2011/Jul-Dec/Announcements/Staff Updates

July

01 Miscellaneous Fixes

• Topic Miscellaneous Fixes - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Jul 01, 2011 3:07 pm

Miscellaneous Fixes

Grab bag of changes for the past two weeks done by all the devs and interns here, some of which have been messaged, and some not. Thanks for the bug reports, keep 'em coming.

• several security fixes (dumpster dive, cash tree, inventory)
• variety of changes to help speed up the site
• fix some edge case bugs in account settings / profiles
• fixes to moderator tools
• cleaned up CSS and HTML
• removed winter theme footer from labs
• fix some pagination bugs
• fixed links in guilds and journals
• fixed problem with clicking an animated avatar in the header
• fix avatar save in global outfits changer
• now show guild ranks in guilds
• backend changes for BG to help reduce 0 payouts
• rewards for this week's avatar contest should be the new values (150k for first place)
• fixed bug in contact panel

01 3. Profit!

• Topic 3. Profit! - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Jul 01, 2011 5:31 pm

3. Profit!

We'll do an announcement on this next week, but: are you hurting for money to buy pies, pies, and more pies? Keep an eye out for ads that look like this:

http://w.cdn.gaiaonline.com/imaging/dt/housethanks_announce_none_20110621_300x250.jpg http://w.cdn.gaiaonline.com/imaging/dt/footer2_announce_none_20110622_1x1.jpg

Clicking on one of these gives you, minimum, 1000 gold (or, in technical terms, ten slices of pie), with a chance to win a bunch of new and rare items.

(Note that if you're a donator, even though you may not see ads normally you'll get to see these, so you'll also have the chance to win the new items).

And, finally, we have determined step 2:

• 1. Turn on dev alerts.
• 2. ??? Click on ad that only the Dev Alert Club! knows about!
• 3. Profit!

Yeah, if there was a club, the password would be something incredibly obtuse, like the first 20 characters of the md5 of the first 1000 digits of the mathematical constant most corresponding to our summer event. UPDATE: Congratulations to Novasurge and Immora for figuring this out first!

01 Cash Tree Issues

• Topic Cash Tree Issues - Posted: bronstahd Fri Jul 01, 2011 5:56 pm

Cash Tree Issues

We've been receiving reports from a small number of users that they aren't receiving GCash grants after watching videos through the Cash Tree. We're looking into the issue and will update with a fix as soon as we can. For now, the Cash Tree will stay active as this only seems to be affecting a small number of users with specific browser configurations.

If you're experiencing this problem, please bear with us while we get a fix out.

edit 3:00pm: Rolling a fix out now. Issue should be resolved in a few minutes when it takes effect.

01 Pi

• Topic Pi - Posted: DARKNRGY Fri Jul 01, 2011 8:31 pm

Pi

http://img-cache.cdn.gaiaonline.com/8c7506eb0ffbd3dd1be411cf93203ed4/http://i222.photobucket.com/albums/dd31/Panagrammic/pi.png?t=1309569641

02 Piehard Event Bug Fix

• Topic Piehard Event Bug Fix - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Sat Jul 02, 2011 3:17 pm

Piehard Event Bug Fix

I just pushed a bug fix for the Piehard event. This fix addresses the following.

Symptoms

• Buying pies only to have them disappear when you reload the page. (This also means the NPC would not have registered as being fed)
• Completing the first or all the cards and not getting the item grant link.

Solution

Added a missing check for data validation before executing purchase code. For some users the system would fail to get their game data but proceed as though nothing was wrong. The event page would continue to update normally while our servers had no data to save.

Now when the system fails to get the users data an error message will be returned advising you to refresh the page and try again.

Notes: Those experiencing this bug would have lost no gold. On resetting the page whatever gold you had before the data failed to save is what you will still have.

Still running into problems? Please continue to post bugs in our Bug Reports and Technical Support forum. I or a member of our Administration staff will address them as we can.

Edit 7/3 8:26 PDT

Found another bug with nearly identical symptoms, a push for it will go out Tuesday, You can read about it here.

05 Bonus Ad Clarification

• Topic Bonus Ad Clarification - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Jul 05, 2011 7:04 pm

Bonus Ad Clarification

The bonus ads show up in both the footer and the main site. If you have the footer off, you'll still have a chance to see the bonus ads (but you get more chances if the footer is on, of course). We've reworded the announcement so that it is hopefully more clear.

06 No title

• Topic No title - Posted: carbonphyber Wed Jul 06, 2011 4:33 pm

Small Wishlist Update

• A little somthin' somthin' for users that asked for new wishlist features. We will probably refine the feature a little in the future.

Guilds topic links

• Now you can middle-click (or ctrl-click) to open guild topics (from the guild forum-topic listing page) in a new window/tab.

Removing lots of code

• Yet again, the interns removed a lot of unused code. If anything breaks, please let us know via the Bug Reports forum.

Enjoy!

06 Arenas, Bonus Ads

• Topic Arenas, Bonus Ads - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Jul 06, 2011 8:54 pm

Arenas, Bonus Ads

For bonus ads: we're slowly raising the percentages on them so that they're more frequently seen.

Arenas: starting next week the fee has been increased to 10k.

07 Special characters fixed

• Topic Special characters fixed - Posted: carbonphyber Thu Jul 07, 2011 2:15 pm

Special characters fixed

There was a problem for a few weeks with "special characters" in page titles not displaying correctly. It's fixed now.

Off to find out what cool stuff the interns are working on today...

07 SMS Alerts

• Topic SMS Alerts - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Jul 07, 2011 5:44 pm

SMS Alerts

Follow up for some reports in Reporting Bugs: we're talking with our provider about problems with SMS alerts, and will do another dev notice when it is resolved.

07 New Exclusive Item

• Topic New Exclusive Item - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Jul 07, 2011 7:04 pm

New Exclusive Item

We won't be able to do an announcement for this until tomorrow, but we've switched to a new bonus item for buying GC. Out with the old Queue Demonique, in with the new Solar Headphones. More details on the Payments page.

http://s.cdn.gaiaonline.com/images/gcash/new/GCash_hover.png?20110607

08 Toolbar ads

• Topic Toolbar ads - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Jul 08, 2011 9:08 pm

Toolbar ads

We've gone through and granted a bonus for anyone that was mistakenly misdirected to /mygaia when they saw the ad on the Meebo toolbar. We've turned off the toolbar bonus ads a few hours for cache to clear, and will then slowly turn it back on starting at midnight. Thanks for your understanding, and have a great weekend.

For the weekend, an English Lit secret room. Take each of these answers, put them all together, and take just the vowels -- you should end up with a 20 letter password.

• 1. Shakespearean starfish form
• 2. Famous novel starts with a river run
• 3. Nothing + nothing = existential play
• 4. Started out in this novel; went from mate to coffee mate.

First in? Leave an MD5 of the answer in my profile, if I'm not in there.

http://www.gaiaonline.com/launch/myroom?&room_name=field_8357925_2

UPDATE: congratulations to wandringmind for being first in!

11 No title

• Topic No title - Posted: carbonphyber Mon Jul 11, 2011 7:01 pm

Fixed some 'sploits

• Fixed two glitches, but I can't tell you which ones. "Need to know" and all that razzz...

JavaScript fix

• We fixed a general JavaScript error that might happen if you have a slow internet connection or have AdBlock enabled. It could have potentially prevented the CashShop "popup" from displaying. Please let us know if this helps or does nothing for your CashShop woes.

12 What's In The Sky?

• Topic What's In The Sky? - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Jul 12, 2011 2:46 pm

What's In The Sky?

A bird? A plane? Superman? No, even better: flying pork! A new game, Sky Pigs, has been soft launched for your amusement; go to the games page to play it.

13 World Navigation Changes

• Topic World Navigation Changes - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Wed Jul 13, 2011 1:45 pm

World Navigation Changes

Hey guys, made some changes to the World navigation panel:

• The Pie Hard event has been added to the Gaia's Story section
• Removed Towns (now available on the games page)
• Removed Rally (now available on the games page)
• Removed Gaia 9 Action News (hasn't been used in about 3 years)
• Renamed mstylelab to Virtual Hollywood (...cause that's what it is)

Changes to expect in the future:

• Removal of Gaia Blog (sadly it's currently rarely used)
• Relocation of Offline Events link
• Relocation of Gaia Labs link
• New World landing page (may also possibly be renamed)

Edit 14:03 PST

Adding back Rally and Towns until we are ready to change the World page.

14 No title

• Topic No title - Posted: carbonphyber Thu Jul 14, 2011 3:12 pm

Gaia is Large-Inventory-friendly!

• Those of you with 8000+ items will be happy to know that many more pages on Gaia should be more friendly to large inventory accounts -- "friendly" meaning that they don't crash with a "white-screen" when you try to use them.

We've optimized our inventory code so Journals, Account Settings, and a few other apps so they run much faster/better/sexier when loading items from "well-endowed" accounts.

Old Search removed

• The old search feature is now gone from the site. More of the site uses the "GSearch" feature (which is faster, easier on our servers, and better in other ways). Please let us know if anything forum, guild, arena, or PM related stopped working in the last half hour.

More old code removed

• The Dev Interns removed 3 old features that likely weren't used by any users recently. If you find broken links, please make sure to report them in the Bug Reports forum and we will get them cleaned up quickly.

14 New Hot Topic: Harry Potter

• Topic New Hot Topic: Harry Potter - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Jul 14, 2011 5:24 pm

New Hot Topic: Harry Potter

Come visit our new Hot Topic for Harry Potter, including a special chat room just for the occasion.

- signed, someone that will at the midnight showing tonight.

14 Outfits Shop (beta)

• Topic Outfits Shop (beta) - Posted: edy Thu Jul 14, 2011 6:25 pm

Outfits Shop (beta)

Today, we have released the outfits shop as a beta. This means that we'll be tweaking based on feedback that we get. There are probably some bugs in it too, so please, let us know us of issues or comments you have.

Here's a thread that gives more information about the feature, and also where you can give some feedback:

http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/site-feedback/outfits-shop-beta-feedback-and-info/t.73186591/

18 Job System

• Topic Job System - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Jul 18, 2011 3:43 pm

Job System

We've been having issues with our job system, which is why notices, guild announcements, report PMs, so on and so forth have been delayed. We're working through the backlog now, but it will take a while before we're all caught up.

18 Arena Rollover

• Topic Arena Rollover - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Jul 18, 2011 7:53 pm

Arena Rollover

Arenas did not rollover at the appointed time. They are now rolled over; we discounted any votes after midnight Sunday for the top finishers, but we didn't remove comments and such. People who entered entries for this contest after midnight we're going to let stand, so there are some entries that were entered on the 18th in the current contest.

18 Pies End

• Topic Pies End - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Mon Jul 18, 2011 7:59 pm

Pies End

The first half of the Piehard event is nearing its conclusion. Now's your last chance to support your favorite remaining NPCs! Looks like Carl, Stein, and Moira are in a fight for the finish... Can loyal Devin supporters bring him back from the brink! Watch as the drama unfolds on Piehard's landing page.

Tomorrow when we are ready to update the finalists the ability to purchase pies will be disabled. The event forum will remain open until the end of the week, then it will be locked down and remain so until we are ready to launch Part 2 of the event.

20 Cash Cards

• Topic Cash Cards - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Jul 20, 2011 5:01 pm

Cash Cards

A connectivity issue between us and our provider has meant that Cash Cards are not redeeming properly. We're talking with them to resolve it. We have all the logs of the cards, and as soon as connectivity is back up, all of the cash will be delivered. We apologize for the delay; I'll post another dev alert when the situation has been resolved.

20 Site outage

• Topic Site outage - Posted: carbonphyber Wed Jul 20, 2011 6:28 pm

Site outage

The site experienced about 20 minutes of slowness and some issues related to stores and items. The interns got their first gold star today! The code is now fixed and site should be recovering right now.

