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Development Update 6/15 (edited) Sometimes, work is a mystery! The Case Of The Growing Mailboxes Some of you noticed that the mailboxes grew last week. It all started with an errant background process. You see, we have a program that runs every night that sends PMs to people that have sent invitations. Unfortunately, last Thursday the process kept getting interrupted. Usually, it does this: a) send PMs to everyone, and then b) mark everyone as having received their PMs. Last Thursday, it instead kept getting interrupted when it was sending PMs... so, like a person with no short term memory, it came back to the task 5 minutes later, forgot where it had left off, and decided to send some more messages. So, while it didn't affect many users, it did end up sending about 100 e-mails to some people, which is definitely uncool. In the process of getting rid of all that junk e-mail, we ran into a situation where the task would be much easier if the mailboxes were larger: so, we made them larger. Don't get used to this new size -- it's currently set to 500, but that's a little high given the traffic on PMs, so we'll probably drop it back down to 100 or so. EDIT: We'll definitely make an announcement before we do this, so that people can delete anything that they don't need. The Case Of The Whitescreening Inventory I had reported earlier that the inventory arranger problems were fixed, but it turns out that they were not; a real fix for inventory arranger should go live this week. Also, pages will come to the "customize avatar" page this week, which should make the whitescreening problem MUCH better for people with large inventories. The Case Of The Unwanted Feature Label My Friends. Oh, drop this, it's too contentious to try and touch this week! The Case Of The Evil Browser Firefox 3 went live today, so, everyone, please, go to the Mozilla site and download it today! If there is anyone or anything that deserved the label "skanky fugly drama queen", it is IE6, and the sooner we are rid of it and can concentrate on supporting newer browsers, the better. EDIT: Ah, sorry, apparently Firefox 3 resamples any images that are enlarged, resulting in pixel art being blurry. This bothers some people greatly, and some people are moving back to Firefox 2 because of it -- so, be warned. It's supposed to be fixed in the next version of Firefox. Personally, I find the speed and memory improvements are well worth it, but caveat downtor (let the downloader beward). The Case Of The Frequent Bug Fixes Stuff we should be fixing this week or early next: - inventory arranger fix - pagination in customize avatar - you should be able to bulk accept friends - "find username" in PMs - ink distribution in Daily Chance. (EDIT: Basically, you had a random change of getting any of the inks, but in reality, you should never get a purple or pink ink, and the rare inks should come up more infrequently). - user count was not displayed correctly in some places - a problem wherein changing your e-mail gave you a "already exists" message - connection problems in Towns - some antibot measures - increased percentage chance of CAPTCHA in forums to stop an increase in gorespam

Posted by: Panagrammic Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 09:51am

Read my journal!

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Bria_Teragram
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Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 10:16am


	I look forward to actually being able to dress up in the future without having to move stuff constantly back and forth between my storage and inventory. heart heart Not sure who to really poke about things. But I think the news about fishing last week seems good. On a related note, I think many of the fishers who have fished in the previous months would like to know if they will actually get any trophies or not. Since no one seems to want to give us a straight answer. I hope you know of someone who could give us that answer. :3

Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 10:38am


	Awesome ^___^ It'll be great to have my Dress Up page loading, hopefully. I'll put it to the test when it gets handled wink

Darien S.
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Non Toxxic
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Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 10:38am


	Ooh yay. Thanks for your hard work. goes to download Mozilla Firefox 3

Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 12:02pm


	I did notice the larger inbox, I was surprised to see it, and also happy about it. It's a shame that it's not going to stay large. crying Maybe we could pay to have the larger inboxes? ninja

Aeolusis
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Wizler
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Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 12:35pm


	Score. I've been looking forward for a fix on the inventories for over half a year. gonk I'll finally be able to buy store items again (.: goes and sells some stuff for pure to go on a store item buying spree, as he missed out on like half a year of awesome clothes updates :. ), move like 1000 items from storage back to my inv, and move like 50+ items from my mule back to my main (including almost all Evo Items D: ) Yaay! My inventory is like going to double in size once the inventory doesn't show white pages anymore. rofl heart

Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 12:59pm


	Quote: The Case Of The Unwanted Feature Label My Friends. Oh, drop this, it's too contentious to try and touch this week! I lolled. I actually don't have any problem at all with the concept; the execution leaves a great deal to be desired, however. It'd be great if we could make the avatars ourselves, or had a wider range of options for each existing "label" ... I labeled a couple friends just to see how it worked, but none of the labels I wanted were there, and all of the avatar options were pretty ugly. sad Yay for a new Firefox though. I'll have to check that out when I have more time. biggrin

