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Development Update 9/8 Finally, the placeholder is replaced. Okay, a quick survey of some of the stuff going on and coming up. Questionable Ads With the passage of spring into fall comes the yearly traditions: the creator dips his brush and sprinkles red and yellow and orange across the landscape, the migratory waterfowl trek across their sky in triangular formation, the leaves decide to depart from the mother tree and party on the ground, and a new stock of obnoxious ads starts showing up in the banner spots. The latest ones to be irritating users are a talking Wii ad and a bunch of the IMVU ones. Also: if there ads that are still showing for you even though you're a donator, we'd like to hear about it -- we try and get those as fast as we can. We are trying to clean this up, so please report them in the appropriate threads. As well, I'm trying to get a straw poll of a) what percentage of people are using adblock, and b) if you're using adblock, what your blocked URLs are, so give me an idea below in the comments. My Gaia At last, the feeds are up and running, and it was kind of a pain. We ended up making it a little bit lossy and a little bit more lazy: the feeds aren't up-to-the-last-second-accurate, but they're still reflective of the site as a whole, and the load on the backend is greatly reduced. Next things up for My Gaia are some more feeds, privacy options, and the friends module. GIM Gaia Instant Messenger is imminent, and might even be out by next week, if some third parties come through. The team on GIM has done an amazing job -- an entire messaging client with a beautiful interface, done in Javascript so we don't leave out anyone. It'll be an interesting experiment; I like the idea of being instantly available to anyone on the site, but we'll see how it works out in practice. In terms of scalability, we'll be anxious to see how the guild chat goes -- you'll be able to send a message to your entire guild, and they'll be able to respond to you in real time. This is great from a community aspect, and it helps promote guilds, but it'll be interesting to see if we can handle the messages in a timely fashion. In preparation for this we're going to spawn off hundreds of worker processes to route guild messages and make sure that they get to the guild members. GIM is why guilds were temporarily broken, actually. We've pushed out the GIM code base to the site over the past two weeks, and in the course of this we added a new caching layer to the guild member list retrieval. A bug in the caching layer caused the functionality for controlling the member list for a short while. Gifting Woot! Gifting is up! It took an ungodly amount of time -- more than it should have taken, really, but the conversion of the old gifting structures was a slow process. Anyway, to celebrate, go give some gifts to someone you care about. Inventory / My Avatar I have to apologize for the inventory changes not going out yet -- everyone involved has been sweating blood on tons of projects lately. The scaling problems introduced by My Gaia and a bunch of other features have had everyone chasing red database clusters, and QA has been booked on too many projects lately: Battle and a highly interactive flash toy near the end of the month and about a thousand other projects. Anyway, we're going to try and push out some inventory changes this week if QA can get a chance to evaluate the new stuff. Some of the things we're looking at for the short term are improving inventory management, adding some new user quests. The current plans call for redoing the inventory system in flash, which is why I put up this thread to ask people if they have any problems with flash. Some Bugs Being Fixed Pushed out this week: - bunches of minor UI tweaks - code cleanup in the backend - changed "watchlist" to idols/fans in arenas - past winner page for special events - fixed the link to the add friend/ignore option - added back PM quote style - fixed an arranger problem - fixed the menu highlight when you go into shops - new anti-bot tools for the moderating team Going out Monday: - new admin panel for arenas (for mods) - bunches of bug fixes in arenas - fixed fatal errors in quest system and Scion prize wheel - fixed some ads that weren't obeying donator status - some performance improvements

Posted by: Panagrammic Thu Sep 11, 2008 @ 09:43pm

Read my journal!

User Comments: [56] Viewing page 0 of 2 · Goto Page: 1 2 » [add]

elleeldritch
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Commented on: Thu Sep 11, 2008 @ 09:53pm


	Woohoo, gifting! I will come back later to see the filler for the placeholder ninja

Commented on: Thu Sep 11, 2008 @ 10:02pm


	surprised YAY!! whee

Miles To Go
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Aldo
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Commented on: Thu Sep 11, 2008 @ 10:04pm


	i hope it'll have something to do with journals and guilds being ******** up. and that it will result in awesomeness.

Commented on: Thu Sep 11, 2008 @ 10:40pm


	I heard the good news from SimplySimeone. smile

muhaymin
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snufflypoo
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Commented on: Thu Sep 11, 2008 @ 11:02pm


	huzzah! place holding cheer

Commented on: Thu Sep 11, 2008 @ 11:33pm


	Your placeholder has angered my love meat!!!

Spirrow
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Yen Quest
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Commented on: Thu Sep 11, 2008 @ 11:37pm


	I'm assuming some people are still seeing ads. For now, I could only think of NPC shops is showing for me. Hooray for Guild chat! ^w^ QA better get to the arranger. People patience aren't going too well. xd All the changes have been bringing more glitches for people to deal with. Arenas for one thing, isn't related to the inventory arranger for sure. But then, it is connected to My Gaia, and My Gaia will connect to the inventory arranger... Hope you're not overworking the staff, I worry about them. e_e;

Commented on: Thu Sep 11, 2008 @ 11:55pm


	LOL placeholder. I do the same thing on occasion. whee

Ami Sapphire
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Platonix
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Commented on: Fri Sep 12, 2008 @ 12:13am


	WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOpant pant pant pantOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!

