If you have any information on any of these, let me know!
- CDN problem in the Phillipines (avatars not showing up properly)
- editing of profiles has been broken for a while? Anyone care to describe this one? It seems to work for me.
Passwords
I had promised to explain how exactly we can verify your password without knowing your password, so if you're interested in the extreme nitty gritty details, go here.
Find Friends
We're redoing the friends interface. You'll note we've done minor tweaks over the past couple of weeks -- made the upper limit 500, for example, or giving you the ability to easily approve a bunch of friend requests -- but we've got a whole new shiny interface coming in the next week or two, and we've made it a lot easier to find your friends on Gaia by searching your address books on other sites.
Over the next several months, you'll see a lot of other changes done to try and make Gaia more of a "friendly" place -- that is, it should be easier to find both old and new friends.
Which leads us into the discussion of the new account option we added. Basically, we added an option to allow you to choose whether or not a friend could find you on Gaia:
The question that comes up is this: why did we default this to "yes"?
We went back and forth (and back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth...) on this, but finally decided to default to yes, for the following reason: we aren't giving any information away other than just the fact that you use Gaia. Given how easy it is to make new mail accounts, and the number of avenues for anonymity, we thought that it was a reasonable course of action to take.
Longcats and The Philosophy of Persuasion
I should perhaps bypass contentious issues, but given that it's been affecting the site for the past week, it seems apropos to talk about this. I am predisposed to believing that the Gaia community, as a whole, is mature enough that I can discuss it. So, the basic story: Gaia made a virtual item based on a internet meme that was originally based on a photo. In the description of the item there was even a mention of the internet site that originally promoted the meme. The internet site was displeased, and decided to try and spam and phish until the item is removed from the marketplace.
When the artists do an item that is based on an idea or concept from somewhere else, the thought in their heads isn't, "I'm going to rip this off!" It's much more like, "This is a cool idea, and I'd love to pay tribute to it." An example: the towels that we recently released should strike a note with anyone who has read the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. There are certain limitations in what we can use: legally we can't take copyrighted/trademarked things and make items out of them, so you will almost certainly never see the Official Harry Potter Sorting Hat(tm) in the stores. But that does leave us with a huge selection of ideas and memes that are available in the public domain, and in fact, the use and reuse of memes is what makes them so very popular. Without the ORLY owl being taken up and popularized, it would be a super-obscure Internet trivia question instead of a well-established meme.
Over the past couple of weeks we've seen spam and trolling and phishing attacks up by some measurable percentage, so there is a non-zero effect there. In some ways this entire thing has been really good for the site: some companies pay for security testing, and we're getting it for free.
The tactics are loathsome. Forcing gruesome images on unsuspecting people is a juvenile tactic at the innermost core, and does not endear me to the aims of the group. Nor do such tactics as botting the moderator reports -- they were deliberately injecting false reports, which means that legitimate safety issues might have been delayed.
But there are some aspects of this which show the fundamental strength of Gaia. I worry about the effect of this on the new users, the ones that aren't as knowledgeable about phishing and scams and whatnot, but I can't tell you how many times I've been reading a thread with some question, have started thinking about a reply, and then found that it is properly answered by another Gaia user. On the whole I've been impressed by the reserve and intelligence of the community.
And the dev team is here, day and night, watching over Gaia.
Community Member
Heh, I like the rejected memes xd