21 Cash Cards Working Again

• Topic Cash Cards Working Again - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Jul 21, 2011 5:14 pm

Cash Cards Working Again

The connectivity problems between us and our provider have been fixed, and cash cards should be working properly.

22 zOMG Gold Curve

• Topic zOMG Gold Curve - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Jul 22, 2011 3:49 pm

zOMG Gold Curve

• A new gold curve has been implemented in zOMG. Details and explanation below (but it's LONG).

Overview

• For a long time zOMG has been giving out too much gold; we've made several tries at adjusting it, but there were still some issues. The main feedback from the community was that new content was the key thing they wanted -- so how can we do that while getting the economy more into balance? (There are other issues of fairness: for example, there are people that are buying the zOMG items to show their support, but they aren't getting very much tangible benefit from it).

Details

• So, what we're going to do is this:

• - we have 4 people working on an entirely new area for zOMG. This is a substantial investment in zOMG, based on community feedback.
• - we've simplified and upped the curve for donators and AutoCash subscribers. Every day you can earn up to 160k in zOMG without any effects, and then the gold scaling goes down to 20%.
• - for people that are not donators or AC subscribers, the new scaling kicks in at 10k.

However, some people do not have access to cash -- so we're offering a zOMG gold potion in the cash shop that will confer the donator gold-earning levels for 3 days. So, you can spend some gold, drink the potion, and for the next 72 hours you'll have the benefit of the gold curve.

This allows social players to play zOMG with their friends, confers some benefits on people that buy zOMG items, and allows people without cash the chance to earn gold at the same rate as others.

So, an entire new area is kind of a big investment. How can we know if it's successful? It's obvious that zOMG items / powerups / rings / whatnot are important, but there are other things we'll be looking at:

• - total traffic in zOMG. Right now zOMG is behind Towns and Rallies in popularity; we're hoping that with a new area that it will be the most popular flash game on Gaia.
• - number of new registrations driven as a result of zOMG. If you refer a friend, or get them interested in the game, try to make sure that they register through zomg.com.

More details in the zOMG forums or journals, as appropriate.

22 Explanation of Donator Status

• Topic Explanation of Donator Status - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Jul 22, 2011 7:11 pm

Explanation of Donator Status

Lots of confusion about this, and it's been a while since we've done an announcement, so: "donator" is the term that we use for anyone that's purchased an item for 249 GC or more in the past month or has subscribed to AutoCash.

How can you tell if you're donator? Go to Account Settings / Gaia Cash Purchases and it'll tell you "You have nnn days left." (Subscribers don't see this message, since they always have donator status).

22 Weekend zOMG Tweak

• Topic Weekend zOMG Tweak - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Jul 22, 2011 8:58 pm

Weekend zOMG Tweak

We've been talking this over internally, based on feedback from the mods and a number of users, and as a result we're going to change the limit for gold scaling from 10k to 30k for people that don't otherwise have a higher limit.

25 zOMG Scaling

• Topic zOMG Scaling - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Jul 25, 2011 4:46 pm

zOMG Scaling

We're moving the daily reset for zOMG gold granting to midnight PST. It's been reset now, and will reset again in about 10 hours.

27 Pixton Contest Soft Launched

• Topic Pixton Contest Soft Launched - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Jul 27, 2011 12:11 pm

Pixton Contest Soft Launched

Do you have an artistic bent? Have you always felt that Cathy was overrated and that you could do much better? Have you always wondered why papers bothered to print the Wizard of Id? This is your chance to shine!

The Pixton comic contest is now open, and the theme of the contest is:

Oh, snap!

(Note that's a theme, not a mandatory punch line).

To try it out, just go to the Pixton Contest to be presented with all the tools you need to create and submit your work of genius.

Fabulous prizes and rare items will be given out to the top winners, to be announced later today.

27 No title

• Topic No title - Posted: carbonphyber Wed Jul 27, 2011 6:45 pm

Friend Lists - larger pages

• 15 -> 50 !!!

Trading Pass and other password fields

• We are increasing security on password fields. If your password is currently not working, we are working on a fix.

27 No title

• Topic No title - Posted: swarf Wed Jul 27, 2011 9:13 pm

New zOMG! buddies are here!

We have four new fluffy buddies to bounce around behind you. They're also available as a bundle.

Training is glitched

We have a new bug in the training room for new players. The chest doesn't show up to get your first ring. If you're stuck in training hold on tight. We're working on a fix that should be available in the morning.

28 DD 2.0 Pushed

• Topic DD 2.0 Pushed - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Thu Jul 28, 2011 3:33 pm

DD 2.0 Pushed

Dumpster Dive code has received significant changes as follows:

• Removed percentage full bar. You no longer need to wait for the Dumpster to be "full" to dive.
• Tied the dumpster to daily chance system. When the dumpster has no user donations, you will get a certain number of daily chance dives per day.
• Created daily chance mini event system. When active, donating items to the dumpster will be disabled and instead the dumpster will operate entirely on random daily chance grants with chances for exclusive items. (we'll let you know when this occurs )

...Happy diving!

29 No title

• Topic No title - Posted: carbonphyber Fri Jul 29, 2011 6:03 pm

Password woes

• Password forms were recently upgraded to enhance account security. Some browsers were glitchy with this. We've just fixed some of those glitches and will be making more next week.

Spam issues

• Please don't forget to report spammy content from other users. We would like to nip it in the bud and mute/ban accounts before they get too spammy but this requires help from all users to report spam.

August

01 BG Fixes

• Topic BG Fixes - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Aug 01, 2011 5:01 pm

BG Fixes

• - Put in changes that should greatly reduce if not completely eliminate the 0/blank payout problem.
• - we'll be experimenting with a new CAPTCHA later this week to see if it's more palatable for players.
• - we hope to have a fix for multi-item drops in BG; we may recruit some BG players to help us test this. More info later this week.

01 Giftboxes Old and New

• Topic Giftboxes Old and New - Posted: ubermegAtrOn Mon Aug 01, 2011 8:05 pm

Giftboxes Old and New

Courtesy our illustrious artists, there are two new giftboxes. We are proud to present the Golden Magical Giftbox, which is the rarest ever, and the thematic return of the Pink Link! Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for these new treasures and their contents!

01 Lt. Grunny Drops

• Topic Lt. Grunny Drops - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Aug 01, 2011 9:09 pm

Lt. Grunny Drops

This should be working now (or in the next 10 minutes, give it a bit for the cache to clear).

02 Pixton Comic

• Topic Pixton Comic - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Aug 02, 2011 2:53 pm

Snap!

(Pixton Comic)

Or, the subtext: we've added the ability to easily show your Pixton comic entries to others in the forums -- just use the "pixton" bbcode tag around the URL of your comic and it will be embedded in your message.

Remember, just a few more days to enter for fame and fortune.

03 Frontier Skies Relaunched

• Topic Frontier Skies Relaunched - Posted: ubermegAtrOn Wed Aug 03, 2011 4:13 pm

Frontier Skies Relaunched

Gaia's very own adventure game Frontier Skies has returned! Missing in action for nearly a year, Gaians can once again go on a journey to rescue the floating Jellyfish from marauding vampires. To help you on your travels, you can now purchase in-game loot with Gaia gold. The path is long and arduous, but should you survive the butterflies, elk and cannibals, you will be rewarded with tickets!

03 Wednesday Glitches

• Topic Wednesday Glitches - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Aug 03, 2011 7:26 pm

Wednesday Glitches

Okay, Wednesdays are not supposed to be this interesting.

Fixed a glitch wherein you would get the big red "You are leaving Gaia!" upon logging into Gaia.

As a side effect, the problems with redirecting users to the home page on login have been fixed.

Some users had a variety of glitches in the past few hours, evidenced by such symptoms as an invisible avatar or username, difficulties logging in, friendlists being empty, so on and so forth. We've tracked down the errant server and it has gone to the old server farm for retirement.

The cookies, however, are NOT a glitch.

04 FB Like Removed

• Topic FB Like Removed - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Aug 04, 2011 2:08 pm

FB Like Removed

The Facebook like campaign has kind of stalled, and for now we're pulling it from the header due to the vast amount of new stuff hitting the site in the next few weeks. We'll revisit this at some point so that people have a chance to get the exclusive item, but for now we'd just like to concentrate on getting all this cool stuff to you.

04 Cookies, Revealed

• Topic Cookies, Revealed - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Aug 04, 2011 2:18 pm

Cookies, Revealed

We've done an announcement to cut down on the number of threads about this, but more color:

We're doing another Spring Cleaning type of event (actually in the Summer, but we try not to let a little inconsistency hobgoblin us).

The mysterious "cookies" that you've been getting are the votes. The forums for this will be set up next week, and there will be a way for users to propose their own feature ideas and suggestions.

Don't care about voting for features? Go ahead and sell your cookies on the marketplace to other people. Want to support that killer feature (say, spoiler tag in forums?) Buy some cookies on the marketplace!

We've been giving out cookies for a variety of reasons, including just logging in, and we'll also be giving them out for random good stuff that people do on the site.

08 World Page Design Feedback

• Topic World Page Design Feedback - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Mon Aug 08, 2011 3:58 pm

World Page Design Feedback

Hey guys, we're planning on making some changes to the World page and would love your feedback!

For details and to post your constructive feedback ...positive or negative... Please visit:

The Official World Re-design Feedback Thread

...You have a voice, so let's hear it!

08 New CAPTCHA in BG

• Topic New CAPTCHA in BG - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Aug 08, 2011 4:00 pm

New CAPTCHA in BG

Frequent feedback from BG players was that reCaptcha was too hard to read, so we're experimenting with a new CAPTCHA in Booty Grab. If you run into it, please let us know in the poll thread whether you think it is better or now.

09 Rare Giftboxes

• Topic Rare Giftboxes - Posted: carbonphyber Tue Aug 09, 2011 1:05 am

Rare Giftboxes

Haven't received a rare flying giftbox in a while? Your luck might change!

Rare events were happening too rarely for the last few weeks -- that changes now.

09 CDN Changes

• Topic CDN Changes - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Aug 09, 2011 5:53 pm

CDN Changes

We'll be doing some CDN changes in the next hour, so you may see some glitches with images. Hopefully everything should be worked out fairly quickly.

10 Fishing issues solved

• Topic Fishing issues solved - Posted: carbonphyber Wed Aug 10, 2011 5:38 pm

Fishing issues solved

We were cleaning out some cobwebs in the old code and this created some issues. We know about the Fishing game issues (just solved).

Please remember to report any issues you run into in the Bug Reports forum so we can fix them quickly.

11 No Images In Announcements?

• Topic No Images In Announcements? - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Aug 11, 2011 2:31 pm

No Images In Announcements?

We're trying to track down an issue. If you have problems seeing images in our announcements (or, for example, if you can't see the image below), please let us know in this thread. We'll want to know a) your browser, b) your approximate geographic region. Also, please try flushing your browser cache and trying again to make sure that the problem continues happening.

http://w.cdn.gaiaonline.com/imaging/dt/cs_announce_none_20110808_700x630.jpg

11 Flash 10.3 and Gaia's Flash spaces

• Topic Flash 10.3 and Gaia's Flash spaces - Posted: edy Thu Aug 11, 2011 7:21 pm

Flash 10.3 and Gaia's Flash spaces

If you're using Flash 10.3 (the latest version), then you've probably noticed that the chat bubbles in the Flash spaces aren't working correctly. Unfortunately, this is caused by something Adobe changed in the latest version of Flash.

You can temporarily fix it while we look into it by doing the following:

• 1) Uninstall Flash
• 2) Install Flash 10.2 or earlier

You can get the uninstaller, as well as the installer from:

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/142/tn_14266.html#main_Archived_versions

The download link is a zip file, and inside of it are debugger and release versions of Flash for all operating systems.