Rayinte
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Ginger Flare
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Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 01:45pm


	Oooh, yay. Time to upgrade from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 <3 Had I not read this I wouldn't have known it was out of Beta. xP; Anyhoo, I don't mind the labels. Just wish we had better options. </3 Like some positive ones sweatdrop and some class (mage, knight, etc.) related ones. Of course, we've yet to get those items that those avatars had long ago. emo <I am emo over that, I want a black mage outfit soooo badly. I still don't see why people need more space in PMs XD I delete them after I reply. -shrug- But then again, I'm not popular. </3

Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 01:47pm


	crying I have posted on the Word Bump feedback forum to no avail. The game has a problem at level 30. It states a "server sync" error after entering the first word and reloads 29's tiles, but calls it 30. There is no item bonus at 30 and this error repeats indefinitely. This has been going on for a week now. I have been a member for 3 years with no problems. I have tried updating my IE 7.0 and Firefox on both my computers, but the problem remains. My OS is XP Professional SP3 on one computer and XP Home SP2 on the other. This also occurs on our guest's MacBook as well. My ISP is Comcast out of Manassas, Virginia. The Word Bump feedback forum has several postings from all over the country with this same problem and the same duration. A week is a long time for a game to have an unresolved malfunction. Please, please fix this server issue. Thank you for your time and assistance in this matter. http://www.gaiaonline.com/games/launch.php?g=wordbump

gdoggieluv
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Cleocatra
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Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 02:59pm


	Firefox 3 is making dressing up avatars uncomfortable D: Firefox 2 didn't blur enlarged pictures. Firefox 3 does, so it makes the avatar all blurry while dressing it up. Which is uncomfortable. On the plus side: WOAH IT'S FAST

Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 03:09pm


	But. I LIKE having a big PM mailbox. D; Its nice. Before the change my savebox was already at 54% full and now its at 5%. D: <3

Sgt.PepperHat
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Kunai Jones
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Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 03:48pm


	If you're going to shrink the PM storage again I'd humbly recommend making an official announcement about it. I'm sure there are power users that have already filled their newly expanded saveboxes with important messages, and if the size gets cut all of the ones they treasure most, the oldest ones, are going to get deleted. But thanks for setting the cap to 100 instead of 50. That way even if a user took all of the messages in their inbox at the time of expansion and saved them to a previously-full savebox, everything should still fit. But some people may have already expanded beyond 100 messages in their Savebox. So an announcement would be appreciated. Labelmaker can be salvaged if some of the more offensive labels are changed and some flood control measures are added. As it is now anyone can completely wipe out the contents of a person's PM box just by spamming that app's submit button with hundreds of requests. That could be a major problem, even if it's Friends-only. It would also be nice to create our own labels, so we can be reminded of how we met a Friend, in what forum/thread/guild or whatever. Then the feature would have some actual utility for existing users. I really like the idea of inventory pagination, but I hope it doesn't require a full reload between pages. If that's the case I think it's going to end up costing more time than just waiting for the initial load of a non-paginated inventory. Would it be possible to have an Account setting for this? Firefox 3 runs like a dream, but there's an issue with it. They're using a new library called Cairo for scaling, since you can now zoom images and text on a page with ctrl+scroll. But the Cairo library resamples all images that have been upsized from their initial size by default, even without ctrl+scrolling to zoom the page. This is good news for sloppy web designers, bad news for Gaia and its pixel-perfect graphics. The avatars in the Inventory and Customize Me pages are getting fuzzed out, and listings on the marketplace feature newly blurry icons. It's better in 3.0 than it was in the RCs, but it's still apparent and very hard to ignore. I'm sure somebody will swab up a Greasemonkey script to obviate this, but for the moment it seems to be all on Mozilla's shoulders as far as responsibility goes. The only way Gaia could fix this would be to re-render avatars the icons and avatars at the expanded size when on those pages, or change to rendering that size innately and then downscaling to the forum size, neither of these options being worth the effort or server load. Anyhow, just a heads-up on the only glaring flaw I've found with FF3. If a Greasemonkey script or about:config setting is released you might consider having an official FF3 Fuzziness sticky in Q&A where you can link to it or give instructions on how to fix it. Because I'm sure you're going to get a lot of questions on this issue as more and more users upgrade. Lastly, sorry for the TL;DR, thanks for fighting the gorespam, and are you cutting down on ink distribution or boosting it? EDIT: Here's a blog in response to the blurring issue. It didn't make it into 3.0, but apparently it will be in 3.0.1, at which point hopefully Gaia will be all pretty again. A link has appeared! Do you click it? Oh, and definitely try the about:robots trick. It's hilarious.

Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 04:25pm


	The Case Of The Growing Mailboxes: An announcement would DEFINITELY be polite at this point, since I'm sure some people will lose messages when you shrink them back down. You could give people a 48 hour warning over a weekend or something. The Case Of The Whitescreening Inventory: I'm not sure I'm happy about inventory pages. I've got a humongous inventory, so I'm definitely happy to hear about fixes for these problems. That said, pages? So we have to reload our items every time we want to combine items from one side of our inventory to another? I'm not thinking this is a good idea at all, especially if there are only, what, 100 or so items displayed at a time? Sometimes I'm wearing 10+ items. That's 10+ page loads. D: Even if it's AJAX, I'd rather the items start loading in the background instead of making server requests each time; chances are the items I want aren't all in one section of my inventory. The Case Of The Unwanted Feature: xd Sorry, guys. I think this one was just not well thought out. The Case Of The Evil Browser Quote: If there is anyone or anything that deserved the label "skanky fugly drama queen", it is IE6... HERE HERE. xd Everyone else has already informed you about the Firefox 3 problems. The Case Of The Frequent Bug Fixes: MORE CAPTCHAS! Woo. I absolutely LOVE the little things. They come up with the funniest phrases, seriously. They're a joy.

AlexDitto
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Lazarus Larkin
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Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 04:57pm


	I dunno, Firefox 3 is pretty damn ugly. It's faster but they made it all square and blocky and stupid-looking, and I wish I could turn off the huge dropdown thing that shows up when you start typing in the address bar >.< Also, when you go to edit your Gaia avatar, it's all blurry now for some reason.

Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 05:09pm


	I honestly love the new PM box size but if must go then I shall deal with it. I just need to reminded myself to delete messages more often. I honestly think it's ridiculous there is a petition and people complaining about the label feature. I've been called much worse by other gaians on this site, much worse. I find the label feature funny. I mean within my group of friends we constantly poke fun at each other. But we know everyone is joking... Well I had fun with it and even enjoyed what I was labeled. Perhaps kids these days are simply to thine skinned.

iType
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Erebea revius
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Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 05:54pm


	Quote: The Case Of The Frequent Bug Fixes Stuff we should be fixing this week or early next: - ink distribution in Daily Chance I have to ask exactly what about ink distribution with the DC that needs to be fixed exactly. I've not seen any issue where I've been getting it in abundance or not getting it at all.

Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 07:14pm


	Firefox 3 messed up my Customize Me screen! scream Not really, but it did make the avatar a lot blurrier than usual. On the other hand, IT'S SO FAST. Usually it takes me like half a second to put on items while dressing my avatar, but now the item instantly appears on my avatar when clicked. ^^ Nice.

hwip
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Gamine
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Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 07:15pm


	The Case of the "Pan go to sleep why are you always up so late!" Wow, I'm bad at this xP I'm actually curious about the ink distribution thing as well..I know Juno mentioned something about a tattoo update some time in the near future, are you guys cutting down on the ink being given out because of that?

Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 07:38pm


	heart

Belle612
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Kiyoske Dante
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Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 08:36pm


	Pana, thanks for the update. Very helpful. Can you make a quick edit to let everyone know in your journal that the update to FF3 has a Cairo render update and that it tends to make PNGs that are up/down scaled blurry? There will be a fix in 3.01, but put out a warning to those you advocate plox. Also,I've been using FF3 betas and RCs for a while, and I'm glad to state that FF3 is more memory managed than prior FF releases, and that alone is a good start for soapbox preaching! =D

Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 08:46pm


	Can we at least have 200? xd ; I know that for some it seems like a lot but like.. after being on the site for so long, I have several PMs that I have saved to remind me of stuff and such. Those do tend to add up. D: Plus, I'm lazy and not having to delete things instantly would be awesome. \|D

Infamous
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10Mil_Peace
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Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 09:08pm


	here's an idea for inboxes: GOLDSINK!!! if it goes back to 50 for each, then have it 10,000 gold to upgrade to 100 each and another 10,000 to upgrade to 500 each! that way those who don't need it will keep their gold and not have the larger, server space hogging inboxes, but the few who actually need 500 pm holding inboxes can get them, and since not many people will really need them that big, it won't hog too much server space! domokun stargate

Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 09:09pm


	Tried commenting at the school comp. Failed. ;____________; Thanks for the update again. ^^ Even if it was at 1 in the morning. v.v I looooove the big increase in pm space. I wanted a large inbox <3 I have to clean it out every other day with how it was before. Now I don't have to so often. ^^

PinkMeansEvil
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Lady Rebellion
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Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 10:08pm


	LOL smile D: Blurry avis!! LOL Its loading faster though. xD Thanks!!

Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 10:09pm


	The enlarged mailbox system is a big help for me...my guild shop used to force me to clean my out my inbox several times a day, but it's been a few days now and I haven't touched the delete button yet biggrin Must you really shrink the size to even 100? How about 200?

Radimir
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Miles To Go
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Commented on: Wed Jun 18, 2008 @ 10:10pm


	NOOO! PAGES?! I DON'T WANT TO RELOAD MY INVENTORY 8 TIMES JUST TO SEE ALL MY SHIRTS. I'M BEGGING YOU, FLASH OR NO PAGES AT ALL!! T_____T You may think I'm jumping to conclusions but they had the pages system in item norm testing, and it was not fun. T____T It took a minute+ to load each page of Tops, please dear god noo. T__T PS: I'm assuming it was okay to mention that since you basically just announced the feature anyways. If not feel free to delete my comment? <__________<; Edit: Whoa, FF3 is nice. But it disabled alot of my firefox add ons, AND my anti-virus. )))): I can't use it unless they change that. DX

Commented on: Thu Jun 19, 2008 @ 02:12am


	I love you just for the comment of FireFox and IE surprised I love my new FireFox 3 heart

The_last_alchemist
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Minapot
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Commented on: Thu Jun 19, 2008 @ 06:06am


	The Case of the Growing Mailboxes... Is there any way for us to maintain the 500 spaces in the PM system? or 200? It would be a great help for me and for a bunch of people to have all that extra space! I wouldn't mind to pay for the extra space! The Unwanted Feature... I have to agree 200% with the ones who do not like this feature, it gets on my nerves. As of now it only uses social stereotypes... But maybe if we had Battle or Anime Labels it could actually work as something fun! Thanks for all your hard work!

Commented on: Thu Jun 19, 2008 @ 06:32am


	@Everyone: added edits to the journal to talk more about FF3, ink distribution fix in DC, and a little bit more on the mailbox. Thanks for reading.

Panagrammic
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Edible Substance
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Commented on: Thu Jun 19, 2008 @ 07:02am


	I'm on point with Wizler, although I can't imagine how long he's waited, for me it's only been a few months but it seems like forever. I actually enjoyed the labeling feature, it seems I always tend to like the stuff Gaia ends up getting rid of. I would also love to pay for the bigger inbox service if that's what it took. I also appreciate all the work being done to stop the Fishing bots.

Commented on: Thu Jun 19, 2008 @ 07:44am


	Thanks for updating your journal about ink, but I personally don't see the reason for changing it. Why shouldn't people get purple or pink ink, aren't they considered a rare colour anyway? I feel dropping the frequency isn't a good thing, aren't tattoos meant to be accessible to everyone? Not every user can access Towns to get bugs because it isn't possible on their computer or too many users are in Towns (we all know how glitched/laggy Towns can be), and DC doesn't give enough bugs to make ink with - so DC being their only 'free' way of getting ink. If you must make this change, then at least increase the frequency of common inks a little, so it'd be easier for them to obtain the (so called) rare ink. I guess I also have to question just why is this change being made after so long, I've only ever seen a couple of people ask for this - and their reasoning was not selfless - so is this change really necessary?

Erebea revius
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Kathleen Starr
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Commented on: Thu Jun 19, 2008 @ 11:52am


	Quote: - inventory arranger fix - pagination in customize avatar - "find username" in PMs - ink distribution in Daily Chance. (EDIT: Basically, you had a random change of getting any of the inks, but in reality, you should never get a purple or pink ink, and the rare inks should come up more infrequently). - some antibot measures <33333

Commented on: Thu Jun 19, 2008 @ 02:44pm


	Shrinking PM boxes? Why? Over a glitch? The added space is awesome. Can we maybe have a space of 200 PMs at least? Well at least there'll be an announcement. I just hope it'll go out in time. So inventories will be getting patched again? Good. Starting to get some glitches now. I take it you really don't like the-feature-that-must-not-be-named? I'll side with you on that one. It's not really needed and pretty meh. lol more FF3 issues. Priceless. Looks like a nice big line of patches going out. Excellent. Especially nice to see Towns is finally getting patched. I think that's a tad overdue but you guys have been busy with lots of other stuff so no surprise there. Thanks for the updates smile

France Hopper
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Bunai
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Commented on: Fri Jun 20, 2008 @ 12:21am


	^_^;; could you at least consider moving the two large images "flaunt it" and "label maker" out of the Inventory? or at least reduce their size, its a bit much. and its really distracting.

