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Long Break
Sorry for the long silence. My vacation was nice, and I was very relaxed, but the problem is that I had all these requests stacked up during my vacation, so when I got back I had to deal with the normal set of requests + the requests over the vacation, which caused me to fall behind even more.

And, this explanation is startingly topical -- see below.

I'll get to my PMs over the weekend, I think -- my apologies to anyone who sent me something and has been waiting on a reply.

Gifting and Inventory
Gifting and some inventory changes will be out Monday -- they are in QA right now.

My Gaia
So we rolled out My Gaia. And pulled it out. And rolled it out again. And then just disabled the feeds. What the heck is the issue?

My Gaia is a heavy user of something that we call the "job system." The job system takes care of lazy evaluation of tasks that we don't want to deal with at the moment. We use this all over the place, especially for logging. Let's say that you've just completed a marketplace transaction -- we have to update the logs that keep track of the marketplace. But, there's no point in making you wait for us to update the logs, since it's okay if the logs are updated in 5 or 10 minutes, so we do something like this:

- complete marketplace transaction
- hey, job system: add (user id, item, price) to the logs

Now, the job system is running in the background, constantly waiting for jobs to be submitted, and when it gets one it will perform it -- so it sees the log request, does it, and then moves on. During periods of high load our job system will fall behind, but it almost invariably catches up -- it currently runs about 100 jobs per second on average.

So, My Gaia rolled out. It uses jobs extensively, every time you:

- post a message -- all your friends are notified
- change your profile -- all your friends are notified
- change your journal -- all subscribers are notified

... so on and so forth. Now, it turns out that there is a whole lot of activity going on in the site, so we suddenly saw the jobs shoot from 100/second to over 2000/second, which is more than were prepared to compensate for, and got us kind of into the situation that I was in with my vacation -- so much stuff stacked up that we couldn't get through any of it. So, we fixed some issues with the job system, fixed some issues with other data structures, tweaked some database stuff, and we're still running a bit hot, so we're trying to figure it out.

My Gaia, Philosophically
I've seen a lot of complaints about My Gaia, especially with regards to "stalking." I understand that sentiment -- I'd a strict privacy advocate -- but the other aspect to consider is that pretty much all the information on the feeds is also obtainable through other avenues on the site. I can search anyone's forum posts, I can just check their profile every day to see their comments, so on and so forth.

I think a privacy option -- i.e., the option to not have your information broadcast to the world at large -- is something that we want to do, but we'll take a look at it after we get the basic feed mechanism working properly.

Manga Mashups
If you look at the manga page now, you'll see that we now link to some of the mashup threads. You're going to see us doing a lot more of that in the future -- I think it's a really cool way to bring the community more to the forefront of the site.

Bugs Fixed (Past Three Weeks)
- fixed Fishing Hole link
- abbreviated the submission process for art so that moderators don't have to approve it
- minor UI tweaks all over the place
- new menus rolled out, which has been discussed to death in Site Feedback
- fixed the annoying problem with flash ads inserting into your history (so you needed an extra backspace to go back a page)
- fixed a problem with the forum polls vanishing sometimes
- changed the way we deal with popular items in the arenas
- auto-generation of suggested tags in arenas
- fixed it so you don't need to pay gold to edit an avatar arena entry
- fixed numerous problems in moderator tools
- tons of bug fixes in arenas