There is also an additional issue with Chrome, where the arrow keys don't work. Google has provided a workaround in the following thread: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=0bc6c9463a152d8e&hl=en#fid_0bc6c9463a152d8e0004a9f33f1dfa1f

They also mention that it'll be fixed in the next week, or two for everyone.

12 New Ad In Forums

• Topic New Ad In Forums - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Aug 12, 2011 5:49 pm

New Ad In Forums

• We're experimenting with a new ad placement in forums. We'll run this for a couple of weeks as an experiment. However, why that location, and why that ad?

• A number of people have said that they had less problems with Google ads than other ad agencies, so we wanted to try them out
• By putting it in the middle of the forum thread, it doesn't push content below the fold.

As always, we love to hear your feedback in Site Feedback if you have opinions one way or the other.

15 Thanks for "World" feedback

• Topic Thanks for "World" feedback - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Mon Aug 15, 2011 12:54 pm

Thanks for "World" feedback

Big thanks to everyone who provided their feedback in our World Re-design Feedback thread. The team will now be going over it and creating new mocks with the feedback in mind.

While we review and make changes the thread will be locked, but left available for public viewing. A new one will be created with the updated designs when they are ready. Thanks again!

15 Inventory Glitches

• Topic Inventory Glitches - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Aug 15, 2011 9:27 pm

Inventory Glitches

Users have been reporting some inventory glitches today, especially when opening containers. Frequently, this shows up as a "serial_not_in_owner_location" error. These problems should be worked out now, but if you're still having problems, please let us know in this BR&TS thread.

IMPORTANT NOTE: We don't believe that you should have lost any items on a failed open. However, if you've checked and checked and something you've paid for has vanished (i.e., luck key or MC) without a trace and without you getting anything in return, please be sure to fill out a billing inquiry so we can make sure to take care of you.

16 Soft Launched Two New Games

• Topic Soft Launched Two New Games - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Aug 16, 2011 5:56 pm

Soft Launched Two New Games

Two new games are now available, Backyard Monsters and Resort World. These are integrated with the site, so in these games, you'll be playing against other Gaia people, any in-game gifts / notifications will come through as a PM or feed, so on and so forth.

Gold grants: We are granting a little bit of gold whenever you brag to your friends about in-game accomplishments. We'll look at how much gold is granted and then adjust up or down as needed.

Known bugs: giving gifts only works in Backyard Monsters if you grant to one person at a time; picking multiple people for gifts doesn't work, and they are working on fixing it.

There is also a new Viximo forum where you can trade tips and tactics and declarations of war.

P.S. Please don't attack my base!

17 Container problems, revisited

• Topic Container problems, revisited - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Aug 17, 2011 7:14 pm

Container problems, revisited

TL;DR: edy has fixed another issue with containers (i.e., MCs, fish drops, RIGs, so on and so forth). You may have to wait a bit before your inventory sorts itself out, however.

Details: Thanks very much for the bug reports. For some users, when you did anything that would swap an item in your inventory (i.e., open a box), you would get an error. The item was actually added to your inventory, but the inventory screen was not up to date, so it looked like you were missing items.

If you think you are missing items: Either wait a bit for cache to clear (can take up to half an hour sometimes -- logging out and back in does not clear the cache), or it can be quicker to add or remove an item from your inventory (i.e., by buying an item from the store, donating an item, giving an item to a friend, whatever), and that will immediately update your inventory.

17 Controlling Your Feeds

• Topic Controlling Your Feeds - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Aug 17, 2011 9:48 pm

Controlling Your Feeds

So, a couple of things going on here.

You can control what you see about your friends by going to Account Settings / Data Feeds. For example, the Viximo settings are controlled by the "Other" slider at the bottom of the page.

However, it turns out that settings of the sliders are not entirely intuitive (they do not control the percentages directly, but are instead run through a formula and weighted). We'll be pushing out a change tomorrow that will make it easier to understand.

So, your data feed sliders should give you more control over your feed starting tomorrow.

18 Feeds Reworked

• Topic Feeds Reworked - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Aug 18, 2011 11:32 am

Feeds Reworked

The Account Settings / Feeds have been reworked a bit to make the sliders more intuitive. You should be getting many less notifications for the feeds that you've dialed down.

Before: all sliders were added together, and the difference between 100 and the highest percentage of slider / total weight was used as an inherent bias to each slider percentage, and then I think there were some references to phase of the moon and gender and the stock market and whatnot; the code got a little turgid at that point and some of the hieroglyphics were smeared.

After: There are seven notches in the account settings, and they give you the following chance that you'll see a message from that feed:

• Slider is 1: 5% chance
• Slider is 2: 25%
• Slider is 3: 50%
• Slider is 4: (default): 75%
• Slider is 5: 82%
• Slider is 6: 90%
• Slider is 7: 100%

If you haven't changed your settings at all then everything is at 100%.

18 The Alchemy

• Topic The Alchemy - Posted: ania1899 Thu Aug 18, 2011 4:20 pm

The Alchemy

Item Alchemy is out!!! Go check it out: Item Alchemy

18 Quick Item Alchemy Tweak

• Topic Quick Item Alchemy Tweak - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Aug 18, 2011 9:28 pm

Quick Item Alchemy Tweak

Some users were reporting problems with not being able to complete even the Aspiring Alchemist recipe -- turns out that if you had craft items in storage that it would just fail repeatedly. We now check only the unequipped items in your inventory for alchemy purposes. Be sure all the items that you're crafting with are in your main inventory.

19 CAPTCHA / Ad changes

• Topic CAPTCHA / Ad changes - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Aug 19, 2011 9:09 pm

CAPTCHA / Ad changes

• Substantially increased the chances of getting a reward ad. Also, the items you can get from the reward ads have been changed up a bit.
• Removed Google ad below first post in the forum threads. We could use the ad revenue, to be honest, but we'll try to find something that doesn't disrupt the forum experience so much.
• Turned off the video captchas for BG for now. We'll probably try revisiting that same CAPTCHA provider with non-video ads whenever we can set it up with them.

22 Event Soft Launched

• Topic Event Soft Launched - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Mon Aug 22, 2011 4:50 pm

Event Soft Launched

Hey everyone, Pie Hard with a Vengeance, the second half to the Pie Hard summer event is currently soft launched. That mean the forum and event page are active and playable but the wing sticker, event header and event icon are disabled.

Once the announcement is made the remaining elements of the event will be made active. Until then, feel free to Pie Hard.

23 Event Launched

• Topic Event Launched - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Tue Aug 23, 2011 7:37 pm

Event Launched

Hey guys, the exciting conclusion to the Pie Hard event has launched!!!

In this event expect four new achievements, 5 items (one claimable only when the event ends), lots of pies in the face, and 30 new forum emotes!! (including 6 secret ones.) As well as an update to Pie Paradise so you can pie your friends and taunt them at the same time!

All this and it won't cost you a single Gaia Gold piece...so head over to the event page, live free and Pie Hard ...with a Vengeance!

CURRENT NPC SCORES:

• Carl: 130
• Diedrich: 135
• Ian & Rufus: 139
• Kanoko: 138
• Louie: 136
• Stein: 136

Note: The event will run until next Monday or Tuesday then the event page will be updated to include the final item grant based on who won. Ties will be decided at Gaia's discretion.

24 Pie Hard: Pie User Fix

• Topic Pie Hard: Pie User Fix - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Wed Aug 24, 2011 12:36 pm

Pie Hard: Pie User Fix

Late last night I read reports of and confirmed the following bug involving pieing other users. A fix for this has been made and is now live. Sadly I have no way to recover any lost data... Sorry guys

24 Site Loading Slowly?

• Topic Site Loading Slowly? - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Aug 24, 2011 6:47 pm

Site Loading Slowly?

We're trying to track down some problems that are causing pages to load slowly. If you find that some pages load slowly, please come to this thread and let us know what is loading slowly.

25 Site Loading Slowly p.2

• Topic Site Loading Slowly p.2 - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Aug 25, 2011 3:32 pm

Site Loading Slowly p.2

I've updated the OP in the Site Loading Slowly? thread. Basically, we're looking for a few folks that a) have Firefox, b) can install two extensions, and have c) slow loading pages. It helps if you're at least a little bit technical, because we're going to have to try and work with you to diagnose the issue.

26 Alchemy Q&A

• Topic Alchemy Q&A - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Aug 26, 2011 6:01 pm

Alchemy Q&A

There's been a lot of feedback on alchemy lately, and we wanted to set up a Q&A on it to try and address some concerns that have been raised.

(We wanted to do a Fireside Chat for this, but the provider that we use was not comfortable with the potential load, so we'll try this a little differently.)

In Site Feedback we have an Official Q&A Thread for alchemy. To try and keep this manageable, please check the thread before posting your question -- if you see the question you were going to ask, go ahead and tip it. We'll be looking at tip counts as a gauge of the questions that are most important to the community.

In the OP, I've tried to summarize some of the fundamentals of alchemy. Be warned that our crack writing staff has not gone over my post, so please make allowances for my poor phrasing. If you read something in the OP and are getting angry about it, it is probably my bad writing; alchemy is, fundamentally, something cool, and we hope that people will agree after we answer questions.

28 Pie Hard Score Update!

• Topic Pie Hard Score Update! - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Sun Aug 28, 2011 3:25 am

Pie Hard Score Update!

Hey everyone, thought I'd give a score update so everyone knows where they stand... and what vengeance must be enacted to win!

• Carl: 618
• Diedrich: 617
• Ian & Rufus: 628
• Kanoko: 622
• Louie: 624
• Stein: 620

Live free and Pie Hard ...with a Vengeance!

Note: The event will run until next Monday or Tuesday then the event page will be updated to include the final item grant based on who won. Ties will be decided at Gaia's discretion.

30 Final Score Update!

• Topic Final Score Update! - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Tue Aug 30, 2011 2:40 am

Final Score Update!

The event will be ending tomorrow night, Pie wisely!

• Carl: 834
• Diedrich: 836
• Ian & Rufus: 846
• Kanoko: 845
• Louie: 846
• Stein: 838

30 New Bifrost Formula

• Topic New Bifrost Formula - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Aug 30, 2011 4:49 pm

New Bifrost Formula

A new limited edition formula to create golden giftboxes (the LIMITED EDITION Golden Giftbox formula) is now available in Bifrost.

Important note #1: This formula will vanish on 9/15 (unless we extend the deadline), and when it vanishes we'll grant you back the gold piece.

Important note #2: This formula has multiple paths -- the alternate paths will show up if you have any of the components in the secondary paths.

Marketplace fluctuations: Prices of common farmable components will probably spike up for a week or so. There are a lot of these components in peoples' inventories, however, so prices should drop back down.

If you're a new user, now is a great time to farm components -- either for your own use, or for selling to other people on the site.

30 Pie Hard Event Ending

• Topic Pie Hard Event Ending - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Tue Aug 30, 2011 6:30 pm

Pie Hard Event Ending

The Pie Hard with a Vengeance event will be ending tonight ~9 PDT.

A winner will be declared and the event page will then give out the final item. The final item will remain claimable for approximately a week, so don't forget to go get it! ..Until then, happy pieing!

30 Database Issues

• Topic Database Issues - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Aug 30, 2011 10:01 pm

Database Issues

We're tracking down some issues with inventory databases. More details when we know more.

30 Database Issue Fixed

• Topic Database Issue Fixed - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Aug 30, 2011 10:16 pm

Database Issue Fixed

An inventory server had decided that it was time to go into a reverie and contemplate its CPU. Our rockin' ops team swapped out the server and everything should be back to normal now, including posting.