Commented on: Fri Jun 20, 2008 @ 01:54am


	gonk I wish I knew about the fire fox ( resizing) thing before hand gonk oh wells

Simica
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Morteana
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Commented on: Fri Jun 20, 2008 @ 07:32pm


	I see all the people unhappy about the inbox size shrinking... and I wonder if they realise all the server space that it would take for all the millions of Gaians to have that much space, especially if full! I understand that some people DO have important PMs and such, but so many of them? I just worry about the people who are too lazy to delete the messages overrunning the system which would then cause the servers to lag, which would warrant a complaint, then if Gaia had to buy more servers, the money would have to come from somewhere. I know people would say it's not a big deal, but it's remarkable how much space the 1-word pms can take up. If you're having a casual conversation, wall posts are great and those ARE unlimited. hides from rotten tomatoes

Commented on: Fri Jun 20, 2008 @ 11:16pm


	Still not a fan of pagination of inventories the way you've described it. I really hope there are some show all tabs. confused

Nobara
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Platonix
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Commented on: Sat Jun 21, 2008 @ 01:53am


	/Reads note about ink distribution/ gonk Why are you picking on Purple!? Here, and in the tattoos...There's no reason to pick on purple! Look, let's get this straight. The following colors of ink are relatively easy to obtain because there are common bugs in these colors: Red Yellow Green Blue Brown Black Other colors, barring rare bugs, are gotten by mixing these. You get Orange by mixing Red and Yellow. You get Purple by mixing Red and Blue. You get White by mixing Red, Green and Blue. When you've done that, you get Pink by mixing Red and White, or Gold by mixing Yellow and White. THE RAREST INKS SHOULD BE PINK AND GOLD! Pink! And! Gold! *Not Purple!!* Knock it off with the Purple hating! (fume fume fume) ...ahem Um. By the way. Thank you very much for fixing the glitch where recently-obtained items couldn't be sold through the inventory arranger. That was very helpful of you. Yes. >_> <_< ... /runs away/

Commented on: Sat Jun 21, 2008 @ 04:35am


	The "Customize Me" screen also suffers the 'blurry image' effect, too, in Opera 9.5. whee I know this, because my mule Knux Emerald is logged in on there. I won't upgrade to Firefox 3 from version 2 yet. 3nodding

Ami Sapphire
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da-maniac
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Commented on: Fri Jun 27, 2008 @ 05:14pm


	Yeah!!! Go FireFox 3!!! But a lot of plugin's aren't compatible yet D: DONT Click! LOL Questing: Gwee Cloud Donate? heart

Commented on: Fri Jun 27, 2008 @ 05:58pm


	xD. I thought I needed new glasses becaude the imgs were blurry on Firefox3

pure dark star
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biteme38v
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Commented on: Sat Jun 28, 2008 @ 05:01am


	the fishing CAPTCHA system is telling me the words typed are wrong even tho they are spelled correctly, Is others getting this problem aswell? ninja pirate

Commented on: Sat Jun 28, 2008 @ 06:11am


	I know this is a little late, but I just noticed the larger PM boxes. There really needs to be an announcement about this to clarify for those that do not stalk your journal. 3nodding So I made a stupid mistake right off: I went to move PMs from my Inbox to Save box. My Save box was full before so it says 10% full, but it acts like 100% which I found out when I lost a number of the older messages I had in there. (IE. I moved about 15 in there so the oldest 15 were automatically deleted to make room). If an announcement would have been made I would have known it was temporary and not done that. It's always best to keep the public informed. Many needless problems can be avoided this way. I would also like to suggest a Trash box. It would save the sanity of those that do not want to lose important PMs from the automatic replacement thing or their own stupid mistakes. Between larger boxes and a trash box the Gaia PM experience would be complete. xd (And wow is this CAPTCHA hard to read! eek )

kaiken
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