- we still don't have enough information about the avatar display problem in the Philippines. If you can help out, please go to this thread and do the steps contained therein.
Market Shutdown
So, pretty much anything dealing with items started going haywire on Sunday, and we ended up disabling gifting entirely as an emergency measure. So what went wrong?Well, serial numbers on certain classes of items exceeded 2^31 (2,147,483,64 cool on Sunday morning. This isn't a problem in the database, mind you, but PHP treats anything over 2^31 as a negative number, which means that all this code that assumed that the IDs were positive suddenly blew up[1].
This is why, for example, you could sell old items back to the stores, but you couldn't sell new items; the serial number was fine for the old items, but the new items had a serial number that looked negative, so all the sanity checking code in the stores was complaining and issuing cryptic "2004" errors.
We were able to bring up Cash Shop and gift cards up pretty quickly, which led people to postulate that, once again, we were selling out to the soulless corporate overlords that inhabit the cave in the back of Gaia HQ. There's some truth to that -- certainly, issues dealing with real money take some precedence -- but the major reason we were able to fix the Cash Shop and gift card stuff so much faster is that it is just newer, better code; it's well architected and we could make just a couple of tweaks to get everything working. The old code, though... well, suffice it to say that it is "interesting."[2] It took DARKNRGY, Jakobo, and omgwhat a day or two to go through all of the old code and fix it up so it could deal with our new serial numbers.
Find Friends
When we ship a major feature (like the new friendslist / find friends feature), we have something we call the "30 days," which means this -- we continue to tweak and optimize and improve the feature while it's still new and out there. We are looking at adding Hotmail / AOL importing, and we'll be changing the name to "Friends & Ignored."
We are still definitely reading the feedback, though, so if you have something you want to say about the new feature, go to the feedback thread and let us know; WonderSloth is going over it every day.
Security
So, some security changes went out -- the image hiding/blocking seems to be fairly well received. We still have a bunch of things to do on our list, including the following:
- adding CAPTCHA to arenas
- adding CAPTCHA to PMs
- allowing image hiding/showing in profile comments
... and I think that's it. You'll see these changes over the next month.
Inventory Management
Thanks for all the feedback in journal comments about what we could do in inventory. We're taking a look at this to see if there are any quick fixes we can do. We'll be completely redoing the inventory, making it a lot easier and snazzier (and probably in Flash), but that will take a few months at least.
One note, though, since a number of people mentioned it: custom layering is a big deal. I'll go more into the complications that are avatars in a future journal, but the layering itself is complicated enough without each individual user having their own layering.
Other Stuff Rolling Out
- a feature that everyone has been asking for -- this week. Check your header. EDIT: arrrgh, this always happens when I say a date: it moves out! Check next week.
- See you at the prom!
Footnotes:
[1] Bonus question: does this mean that we have more than 2 billion items in the Gaian world? Actually, that's a hard question to answer -- some of the serial numbers are skipped or not used right now, but other item types are treated differently and are in different serial spaces; game items, for example, only count as one "type" of item, even though you might have many of them. We'll be able to analyze this easier after we push out item normalization.
[2] This is not "interesting" good, as in "that was an interesting book," but more like "interesting" not-good, as in you're trying to tell a friend how a date with his cousin went, and you say that "she was interesting," when in fact what you mean is that you met her for coffee but she tricked you into the parking lot and beat you up and took your wallet and then ran off with her boyfriend while pointing at you and laughing.[3]
[3] Yes, I have both interesting dates and recursive footnotes.
I can't wait for new inventories.
Community Member
I have no idea what feature people have been asking for in the header. @.@ I'm so curious now.