31 Pie Hard Closing Scores

• Topic Pie Hard Closing Scores - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Wed Aug 31, 2011 12:16 am

Pie Hard Closing Scores

• 1. Ian & Rufus: 943
• 2. Louie: 940
• 3. Stein: 937
• 4. Kanoko: 935
• 5: Diedrich: 934
• 6. Carl: 933

Don't foget to visit the event page for your final event item grant! The grant will be available for a week so claim it while you can!

Thanks for playing!

September

01 zOMG servers offline for maintenance

• Topic zOMG servers offline for maintenance - Posted: swarf Thu Sep 01, 2011 1:59 pm

zOMG servers offline for maintenance

We're making some small changes in preparation for Deadman's Shadow. We'll have the servers back in a couple hours.

Among the changes:

• 1. Rings with the reflect mechanic will reflect knockback as well.
• 2. Reflect is limited to a portion of your base health (random range around 1/8th).
• 3. Reflect damage will scale with the level difference between you and your target like other damage
• 4. We have the UI elements added in for a new orb type

02 Event Forum Takedown

• Topic Event Forum Takedown - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Fri Sep 02, 2011 6:52 pm

Event Forum Takedown

Just a heads up the Pie Hard event forum will be archived this coming Tuesday, this means users will no longer be able to post in the forum but it will be available for viewing.

The event emotes have been added to our patch rotation and should launch some time next week. Special thanks to Carbonphyber for taking the time to make sure they would work in most areas of the site.

Even after the emotes are made available site wide, the hidden emotes will remain hidden... to my knowledge two have yet to be discovered...

Have a great weekend everyone!

02 Alchemy Stuff

• Topic Alchemy Stuff - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Sep 02, 2011 9:36 pm

Alchemy Stuff

A baker's dozen of new formulas has been released into the Bifrost. These formulas use common components, and if you are a zOMG player you will be well situated (hint, hint).

Also, more stuff on alchemy (and please pass this along to those interested):

• The feedback thread has been moved from Site Feedback to the Alchemy Forum
• Users were asking for more formulas that were attainable with common, farmable components. The formulas we've released today should hopefully provide that, and we are also releasing new formulas on Tuesday that will (also) use farmable components.
• We definitely heard the feedback about the various RIG formulas. We will take a look at them; it is likely that any changes will be in the form of an alternate path added to the formula.
• One key issue here is that many users were concerned with the destruction of limited items. We are working on something that will re-release "endangered" components consumed through alchemy back into the wild, probably through some mix of the marketplace and dumpster diving.
• Any marketplace releases would be on a one-week bid placed by an NPC -- hopefully this will exert downward pressure on the prices.
• Using DD would make the items available even to those users that don't have a lot of gold.

More details on this next week, when we can have the writers craft our random napkins into the semblance of English.

As always, your feedback is appreciated.

06 Jigsaw and Word Bump

• Topic Jigsaw and Word Bump - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Sep 06, 2011 4:02 pm

Jigsaw and Word Bump

Jigsaw and Word Bump servers have been restarted -- this should help fix a number of the issues with gold granting / BC granting that users have been hitting.

06 Permanewmotes

• Topic Permanewmotes - Posted: carbonphyber Tue Sep 06, 2011 4:59 pm

Permanewmotes

We've added multiple emote categories to all BBCode parts of the site.

Please don't forget to post any buggy or glitchy issues (especially in Guilds ) in the Bug Reports forum.

Also, if you have any third-party toolbars or browser extensions (i.e. TekTek, BetterGaia, GreaseMonkey scripts, etc.), they might interfere with Gaia's emotes (or vice versa). Please report if you are using any of these when you file a Bug Report.

Big thanks to the events team for adding the newer emotes!

06 Guild Change of Ownership

• Topic Guild Change of Ownership - Posted: carbonphyber Tue Sep 06, 2011 6:56 pm

Guild Change of Ownership

We're fixing at least part of the issues with changing Guild Ownership.

Please post if Bug Reports if that feature is still not working 10 minutes from this post's time.

06 BG Fixes

• Topic BG Fixes - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Sep 06, 2011 7:39 pm

BG Fixes

• - brief glitch with spurious drops by Memphis + others have been fixed
• - you can now catch multiple drops without glitching the game (yay!)
• - releasing new fish in a bit -- Enki the Merman. Enki glows and drops at the same rate as Grunny Sub; we reserve the right to adjust either glow or drop rates up (only) in the next week. The box contains both new formulas and the components for those same formulas.

07 Guilds Chat

• Topic Guilds Chat - Posted: edy Wed Sep 07, 2011 1:23 pm

Guilds Chat

Have a guild? Want/need a private place to hangout with your other guild members? Then read on!

We just released the ability for guilds owners to purchase a permanent chat space for their guild. You'll find the link under the Moderator Panel. Once you purchase a room, the link will be prominently shown in a tab.

08 World Page Re-Design Feedback

• Topic World Page Re-Design Feedback - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Thu Sep 08, 2011 5:52 pm

World Page Re-Design Feedback

Hey guys, not too long ago I had started a feedback thread in SF on planned changes for the World page. Since then we've made new mocks taking the feedback we received into account.

To view what has changed and to post your feedback, please visit: The Official World Re-design Rnd. 2 Feedback Thread

09 New CAPTCHA

• Topic New CAPTCHA - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Sep 09, 2011 5:14 pm

New CAPTCHA

We're going to be experimenting with a new CAPTCHA. We previously tried it with BG, but for various reasons it didn't work in that context; we'll be trying it in profile comments next.

The CAPTCHA should be easier to perform (it's more readable), but it will ask you to type a slogan from an advertisement or something, rather than giving you contorted text. Note that some of them will look like advertisements.

Please let us know what you think in SF. As a small "thank you" for participating in our experiment, we are granting a bit of extra gold whenever you run into the new CAPTCHA.

12 New emotes update

• Topic New emotes update - Posted: carbonphyber Mon Sep 12, 2011 3:10 pm

New emotes update

We've realized that only some features on Gaia can use the new emotes. As of now, the public forums and profiles can use them. Other apps (namely PMs and Guilds forums) will need some work to be able to use them. We'll keep you updated.

13 Mahjongg Dimensions

• Topic Mahjongg Dimensions - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Sep 13, 2011 5:40 pm

Mahjongg Dimensions

We've soft launched Mahjongg Dimensions in the Viximo area. Both of you subscribed to dev alerts can try it early!

14 Marketplace Sell Item page

• Topic Marketplace Sell Item page - Posted: carbonphyber Wed Sep 14, 2011 5:52 pm

Marketplace Sell Item page

• Marketplace "Sell an Item" page is getting an overhaul. You'll be able to use the new tabset and search your inventory! This may take 5-20 minutes to work correctly.
• Also, the "my store" page will now display the BBCode toolbar (thanks Absol - Ruler of Chaos for suggesting this). It has always accepted BBCode text but now you can click instead of type!

Please let us know int he Bug Reports forum if you have any issues using the new features!

15 New emotes in Guilds

• Topic New emotes in Guilds - Posted: carbonphyber Thu Sep 15, 2011 5:17 pm

New emotes in Guilds

We are rolling out the new emotes into guilds. There will probably be a few minutes (5-20) when the older emotes might break.

Thanks st-sri for this fix!

16 zOMG's Buccaneer Boardwalk is open to everyone!

• Topic zOMG's Buccaneer Boardwalk is open to everyone! - Posted: swarf Fri Sep 16, 2011 6:16 pm

zOMG's Buccaneer Boardwalk is open to everyone!

The boardwalk may not be completed yet, but we've decided to open it up in celebration of the upcoming launch of Deadman's Shadow. The boardwalk no longer requires a ticket to enter and the tickets have been removed from the shop. In their place is a pass which will eventually allow unlimited access to Deadman's Shadow: The Bloodstone Amulet.

Enjoy exploring the boardwalk!

16 Temporary Gift Box

• Topic Temporary Gift Box - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Sep 16, 2011 6:49 pm

Temporary Gift Box

Good news! The temporary giftbox recipe has been removed from the store, but we are not removing it from inventories -- you'll have as much time as you want to make your formula. Additionally, we have made the 3 paths for the recipe permanent, and you can find them in the existing Goldbox formula.

18 Aquariums/Booty Grab Offline

• Topic Aquariums/Booty Grab Offline - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Sun Sep 18, 2011 7:17 pm

Aquariums/Booty Grab Offline

Aquariums and Booty Grab have been taken offline while we investigate a critical bug with the system. We apologize for the inconvenience and will have it up and running again as soon as we can get the issue resolved.

Thanks,

-Gaia Online Staff

19 Booty Grab Back Online

• Topic Booty Grab Back Online - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Sep 19, 2011 6:15 pm

Booty Grab Back Online

An exploit was uncovered in BG that allowed large amounts of gold to be created. Our rockin' admin/mod team worked over the weekend to undo the (economic) damage, and except for edge cases should be mostly fixed at this point. The exploit has been repaired and BG has been turned back on.

19 Spring Cleaning 2011

• Topic Spring Cleaning 2011 - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Sep 19, 2011 10:30 pm

Spring Cleaning 2011

We'll do a full announcement for this, but: the (traditionally misnamed) Spring Cleaning forums for 2011 are now active.

We are finishing up on a couple of features that will be out soon (BidBlast and zOMG), but other than that, we want to concentrate on site maintenance and bug fixes. This is your opportunity to have a say in how we prioritize!

We'll be adding proposals to the main proposal forum. Think we missed something important? Place it in the Spring Cleaning Proposals forum and get people to vote it up!

You'll use cookies to vote up proposals, and you can only vote up a certain number of times per day -- see this post for all the gritty details.

Other stuff we're looking at over the next month:

• fix a bunch of zOMG/BG bugs
• fix pages that are incredibly slow
• get the flash games working better

20 Spring Cleaning Tweak

• Topic Spring Cleaning Tweak - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Sep 20, 2011 2:21 pm

Spring Cleaning Tweak

Given the number of fine proposals in the Spring Cleaning Proposals forum, for now we've bumped the number of cookie votes up to 10 per day.

This will be going on at least a couple of weeks, so you should have time to burn a substantial number of cookies.

20 BidBlast

• Topic BidBlast - Posted: Shadow_Dragonz Tue Sep 20, 2011 2:47 pm

BidBlast

In the next few hours we will be rolling our new feature for you guys to buy, bid, and win! We will be monitoring it closely to ensure everything is working.

Don't forget to tell us what you think in the Site Feedback Forum

Cheers!

22 MOAR outfit slots!

• Topic MOAR outfit slots! - Posted: edy Thu Sep 22, 2011 4:28 pm

MOAR outfit slots!

If you've been wanting/needing more space in your virtual closet, then today is your lucky day!

The number of outfit slots you can purchase has been increased to 20 (from 12). They're available for 20k each.

22 Booty Grab Tweaks

• Topic Booty Grab Tweaks - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Sep 22, 2011 6:48 pm

Booty Grab Tweaks

• - fixed glitch with multiple Enki drops
• - Added a gold glitch report form to the tank. If you did NOT get granted gold for a particular play, please use the (tiny) form immediately above the comments.
• - we're looking the spurious tank glow reporting

22 Witch Doctor Drops

• Topic Witch Doctor Drops - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Sep 22, 2011 7:53 pm

Witch Doctor Drops

This was actually out a week ago, but I don't think it was announced... apologies if this is a duplicate. The Witch Doctor drop was fixed, and you should be able to open it without problems.

22 Bidblast Will Be Changing

• Topic Bidblast Will Be Changing - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Sep 22, 2011 8:41 pm

Bidblast Will Be Changing

We're going to let the current auctions play out, but we'll be making some changes to Bidblast. For purposes of discussion, we're thinking of the following changes:

• raising the ticket price
• requiring the user to have the gold when they bid
• if you win, you automatically win -- that is, you don't have the option of refusing the auction

This will hopefully make the auctions resolve more quickly.

