pm

Gold Tweaks

• starting next week, the winnings for arenas will be raised. The new rates:
• 1st place: 150,000 gold
• 2nd place: 100,000 gold
• 3rd place: 75,000 gold
• 4th to 10th place: 50,000 gold
• as an experiment, starting tomorrow afternoon, there will be an "early player bonus" for the first players on any glowing tank. Starting out, the first 5 players on a tank will get a 500g bonus, which the owner will also get. We'll be experimenting with different values throughout the week.

27 The interns are changing code!

• Topic The interns are changing code! - Posted: carbonphyber Mon Jun 27, 2011 5:35 pm

The interns are changing code!

• We hired some Dev interns and they just began making changes.

The "Meebo" lab has been upgraded to permanent feature and the "Seasonal Lab" was never updated and not useful so we removed it. The "Footer display" option on this page: http://www.gaiaonline.com/account/preferences/ might need to be adjusted:

• "Yes" means the new ("Meebo" footer).
• "Old footer" is the one that (sorta) looks like Gaia.

Another Dev intern fixed some of the "report" links at the bottom of Forum Topic pages and some of the common problems for Moderators+Admins. He's working to make life easier for Mods (which means faster responsiveness for users who report).

We've removed about 70k lines of code related to the old GIM. It won't make the site run faster, but it will allow Devs to work faster.

More updates to come!

28 Dumpster Dive Offline

• Topic Dumpster Dive Offline - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Tue Jun 28, 2011 5:07 pm

Dumpster Dive Offline

Dumpster Dive has been taken offline while we make some security enhancements. Please bear with us while we make these changes.

29 Security Fixes

• Topic Security Fixes - Posted: carbonphyber Wed Jun 29, 2011 5:16 pm

Security Fixes

We've fixed some security holes today. Dumpster Dive should be turned back on in another day or two (pending a security audit).

Interns fixed some broken links in Journals. Please post in my Journal (and be specific) if you find any more broken links in Journals, arenas or anywhere else on the site and we will try to get them worked out.

Interns are hard at work in the Gaia HQ dungeon -- fixing security holes and repairing lots of bugs. Please keep posting in the Bug Reports forum or they might get bored with nothing to fix =P

29 Blue Noodle Cash Tree Offline

• Topic Blue Noodle Cash Tree Offline - Posted: bronstahd Wed Jun 29, 2011 10:01 pm

Blue Noodle Cash Tree Offline

The Blue Noodle Cash Tree offers have been taken offline while we make some security enhancements. Please be patient while we make these changes. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Thank you!

30 Piehard Event Launching

• Topic Piehard Event Launching - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Thu Jun 30, 2011 10:56 am

Piehard Event Launching

The Piehard summer event part 1 launch is in progress. Beware bugs, animals, cakes, site glitches, random explosions and strangers. Should you run into any of these, assume the party submission position.

...don't think about that too hard...

30 Piehard Launched

• Topic Piehard Launched - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Thu Jun 30, 2011 6:01 pm

Piehard Launched

Hey guys, the event is in full swing, be sure to go check it out. There are 9 possible achievements in this event, though not all of them are claimable today, so be sure to check back and keep participating so you don't miss your chance to claim them!

Starting tomorrow the pies will be swapped out around 13:00 P.D.T. and will continue to be swapped out each business day until we have 6 contestants remaining. (Note: The office will be closed on the fourth.)

Starting Tuesday, we'll begin eliminating npc's, so be sure to round up support for your favorite and keep the pies coming.

Not digging the main event? Try just hanging out in the forum. We've added new emotes for the event! There's also some hidden ones, waiting to be discovered...

Edit 17:24 PDT

When playing the event please note that 6 slices make a whole pie. You'll get 1 sticker for every 6 slices of pie you purchase.