23 Site Outage / Bidblast

• Topic Site Outage / Bidblast - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Sep 23, 2011 2:42 pm

Site Outage / Bidblast

We had a site outage this morning, and ops has been working ever since to resolve the issue. Site should be working for everyone, and inventories were not affected. We are taking steps to try and make sure something like this does not happen again.

Vis a vis Bidblast: we're going to let the auctions stand, and we'll be making some changes to BB for the next round. There are a couple of good threads in SF if you'd like to weigh in on how we change it.

(Why let the auctions stand? Couple of reasons: a) the "winners" did not do anything wrong or unfairly take advantage of what was really a random happening, and b) outages are a fact of life, whether caused by an errant database server or unexpected asteroid.)

23 Booty Grab Tweaks

• Topic Booty Grab Tweaks - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Sep 23, 2011 5:54 pm

Booty Grab Tweaks

One note: the new mini-form we added for reporting gold grant glitches is meant to be used on the tank that had the issue. (That is, if you were not granted gold by a tank, please use the form that is shown on that particular tank to report the glitch).

From yesterday's results, we tracked down an issue that was causing early players to get a disproportionate amount of glitching, and we've pushed out a fix for that problem.

23 zOMG Bloodstone Amulet

• Topic zOMG Bloodstone Amulet - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Sep 23, 2011 6:08 pm

zOMG Bloodstone Amulet

People asked for a clarification on the announcement, as it was a little unclear. We're going to raise the price for the zOMG Bloodstone Amulet at 5:00pm today. Now is the best item to get this fine, fine looking amulet that I'm wearing, as very soon it will either go up in price or be removed from the stores (we're close to the 5k limit).

23 Alchemy Special Reward

• Topic Alchemy Special Reward - Posted: ania1899 Fri Sep 23, 2011 6:38 pm

Alchemy Special Reward

We just rolled out some small fixes for the Item Alchemy. Along with fixes we also released a fun update. Dedicated Alchemists who get to level 10 will receive a special reward. So if you are close to reach level 10, hurry up, the number of rewards is limited!

26 Spring Cleaning Votes Cleared

• Topic Spring Cleaning Votes Cleared - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Sep 26, 2011 2:28 pm

Spring Cleaning Votes Cleared

We cleared the vote status for the main Spring Cleaning Forum, so you can go ahead and vote again (may take up to 10 minutes for the cache to clear).

Note that less than 1% of active users vote in SC, so your vote is very important!

26 Booty Grab Tweaks

• Topic Booty Grab Tweaks - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Sep 26, 2011 4:57 pm

Booty Grab Tweaks

• - thanks for the reports, another change was made for gold grant glitch
• - now show number of games played today in tank, in preparation for changing join bias
• - New. Any item-dropping fish now has a chance to drop an item in the owner's inventory, as well. We'll be tweaking the levels on this.

26 Alchemy Tweaks

• Topic Alchemy Tweaks - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Sep 26, 2011 8:53 pm

Alchemy Tweaks

Long dev notice.

Level 10 Reward

• There were concerns that the level 10 reward unfairly awarded users with tons of gold. So, we'll change it so that a reward will be given to anyone that reaches level 10 -- not just the first n.

Getting Past Level 3

• The fundamental issue here is that the components are too rare, and that's making it difficult to proceed past level 3. Components are contained in the Philosopher's Cache. To that end:

• we're reducing the difficulty of the GGB formula
• in appreciation to those folks that soldiered through the existing GGB formula, we are going to back-granting GGBs to anyone that created a GGB to compensate so that they get the advantage of the easier formula. This backgrant is proportional to the number of GGBs that you've created, so if you've created 10 GGBs, you'll get 10 backgrants.
• instead of opening or selling the GGB, you may instead want to craft a Philosopher's Cache (for components) or Alchemist's Case (for formulas).
• we are adding an alternate path to the Philosopher's Cache and Alchemist's Case that is constructible through farmable components

• Many users wanted to have the components in the gold shop, but pricing the components fairly is difficult in that case, and we don't want to price them so low that it kills value of the farmable recipes; we'd like to see how the components price out with this strategy, and then if we need to improve the liquidity we can have a limited time sale in Dernier Cri or something.

Recycling

• This week, we'll use the marketplace for any item above a certain marketplace value. However, we'd really like to use diving dumpster instead (it's more fairly redistributive), so we'll be experimenting with that next week.

26 Booty Grab Confusion

• Topic Booty Grab Confusion - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Sep 26, 2011 9:08 pm

Booty Grab Confusion

• The description of the new feature was perhaps oddly worded, so it was misinterpreted by some. Please allow me to clarify.

Let's say you have an Enki.

• Enki drops a gift box for the kind patrons that are playing your tank.

Every time Enki drops a gift box for your patrons, you have a chance of getting a gift box, as well.

After all, the gold is shared between owner / player, why not items as well?

27 World Page Re-Design Update

• Topic World Page Re-Design Update - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Tue Sep 27, 2011 2:58 pm

World Page Re-Design Update

Hey guys, just fyi, after the most recent feedback on the World page re-design, we have decided to move forward with the changes as presented in the above thread.

My team will begin development on it following the Halloween event for launch some time before X-mas (launch dependent on sponsorships and event scheduling.)

For the time being the thread will be locked but I'll keep it as a sticky in the SF forum for all to see until after the launch is made.

For those asking for updates to the World map, expect a very small one with the Halloween event...

27 Booty Grab Gold Glitches

• Topic Booty Grab Gold Glitches - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Sep 27, 2011 6:06 pm

Booty Grab Gold Glitches

• - glitches happened most frequently for very-low or very-high scoring game
• - low-score glitches appear to be mostly gone, based on logs from yesterday
• - just pushed out a fix that should decrease the number of high end glitches
• - we checked logs for yesterday and owner-side drops are confirmed working. You will not get a notification if you get a bonus item, but it will show immediately in your inventory.

27 Spring Cleaning 2011

• Topic Spring Cleaning 2011 - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Sep 27, 2011 8:54 pm

Spring Cleaning 2011

Please be sure to check out the Spring Cleaning 2011 forum often, as proposals are moved up from the Proposals every so often. Also, our artists just added a late proposal for animated eyes (including an example of what they would look like), so if you'd like to see this sort of animated item offered in the future, be sure to let us now!

28 Aquarium Bump Option

• Topic Aquarium Bump Option - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Sep 28, 2011 5:26 pm

Aquarium Bump Option

In Account / Settings there is now a new option, "Aquarium Bump Thread."

http://w.cdn.gaiaonline.com/mfs/index/adminupload/86c55c77de23.png

Setting this to the topic ID of your bump thread will prevent people from leaving comments, and instead give them a link directly to your thread.

The topic ID is the numeric portion of the URL of your bump thread -- for example, given the url of the R&G for the Aquarium forum:

http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/gaia-aquarium/gaia-aquarium-rules-guidelines-revised-3-11-09/t.48013283/

The topic ID would be 48013283.

You should only link to threads in the "Aquarium" forum.

29 Zoey and Cathulu Fixed

• Topic Zoey and Cathulu Fixed - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Sep 29, 2011 4:50 pm

Zoey and Cathulu Fixed

Zoey and Cathulu will now show up in the aquarium properly, and will glow / drop gold as expected during Booty Grab.

29 BG Gold Glitch Followup

• Topic BG Gold Glitch Followup - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Sep 29, 2011 10:19 pm

BG Gold Glitch Followup

So, it looks like the number of gold grant glitches has decreased substantially. So far, 70% of the gold grant glitches that have been reported were actually granted; removing the obvious nulls (i.e., users reporting 99999, so on and so forth), we're left with a failure rate of < 1%.

There are some users that are reporting large numbers of glitches, so we'll be working with them individually to see if it is a systemic problem or is instead local connectivity issues.

30 Booty Grab Gold Curve

• Topic Booty Grab Gold Curve - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Sep 30, 2011 12:44 pm

Booty Grab Gold Curve

• Long dev notice. TL;DR: Booty Grab gold grants are changing.

Old Method

• Previously, as both an anti-bot and gold scaling measure, we would keep a count of a) the number of games you played, and b) the number of games from your IP. As you played more and more games, we would start biasing your player count up and up, and if you exceeded the number of players in a game, we wouldn't allow you in, even if the tank wasn't full.

As an example:

• Your first game of the day? You can be the 1st player or the 34th -- you're still in the game.
• 100th game of the day? You have a +20 bias. If you try to come in as the 20th player, you're not allowed into the game (since 20 + 20 = 40, which is greater than the number of players allowed into the tank)

This had a number of disadvantages:

• emphasis on number of games meant that users would go only for the high-tier tanks
• it was an invisible bias, so the user had no idea when they were getting scaled
• penalized people on the same IP (usually families)

New Method

Here's the new method:

• No penalty until you hit a certain gold amount (currently 150k)
• Afterwards, you are prevented from playing anything except low-tier tanks
• Low-tier tanks never count against your daily limits
• Messages in the tank window that tell you exactly what is happening

Why did we pick 150k as the upper bound? It's the top 1% of users. Ostensibly this will lead to a 2% reduction in the number of plays, but it's hard to predict the actual impact because a) the top 1% played a larger proportion of full tanks (i.e., presumably the slot would have been filled by someone else), and b) the top 1% tended to bump much less frequently than lower earners.

We're a little worried about removing the IP limits, but we'll have to keep an eye on it. Please note that using multiple mules in an attempt to work around the 150k daily limit is going to flag you as a bot.

Gold Balancing We've also slightly reduced the player bonus, since tanks are now easier to get into. We'll be doing further adjustments over the next few weeks to try and get BG and zOMG into approximate parity, both on a gold-per-hour and maximum-per-day basis. Some of the gold that is being diverted from BG will be redirected into other flash game grants. (Although we're still discussing internally, other possible ideas we're considering are a) ramping up CAPTCHA levels as people play more games, or b) requiring a bump every nn tanks, or c) requiring low-level tanks to be played every nn tanks, as well as some others.)

30 More Gold Tweaks

• Topic More Gold Tweaks - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Sep 30, 2011 5:38 pm

More Gold Tweaks

Just in time for the weekend:

• non-potioned zOMG gold curve has been changed from 30k to 50k
• Word bump gold grants increased, for those sesquipedalian sorts
• Jigsaw gold grants increased
• Pinball grants increased

30 Word Bump Gold

• Topic Word Bump Gold - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Sep 30, 2011 10:09 pm

Word Bump Gold

If it doesn't seem like your gold grants increased for Word Bump, please reload the Word Bump game at a convenient stopping point, and try again; edy brought up another Word Bump server and fixed the problem with grants, and re-entering the game at this point will direct you to the new server.

October

03 Alchemy

• Topic Alchemy - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Oct 03, 2011 8:37 pm

Alchemy

We'll try one more week of the marketplace for recycling alchemy components -- Cresento has put up another bunch of items in the marketplace. Last week some users got some really good deals.

Also, starting tomorrow we're going to experiment with something different for the week. We'd like to get more alchemy components out there, so we're going to be putting alchemy components up on Bidblast continuously throughout the week, on two hour bids. This will make the auctions much shorter and more exciting... and gives you the chance of getting a really good deal.

04 Phing Phang Disabled

• Topic Phing Phang Disabled - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Oct 04, 2011 1:33 am

Phing Phang Disabled

A couple of glitches came up over the past few days that we'd like to fix. It will be back up later this week.

04 Booty Grab Tweaks

• Topic Booty Grab Tweaks - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Oct 04, 2011 2:54 pm

Booty Grab Tweaks

• - To facilitate contests and the like, the "bump my thread" link now takes the user to the first post in the thread.
• - Turned off the concept of "bonus tank" for now. All plays count against the upper limit.
• - Tightened up IP restrictions to try and restrict the unusually heavy botting over the weekend.

04 Viximo Sale

• Topic Viximo Sale - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Oct 04, 2011 4:22 pm

Viximo Sale

Over the weekend, there was a sale for some of the Viximo games that advertised a 33% bonus. Due to a configuration issue, the bonus given was actually 20%. By Wednesday we'll be issuing refunds to anyone that took place in the sale so that you get the 33% that was promised -- PMs will be sent to all affected when we do the refunds. If you have additional questions you can use the sticky in the Viximo forum.

04 Missing Housing Items

• Topic Missing Housing Items - Posted: carbonphyber Tue Oct 04, 2011 6:10 pm

Missing Housing Items

We ran into some old code and Gaia Houses currently appears to have "lost" some items. Don't worry - these items are still in your housing inventory. These items are not lost... just currently not visible.

We are working to get this resolved, but it might be a while -- this is some old code!

05 Box Fish

• Topic Box Fish - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Oct 05, 2011 7:27 pm

Box Fish

• - Box fish should now show up properly when placed in your tank
• - also fixed related glitch with aquarium signatures not appearing

06 Viximo Refunds Sent

• Topic Viximo Refunds Sent - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Oct 06, 2011 3:36 am

Viximo Refunds Sent

The Viximo adjustment mentioned on Monday has now been done, and if you were affected you will have received a PM. If you have any further questions please use the sticky in the Viximo forum.

06 Booty Grab

• Topic Booty Grab - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Oct 06, 2011 4:08 pm

Booty Grab

• - fixed CDN issue that was causing some users to get spurious "tank full"
• - there was some discussion about restricting players from playing other tanks on the same IPs. While only 2% of the total plays, it was apparently a very important scenario for some people. We'd hate to be seen as being being anti-friend, anti-family, and anti-Korea (among other things), so before the rhetoric escalates and we're forced to invoke Godwin's law, we've turned off same IP restrictions on tank play.

06 iPhone App Update

• Topic iPhone App Update - Posted: ania1899 Thu Oct 06, 2011 4:12 pm

iPhone App Update

Version 1.4 of our iPhone app has just been released to the iTunes store. Here is what's new:

• - Mobile Daily Chance - scratch away for daily rewards
• - Forums - faster and simpler way to read, reply and post
• - Dressup - change your avatar on the go

06 Interested in Gaia on Android?

• Topic Interested in Gaia on Android? - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Oct 06, 2011 5:18 pm

Interested in Gaia on Android?

We'd be really interested in evaluating the interest for an Android version of the iPhone application -- please go to this thread and give it a cookie if you'd like to have Gaia on Android!

07 Phin Phang Enabled

• Topic Phin Phang Enabled - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Oct 07, 2011 2:27 pm

Phin Phang Enabled

• - Fixed glitch that was causing spurious "item not found" issues for a couple of the fish.
• - Box fish issue in the tank editor/viewer is fixed now
• - Momo and Gwee swapped out
• - For a few weeks we've removed the entry-level cash fish (Octopii, Lazor, Knight, Memphis, Pinchi, and Cooks). We're trying to slow down the creation of new tanks for a bit.
• - If you have suggestions for older fish that should be re-released, please let us know in Gaia Aquarium Discussion.

07 Site Slowdown Issues

• Topic Site Slowdown Issues - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Oct 07, 2011 2:30 pm

Site Slowdown Issues

Some users are reporting incredibly long load times for web pages. While it seems to be an isolated problem we'd really like to figure it out and solve it.

Based on the information we've received, we believe that the problem is related to a particular geographic region and ISPs.

Our mod / admin team has graciously offered to help us gather more information so we can solve this issue once and for all. Please see this thread for details on how to report problems -- there are more detailed instructions than were in the original thread.

07 Forums Lite

• Topic Forums Lite - Posted: ania1899 Fri Oct 07, 2011 3:30 pm

Forums Lite

New Labs feature has just been released. Forums Lite will let you experience faster Forums. It's a new clean and uniform look with no signatures, aquariums, and no post actions. Try it out.

Important Note: Forums Lite will not let you participate in Gaia Events, but you can always easily switch back to the regular Forums. It is an experiment, so it might be disabled from labs at any time.

10 Partial site outage

• Topic Partial site outage - Posted: carbonphyber Mon Oct 10, 2011 3:30 pm

Partial site outage

We had trouble pushing a code change and a missing file caused a lot of site features (namely Flash spaces and Facebook games) to fail. The file has been restored and the features should be back online.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

13 New logged-out home page

• Topic New logged-out home page - Posted: carbonphyber Thu Oct 13, 2011 2:15 pm

New logged-out home page

In about half an hour (about noon on Thursday), we're going to change the logged-out version of the Gaia home page. There was a sticky put up in GCD this morning but I felt it deserved a little more attention.

This only changes the home page, not registration or login. We're trying to add text to the page that describes Gaia (instead of the fantasy island-world picture that has no explanation). Also, you will be able to log in from the header (you won't have to visit the purple login page if you don't want to).

Just wanted to give you a "heads up" so you don't think you're being phished.

14 VJ Removed

• Topic VJ Removed - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Oct 14, 2011 2:55 pm

VJ Removed

Due to really low usage and lack of DMCA compliance, we've removed VJ from the site.

14 Rampaging Monkey's

• Topic Rampaging Monkey's - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Fri Oct 14, 2011 7:06 pm

Rampaging Monkey's

We're having some issues with the monkey's... areas... of... site are... a bit sluuuuuuggish... ...hope to have issues resolved soon.

14 Welcome Back

• Topic Welcome Back - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Oct 14, 2011 8:49 pm

Welcome Back

Welcome back! We're picking up pieces of smoking server from the floor and slowly turning site features back on. We should be fully operational within the next hour.

14 Mobile Payment Errors

• Topic Mobile Payment Errors - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Oct 14, 2011 9:13 pm

Mobile Payment Errors

Boku (our payment provider for mobile payments) is also reporting connectivity problems (unrelated to our own problems, by the way). They are working on the issue and hope to have it resolved as soon as possible.

15 Mobile Payment Working

• Topic Mobile Payment Working - Posted: Panagrammic Sat Oct 15, 2011 12:14 am

Mobile Payment Working

Our provider (Boku) has told us that the issues with mobile payments are resolved, and everything should be working fine.

17 Towns Pools Ending

• Topic Towns Pools Ending - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Mon Oct 17, 2011 3:02 pm

Towns Pools Ending

Hey guys, just a heads up shortly I'll be turning off the pools in Towns. ...Almost time to start re-decorating

17 New Formulas in Bifrost

• Topic New Formulas in Bifrost - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Oct 17, 2011 8:27 pm

New Formulas in Bifrost

Philosopher's Cache and Alchemist's Case.

24 Event Launched

• Topic Event Launched - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Mon Oct 24, 2011 3:20 pm

Event Launched

Hey guys, just fyi I'm still in the process of launching Trick or Treating and the pre-event stuff.

I'm taking my time because a lot of old code has been updated. If you notice anything weird with the shops or towns trick or treating, worldmap, or the event forum, please report it in the Bug Reports & Technical Support forum and give it some time.

Event is now fully launched, still some minor bugs with the counter in towns saying you need more candies and the like, but otherwise everything is stable and playable.

We'll be rolling out additional fixes for remaining bugs today and tomorrow.

25 Trick-or-Treat Boo-boo

• Topic Trick-or-Treat Boo-boo - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Tue Oct 25, 2011 2:06 pm

Trick-or-Treat Boo-boo

It looks like I forgot a Trick or Treat item.

Due to a miscommunication between myself and the art team (internal miscommunication... nothing new there right ), one of the trick-or-treat items was missing from the set.

Sadly I can not go back and retroactively grant it to those who already completed trick-or-treating, however I did increase the replay cap so that those who choose to play again will be able to claim it.

Anyone playing for the first time, or those who hadn't yet completed trick-or-treating, will be granted the item as expected.

26 Primary Event Start

• Topic Primary Event Start - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Wed Oct 26, 2011 12:06 pm

Primary Event Start

I'm currently activating the main event, please be patient while I get things setup.

EDIT 11:34

Still in the process of launching and fixing things in the event. We're currently investigating a problem with death in the Masquerade space. An announcement will be made when I'm satisfied with the state of the event.

26 Event Status

• Topic Event Status - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Wed Oct 26, 2011 7:00 pm

Event Status Hey guys, we're still making changes and fixes to the event. Here's what we've done so far...

FIXES

• Fixed issue with Masquerade space where deaths were not occurring.
• Fixed skill use bug where skills uses were not properly being tracked.
• Fixed protected state bug where some users would not leave the protected state if they attacked other users.
• Fixed title display bug where users couldn't see if someone was dead or in a protected state.
• Fixed achievement bug where achievements were only registering if you made a heal. (...don't ask...)

What's being worked on

• Having friends not properly applying modifier
• Making level gains based on successful attack/heal instead of kills (will also fix heal bug where you won't level through healing)
• Stats not being tracked correctly on landing page for humans.
• Joining event for first time through Masquerade space only puts you on human side.

27 Event Status 2

• Topic Event Status 2 - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Thu Oct 27, 2011 12:06 am

Event Status 2

Hey guys, made a bunch of fixes. Here's what we've done so far...

FIXES: 1

• Fixed issue with Masquerade space where deaths were not occurring.
• Fixed skill use bug where skills uses were not properly being tracked.
• Fixed protected state bug where some users would not leave the protected state if they attacked other users.
• Fixed title display bug where users couldn't see if someone was dead or in a protected state.
• Fixed achievement bug where achievements were only registering if you made a heal. (...don't ask...)

FIXES: 2

• Friends now properly apply bonus attack modifier.
• Level gains based on successful attack/heal instead of kills
• Stat tracking corrected on landing page for humans and wolves. (kills/heals broken for humans, energy display broken for both teams.)
• Joining event for first time through Masquerade space will now properly divide the chances of what team your on in half.
• Item grant tied to successful ability use instead of kills. (Every successful skill use yields a chance to get granted a component)
• Fixed pass by reference value not passing by reference, which resulted in broken player data.
• Updated Sparkledog image, he/she...it? ...had too many legs!

What's being worked on

• Due to the corruption of some players data. I will write a script that will bring the data stored in the database in sync with what is being saved in our temporary data cache. Anyone who is above level 10 will be reset to 10 (10 is the level cap) and will have the opportunity to add the correct number of abilities to their ability list.
• I intend to make leveling individual skills easier. Currently it appears to be to hard to do so.
• Sometimes the javascript animation fails to animate the health bar dropping/raising.

Heading home for now, expect more updates tomorrow.

27 Event Status 3

• Topic Event Status 3 - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Thu Oct 27, 2011 4:56 pm

Event Status 3

Additional fixes/changes...

FIXES: 3

• Made it so you can't delete your own posts in the event forum
• Fixed broken heal achievement; was trying to reference an array element that didn't exist.
• Fixed broken ability selection in IE7 & 8
• Fixed broken change team skills which were allowing people to attack and change the team of a player w/o killing them.

What's being worked on

• Anyone who is above level 10 will be reset to 10 (10 is the level cap) and will have the opportunity to add the correct number of abilities to their ability list.
• Survivor achievement only checked and granted after 24 hours and after performing a skill. Should be checked on each forum page load.
• I intend to make leveling individual skills easier. Currently it appears to be to hard to do so.
• Sometimes the javascript animation fails to animate the health bar dropping/raising.

I can no longer delay in announcing the event. So I will proceed with the remainder of the launch. Once that is done I will then finish and execute the script to correct the players above level 10, then as time allows I'll start making the additional changes mentioned above and in the forums.

27 Happy Birthday, zOMG!

• Topic Happy Birthday, zOMG! - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Oct 27, 2011 7:58 pm

Happy Birthday, zOMG!

Today is zOMG's third birthday! Please come and enjoy the celebration in the zOMG forum or in zOMG game itself.

Just some of the events going on right now (including free stuff):

• Posting anywhere in the zOMG forum for the next few days will grant you a special Halloween zOMG component
• Post in the Birthday Sticky for a chance on a Sweetheart Ring.
• A birthday thread with links to many other birthday celebrations that are going on.
• A giveaway of party favors for zOMG's birthday.
• Bloodstone Amulets are being given away in this thead
• An amazing real-life zOMG birthday cake.
• Sign a cake here as well.
• Join in a birthday boss run, including one for players older than 40!

Now is a great time to find out what the fuss is with zOMG, as there are many friendly people that can help you learn about the game.

We just ask that the noise level be kept to a reasonable roar, as making too much noise might attract the attention of dark and nether powers.

28 Event Fixes

• Topic Event Fixes - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Fri Oct 28, 2011 3:15 pm

Event Fixes

Additional fixes/changes...

FIXES: 4

• Anyone above level 10 has been reset to the levl cap of 10. (Note: there may be some outliers not reset, we'll get to them as we can.)
• All achievement checks moved to event forum page load, this fix should correct the many missing achievement grants. (Note: the checks are run on the skills for the team you are currently on, you will have to switch teams if the skill uses are registered on a skill from the opposite team.)
• Leveling skills made easier.
• Fixed issue with skills following you when you change teams. You should not be able to use human attacks if you are a wolf etc. This fix works by removing the skills that don't belong on the current team your on. (Note: does not remove the skill from the opposite team, if you change teams that teams skills will still be there.)
• Fixed event NPCs not displaying correct avatar image in forums.

What's being worked on

• Some users have duplicate skills from previous bugs.
• Javascript animation fails to animate the health bar dropping/raising. (the attacks/heals still work, you just have no visual notification, only the text at the bottom.)

28 Some New Items in Barton Boutique

• Topic Some New Items in Barton Boutique - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Oct 28, 2011 5:03 pm

Some New Items in Barton Boutique

The artists have put a number of new items in Barton Boutique for those of you that are a) Walking Dead Fans, or b) need to prepare for the impending Zombiepocalypse.

28 Jack Sightings in zOMG

• Topic Jack Sightings in zOMG - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Oct 28, 2011 5:09 pm

Jack Sightings in zOMG

Look, we wanted you to celebrate zOMG's birthday, but we politely asked you to keep the noise level down. The party was way too loud last night, and as a result and now you've caused Jack to make random appearances in zOMG, sending scores of innocent people to the null chamber. We hope you are happy with the mess you have caused!

31 Fixes to login

• Topic Fixes to login - Posted: carbonphyber Mon Oct 31, 2011 3:08 pm

Fixes to login

I am pushing changes to the login JavaScript. If you've had problems over the past two weeks related to login, this should fix those.

The login JavaScript was sometimes running before another JavaScript it depended on was loaded.

If this means gibberish to you, please just know that we are working to fix Gaia one problem at a time. Don't forget to report any issues you find in the Bug Reports forum!

November

01 NaNoWriMo

• Topic NaNoWriMo - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Nov 01, 2011 7:11 pm

NaNoWriMo

It was a dark and stormy night...

Oh, wait, that's Bulwer-Lytton, not NaNoWriMo.

You've never heard of NaNoWriMo? It's "National Novel Writing Month," and we've just opened a new forum for it.

Your challenge? To write a 50,000 word novel in one month.

Your assets? The help and aspiration of your fellow writers, who will give you plot tips, comfort you with encouragement, brainstorm crazy ideas for you to use, and advise you as to the proper time to use mimes in a novel. And, a wheelbarrow. It's always to important to list that as an asset if you have it.

The main website for NaNoWriMo is here, if you'd like to sign up. (Warning: yesterday they were having some problems with the site -- apparently, we've discovered where our old sushi servers ended up -- but it seems to be cleared up by now). There are local writing groups all over, and of course we'd like to think that the Gaia forum could become a good place for writers to encourage each other.

~pan (two time NaNoWriMo winner)

02 Bidblast Updated

• Topic Bidblast Updated - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Nov 02, 2011 9:04 pm

Bidblast Updated

Bidblast has been updated. Fourth slot will be getting components on two hour bids; we're setting that up now.

07 Graphs fixed

• Topic Graphs fixed - Posted: carbonphyber Mon Nov 07, 2011 3:25 pm

Graphs fixed

We cleaned up some old code. Marketplace (and other feature) graphs may have broken for a few minutes but all is working again.

07 Bidblast

• Topic Bidblast - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Nov 07, 2011 8:09 pm

Bidblast

Some users were complaining that they weren't properly awarded for Bidblast.

We just took a look at it, and what was going on is this: when displaying the auction after it has completed, it was shown in reverse order. So, say the bidding history was this:

Bob => Bill => Tom => Frank

... with Frank being the last bid.

After the auction, the history is shown as:

• 1. Bob
• 2. Bill
• 3. Tom
• 4. Frank

even though a) Frank was the last bid, and b) Frank was recorded as the winner of the auction, and c) Frank got the PM to redeem his item.

Confusing, no?

(One question here is: were we properly awarding the very last bidder for the auctions? We looked at the completed auctions and the correct bidder did get the PM.)

We've pushed out a hotfix so that the bidder history is correct for all bids.

08 H2k11 Event Ending

• Topic H2k11 Event Ending - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Tue Nov 08, 2011 12:48 pm

H2k11 Event Ending

The H2k11 Moonrise event will be ending tonight at midnight, tomorrow the final item grant will be available from the event page for about a week. I'll also likely leave the masquerade space up so people can collect the first alchemy item if they missed it.

I'll see if I can get an announcement out when the final event item is ready to be claimed, otherwise keep your eyes on the dev notices.

08 Gaia Slow For You?

• Topic Gaia Slow For You? - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Nov 08, 2011 2:31 pm

Gaia Slow For You?

If you have problems with Gaia being slow (but not other sites), including such things as:

• Pages take minutes to load
• Images sometimes don't show up
• Site shows up as plain text

Please go to this thread and let us know. We have an experimental fix, and have contacted everyone that sent us e-mail per that thread, but would like to try it on more people before deciding whether to proceed. Thanks!

08 Bidblast Not Granting To Winners

• Topic Bidblast Not Granting To Winners - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Nov 08, 2011 3:04 pm

Bidblast Not Granting To Winners

The winners list issue mentioned from yesterday is fixed, as far as we know; the winners list should accurately reflect the actual bidding order and winners from past auctions.

There was another issue, brought up in AtA and SF, that pointed out that legitimate winners of auctions were not getting their PM. We have a fix in review for this, but for now we've gone back to the 9 auctions affected and expired them. You should now have received a winning PM for the auctions in question.

(Specifically: listings 981, 987, 997, 1001, 1021, 1023, 1029, 1039, and 1077 were affected).

09 Final Event Item

• Topic Final Event Item - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Wed Nov 09, 2011 9:27 pm

Final Event Item

...Is currently available!!! Head on over to the event page to claim it. (Note: Only available to those that participated in the Moonrise part of the event.)

An announcement about it will go out later this week. Hope you guys enjoyed the event and thanks for playing!

10 Promoting 2 Labs

• Topic Promoting 2 Labs - Posted: carbonphyber Thu Nov 10, 2011 2:57 pm

Promoting 2 Labs

DevAlerts and Inventory Search have proven themselves as stable and useful to all users. They have been removed from labs and they are now permanently on. If you've never seen either of these features, please enjoy!

The "legal" pages {i.e. Terms of Service, Safety Tips, Rules and Guidelines, Privacy Notice, etc.} have a slightly different URL than they used to. Please update your bookmarks if you care about them. The old URLs should all continue working for some time.

Also, we removed A LOT of unused code.

As always, please post in Bug Reports if you find any broken links or notice that features stop working as expected. Thanks!

10 zOMG Daily Chance

• Topic zOMG Daily Chance - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Nov 10, 2011 5:37 pm

zOMG Daily Chance

So, you dutifully do daily chance every day -- but are you getting all of the daily chances that you deserve? All you have to do is go to Barton Town in zOMG, and spin the colorful wheel for your chance at free stuff. Wheel operators are standing by right now. Don't miss this non-limited-time offer!

http://w.cdn.gaiaonline.com/mfs/index/adminupload/29c0caa6b0a7.png

And wait, that's not all. If you go to zOMG forum right now you will discover an active forum and a passionate community that is more than happy to fill you in on all the tips and tricks of zOMG!

Remember, operators are standing by!

10 Turning Off Dev Notices

• Topic Turning Off Dev Notices - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Nov 10, 2011 5:52 pm

Turning Off Dev Notices

One additional note: If you really want to, you can turn off the dev notices. After you click on one, look at the top of page, just under the menu bar. You'll see something like:

Gaia Forums » GAIA Online » Gaia News & Updates » Dev Notices » Disable Dev Notices

Click on the "Disable Dev Notices" link in order to turn them off. You can also go to the same place to turn them back on -- just click on the dev notice from the main page and then click on "Enable Dev Notices".

We'd prefer that you keep them on, of course, but it is your choice, and to be fair, let us present the advantages of turning them off:

• Learn about important stuff after everyone else does
• Get lots of interesting responses in the forum because you don't know what everyone else knows
• Not be bothered by special events / opportunities that are only mentioned in the dev notices
• You will get the chance to visit the gas station more, since your gas mileage will drop substantially

11 Bloodstone Amulet

• Topic Bloodstone Amulet - Posted: swarf Fri Nov 11, 2011 6:28 pm

Bloodstone Amulet must be unequipped to enter Deadman's Shadow

We've realized that there's a bug where people aren't able to get into Deadman's Shadow if they have the amulet equipped on the avatar. We'll hopefully fix this bug, but for now:

• Remove the amulet from your avatar and re-save
• Go to Deadman's Pass, to the room with the twins and the gate to DMS
• Click the gate, say "Yes" to using an item
• Once inside you can re-equip the Amulet any time

But, Swarf, do I need to log out of zOMG to remove the Amulet?

• Nope, you can do it in a separate window if you want!

Will I have to do this every time I go into DMS?

• Nope, Chuck Testa. I mean, no you only have to do this once. And once we get it fixed people wont have to do it at all.

15 Deadman's Shadow

• Topic Deadman's Shadow - Posted: swarf Tue Nov 15, 2011 4:15 pm

Deadman's Shadow is currently open to the whole zOMG community!

Community time has begun! The community meter will now drain back down over the next 3 days. While community time is on you wont need a Bloodstone item to access Deadman's Shadow. However, you will need to have all eight equipped rings at level 10!

To get to Deadman's Shadow

• Head to the lower left portion of Bill's Ranch
• Talk to Albert if you've never been into Deadman's Pass
• Head into Deadman's Pass along the lower side until you find the Von Helsen twins outside a gate
• Click on the gate!

You should also find a crew to go in with since it'll be plenty dangerous inside!

15 New zOMG Bundles

• Topic New zOMG Bundles - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Nov 15, 2011 6:57 pm

New zOMG Bundles

Based on user feedback, a number of the zOMG consumables have been combined into bundles, so you can buy zOMG power ups and get donator status at the same time.

Check the zOMG store for:

• Double Orb Deluxe Bundle (3 Double Orbs)
• Ghi Amp Deluxe Bundle (3 Ghi Amps)
• Supercharger Deluxe Bundle (3 Superchargers)
• Deadman's Shadow Powerup Bundle (5 Ghi Amp, 5 Supercharger, 2 Revives)

Please note that the orb doublers do not work on the new orbs in DMS -- but will be perfect if you want to level someone up to CL 10.0 to try out the new area.

They are in the zOMG store now.

16 ToT Ending

• Topic ToT Ending - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Wed Nov 16, 2011 12:14 pm

ToT Ending

Tomorrow at midnight trick or treating and the final item grant for the h2k11 event will be turned off and the event forum archived. If you haven't already head over to the event page for your item grant. (Available only to those that participated in the Moonrise part of the event.)

After that head on over to shops or Towns to collect candies and claim this years Jack set before it's too late!

The last few pages of the event manga are still in the process of being made, but don't worry, we haven't forgotten it.

16 Fixing Guilds CSS

• Topic Fixing Guilds CSS - Posted: carbonphyber Wed Nov 16, 2011 3:08 pm

Fixing Guilds CSS

• There have been some styling issues in certain guilds pages since last week. We're pushing the fix to those right now.

Tracking Speed Issues

• We're adding some code that will allow us to better monitor speed issues. Please don't forget to report in Bug Reports when/if you get problems where your browser fails to display images and saiys "waiting for *.cdn.gaiaonline.com" in the "status bar".

16 Pardon Our Dust

• Topic Pardon Our Dust - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Nov 16, 2011 7:13 pm

Pardon Our Dust

We're in the process of pushing out the housing update.

Official announcement will be tomorrow, but feel free to go into housing and try it out! The official feedback thread is here.

Note that if you had previously edited your house with the old data, then you should clear out your house the first time you go in with the new editor.

Changes:

• now based on the latest Flash technology -- should work much better in most browsers
• changed the interface to be more modern
• a number of items are now interactive

16 Housing Update

• Topic Housing Update - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Nov 16, 2011 8:55 pm

Housing Update

Thanks very much for the bug reports in the Housing Feedback thread, they have been very useful.

We have pushed out a few fixes that should a) end the hang at "sweeping floors" (you might even call them sweeping changes, hah!) and b) fixes the black screen when transitioning between housing and towns.

We will be doing more changes tonight and tomorrow morning before doing the final announcement and actual launch of the feature.

17 Another Housing Fix

• Topic Another Housing Fix - Posted: Panagrammic Thu Nov 17, 2011 4:26 pm

Another Housing Fix

Fixed another problem with housing to fix the problem with being stuck at 100% while "sweeping floors." We appreciate the bugs so far -- we have a developer dedicated to this, so please continue to provide your feedback.

18 Miscellaneous Friday Notes

• Topic Miscellaneous Friday Notes - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Nov 18, 2011 7:34 pm

Miscellaneous Friday Notes

• - Additional housing fixes. We believe that everyone should be able to enter the editor (no more hang at "sweeping floors" ). Please let us know in the feedback thread if that isn't correct. We're going to continue to do ongoing fixes in the housing editor, and we appreciate your patience and feedback.
• - The gates to Deadman's Shadow have closed again, and only users with Bloodstones can get into the area. Many users have asked for more specifics on what causes the bar to fill up again, so we'll be doing a post on Monday in the zOMG forum that goes into more detail. (Overall, though, ever since the release of DMS zOMG traffic has jumped about 20% overall, and zOMG / housing are running neck-and-neck for the second-most-popular flash space right now; forum traffic has also picked up extensively, what with all the great threads about tactics for DMS).

21 Minor Dressup Change

• Topic Minor Dressup Change - Posted: edy Mon Nov 21, 2011 6:27 pm

Minor Dressup Change

We just released a minor change to the dress up page. We now show you the thumbnail of the equipped variation instead of showing you the main item image.

So if you tend to have multiple poses of the same item equipped, you can now easily tell which ones you have on your saved avatar!

21 Cash Tree Sickly

• Topic Cash Tree Sickly - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Mon Nov 21, 2011 9:14 pm

Cash Tree Sickly

Cash tree seems to be having some issues, we're looking into it!

21 Miscellaneous Notes

• Topic Miscellaneous Notes - Posted: Panagrammic Mon Nov 21, 2011 9:15 pm

Miscellaneous Notes

• - New Cash Tree is out, but it's not obeying the account settings and is always displaying regardless. We're taking a look at this issue.
• - More information on the zOMG community bar measurement tomorrow (originally was scheduled for today) -- we want to tune the numbers. We are possibly going to do a one time force of the bar to 100% on Friday night so that our weekend users get a chance to try out the new area.
• - Some reports of problems getting into fishing with IE -- if you're having problems please clear your cache and try again, it should work much better.

22 Cash Tree

• Topic Cash Tree - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Nov 22, 2011 2:28 pm

Cash Tree Known issues with the new cash tree page that we're working on a patch for:

• - no longer controlled by account settings
• - doesn't properly hide after all videos are used up
• - not paying out -- we aren't able to reproduce this bug, and it may be related to geographical region. If you can post in this temporary feedback thread with more information, it would help us track it down.

Description of the changes:

We've added a third provider of videos (Gambit Videos), with the fundamental idea being that we try to show you the provider that has highest paying video. Due to implementation concerns and restrictions in the third-party APIs, we were unable to use the previous interface (i.e., a popup when you click the cash tree), so instead we moved it to its own page where we can put a bunch of the free low-effort offers.

Blue Noodle does show up, but it will only show up if you run out of both SV and Gambit offers (since both of those offer providers pay more per video).

We'd like to track down the "not paying out" bug, and then we'll take a look; at least in theory the new system should make it possible for people to earn more free GC per day.

22 Cash Tree Payouts

• Topic Cash Tree Payouts - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Nov 22, 2011 8:46 pm

Cash Tree Payouts

A number of users were running into problems with one or more of the networks; basically, it would tell them that they didn't have any available videos, but it would also not allow them to see any other videos. So, we've made some changes:

• added buttons for V11 and Blue Noodle so that you can just pick which network you want to use
• fixed problem with payout for Blue Noodle videos
• fixed issue with daily limit for BN videos
• fixed weird Gaia-within-Gaia error for some people

In general if you have access to all of the networks, you should be able to earn more now per day, but even if you don't have access to all the networks, you should be at least able to use the buttons to go to the video provider of your choice.

23 Miscellaneous

• Topic Miscellaneous - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Nov 23, 2011 2:44 pm

Miscellaneous

• - We've talked with V11 (formerly Gambit), and they have fixed some bugs that were causing their videos not to pay out. You might try it out and let us know if they seem to have fixed the issues; when they pay out, their videos pay out more for the user than the Blue Noodle videos.
• - Our rockin' ops team has made some changes to our CDN, which means that (hopefully) the site should be responding more quickly for some of you. If you notice the site acting faster (or slower) in the next few days, please let us know in our feedback thread.

23 Miscellaneous, Again

• Topic Miscellaneous, Again - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Nov 23, 2011 3:10 pm

Miscellaneous, Again - the bad link in the recent dev notice was not a hack -- it was just an internal link that was inadvertently posted. Trying again to a) make sure it's fixed, and b) make sure people get the previous message.

(original)

• - We've talked with V11 (formerly Gambit), and they have fixed some bugs that were causing their videos not to pay out. You might try it out and let us know if they seem to have fixed the issues; when they pay out, their videos pay out more for the user than the Blue Noodle videos.
• - Our rockin' ops team has made some changes to our CDN, which means that (hopefully) the site should be responding more quickly for some of you. If you notice the site acting faster (or slower) in the next few days, please let us know in our feedback thread.

23 Cash Tree

• Topic Cash Tree - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Nov 23, 2011 6:32 pm

Last Cash Tree Announcement Before Thanksgiving

I hope, I hope, I hope.

Cash Tree should now turn off after you run out of Blue Noodle videos, and the account settings for "Show Cash Tree" should be working again.

23 Housing Changes

• Topic Housing Changes - Posted: Panagrammic Wed Nov 23, 2011 8:02 pm

Housing Changes

There's been ongoing bug fixes over the past week, and the developer working on the housing editor recently added some modifier keys to help people with placing their items exactly how they want them -- please see this post for more information, if you're interested (basically, arrow keys can nudge, and shift will turn off stacking, but the post also has more information on other bugs that were fixed).

25 DMS Open For The Weekend

• Topic DMS Open For The Weekend - Posted: Panagrammic Fri Nov 25, 2011 3:45 pm

DMS Open For The Weekend

Happy post-Thanksgiving and Black Friday madness! Tired of fighting the crowds at the mall? How about a little zOMG to relax? The gates to Deadman's Shadow have opened for the long weekend -- enjoy!

28 Sonic Update

• Topic Sonic Update - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Mon Nov 28, 2011 1:35 pm

Sonic Update

We have updated the Sonic scavenger hunt so that once you have been granted the profile item 3 times, visiting the page again will turn off the scavenger hunt.

We apologize this wasn't done with he initial release and as always thank you for your support of both Gaia and our sponsors.

29 More Infrastructure Changes

• Topic More Infrastructure Changes - Posted: Panagrammic Tue Nov 29, 2011 6:42 pm

More Infrastructure Changes

Ops has made some substantial changes to our image serving. It should not be noticeable for 99% of users, but those of you that were having problems with slow/partial site loads will hopefully find that the new system is substantially better. If you're running into any specific problems with a) extremely slow site loads, or b) images not loading, or c) site loading but only displaying the text, please let us know in this feedback thread. Thanks!

December

08 Bid Blast Updated

• Topic Bid Blast Updated - Posted: DARKNRGY Thu Dec 08, 2011 8:46 pm

Bid Blast Updated

We've added several new items to Bid Blast today and we have a big list of items to keep it up to date. Come on down and try your luck skill!

16 Profiles Background

• Topic Profiles Background - Posted: st-sri Fri Dec 16, 2011 9:21 pm

Profiles Background

There were about 12,000 glitched profiles with theme issues and we took care of them. Hopefully this resolves any theme issues that users were having. If there is still a problem, please let us know in the Profile Forum section.

Thanks.

20 zOMG Servers Restarted

• Topic zOMG Servers Restarted - Posted: swarf Tue Dec 20, 2011 12:34 pm

zOMG Servers Restarted

The zOMG servers were offline briefly for a small update. This should hopefully fix a rare crash that we saw last week a couple times as well update the servers in preparation for a Christmas item to be released later this week.

28 Quick Links update for Meebo footer

• Topic Quick Links update for Meebo footer - Posted: st-sri Wed Dec 28, 2011 4:19 pm

Quick Links update for Meebo footer

Users can now add, edit, and delete quick links in the new footer. Previously, users could only click on a default set of links. The new feature allows users to add new ones and edit them, similar to the old footer. If you find any problems, please let us know here.

Thanks.

30 Event has ended

• Topic Event has ended - Posted: Narumi Misuhara Fri Dec 30, 2011 1:23 pm

Event has ended

Hey everyone, the Xmas event has ended, thanks for participating! The following is a timeline of when things will be taken down:

• Wing Sticker: 12/30/2011 23:59 PST
• Site event header & link: 01/01/2012 23:59 PST
• Caroling in shops and towns: 01/01/2012 23:59 PST
• Xmas event page: 01/05/2012 23:59 PST
• Forum header and background: 01/05/2012 23:59 PST

Once the site header and link are down you can reach the event page by clicking here or by going to the Xmas forum and clicking the link in the forum header there.

For those interested I'll post misc. stats on the event in my journal at a later time.

• All times subject to change at our discretion.

30 Meebo bar fixed

• Topic Meebo bar fixed - Posted: edy Fri Dec 30, 2011 6:11 pm

Meebo bar fixed

Alright, the Meebo bar should be back for those of you who were having problems. Try clearing your cache if you still don't see it (IE is cache happy sometimes), if that doesn't work, please let us know!

30 New items in Bid Blast

• Topic New items in Bid Blast - Posted: pepper-tea Fri Dec 30, 2011 7:13 pm

New items in Bid Blast

Bidding has started for Gaia-Tan, Silver Bells, Enchantress's Shade, and Firebird Feather Broom. Here is your chance to grab one of them for a great price!