Commented on: Fri Sep 12, 2008 @ 12:15am


	»ĘмǿЯέжĨç~ÞĨмþ« hase spolder scurries off to gift hoarded items between mules okay, now that it's edited... i don't use adblock (i have it downloaded for some reason though) can't wait for the privacy option NO MORE ___ SOLD FOR ___ ON THE MP!!!! huzzah! GIM BROKE MAH GUILDS?! ... well at least i finally know why guilds are broken... "- added back PM quote style" THANK YOU <3 goes to check out PMs I HAS AN AUTO-FORMAT TOO! SEE?

emorexic-pimp
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dreamsk
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Commented on: Fri Sep 12, 2008 @ 01:35am


	WOOO! Thanks for the hard work on the serializing the items. biggrin I'm using Adblock plus+Noscript~ Here's some of the images I have blocked from the site: http://s2.cdn.gaiaonline.com/images/gaia_global/gaia_header/btn_need0gold_100x18.gif http://s2.cdn.gaiaonline.com/images/labelmyfriends/promo/label_693x449.gif http://s2.cdn.gaiaonline.com/images/mygaia/feeds_placeholder.gif

Commented on: Fri Sep 12, 2008 @ 01:54am


	Yay the feed for this worked. UPDATED: Haven't run into an problems with ads yet. I only once got one with sound but that got toasted moments later. I personally don't block any ads but I use OpenDNS so occasionally it'll nail them for me. If Safari did have ad block, I'd be using it a lot. However, text ads I don't have a problem with. But those Vance Vance ones are annoying as hell. Feeds I have no problem with not being up to the second. I don't really have anything to fill them with yet. GIM powered by Javascript... win. You just got me sold on that. However you said instantly chat with anyone. I hope anyone means people you have as friends. I do not want to be receiving random IMs so I hope the team has remembered privacy settings wink If they didn't, well shame on them. Gifting... nice to know its up. I never had any issues with it. Then again I've only used it 3-4 times. Take your time with the avatar stuff. I don't change mine enough for it to bother me. However, I do have flash and it is the latest, but my computer is from 2001ish so if it's overdone, it's painfully slow. So, just don't over do it. I think that's all I have to comment on. Thanks for another update smile

France Hopper
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Okami Rose
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Commented on: Fri Sep 12, 2008 @ 02:23am


	OMFG I love you panagrammic!! Right before normalization I sent my friend a present and now she'll be able to finally open it!

Commented on: Fri Sep 12, 2008 @ 03:31am


	Hooray for gifting!!! QUESTING Checkered Nightmare 100k/600k

Insanity_Is_Freedom
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GrannyD
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Commented on: Fri Sep 12, 2008 @ 05:00am


	Yip! for Gift-Giving - Thanks sooo much for all your hard work!

Commented on: Fri Sep 12, 2008 @ 05:43am


	YAY! About time! rofl

Mythey Maysonia
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Makoto_Gin
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Commented on: Fri Sep 12, 2008 @ 05:58am


	I love you ninja monk Pan T-T heart . I shall be back later when the placeholder is filled.

Commented on: Fri Sep 12, 2008 @ 11:45am


	Woot woot! Thanks Pan and the Devs!

Morteana
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Akabi Yoru
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Commented on: Fri Sep 12, 2008 @ 01:16pm


	Yahoooo! Thanks, Pana! 4laugh

Commented on: Fri Sep 12, 2008 @ 02:21pm


	I hope the placeholder will bring good news regarding the inventory. As in, the equipped items not going to the bottom but staying where they are, and maybe a different way to look at pagination (loading all items per tab without pagination for example, or an option to choose how many items to load per tab or so.. ). Anyway, I'll certainly be back to check the placeholder out. For now, yay for gift giving! xd heart

Wizler
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KiwiCrystatbelle
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Commented on: Fri Sep 12, 2008 @ 04:47pm


	It's wonderful that gifting is turned back on, Panagrammic. How are you?

Commented on: Fri Sep 12, 2008 @ 08:33pm


	Edit: Java IM? Neat, and another reason to use chrome.

Spriteless Girl
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DogCow
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Commented on: Fri Sep 12, 2008 @ 09:31pm


	<<< Placeholder -- will fill out later. >>> xd btw, the captcha was "WALLED Policeman"

Commented on: Fri Sep 12, 2008 @ 11:24pm


	Yay for gifting being back (hopefully the n00b threads demanding to know when "GiFtInG wIlL be BAKK?!?!?11 will never come back again). stare Anyway, I hope this placeholder will have both an update on what's going on with inventories/arranger (I personally like the greyed-out thing, just not the moving around of equipped items), and especially something on the latest issue that many have been talking about today. What issue? The fact that pages "can't be found" and are timing out all over the site. I mean, MP, forums, journals, and profiles. To post anything at all, I have to refresh at least three times, and it's really, REALLY tiresome. Fix, plz? gonk

Kai-Shan Valandria
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Kiri Azunen
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Commented on: Sat Sep 13, 2008 @ 02:21am


	YAY!!! heart

Commented on: Sat Sep 13, 2008 @ 05:24am


	Oh wow gifting yay. What about INVENTORIES?? And placeholder?Why didn't you just wait until you were finished with something else so you could post it in ANOTHER day/entry. Please hurry up my patience is at its limit right now.

xGHSL
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muhaymin
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Commented on: Sat Sep 13, 2008 @ 07:43am


	You now own the world's earliest placeholder. gonk

Commented on: Sat Sep 13, 2008 @ 09:26pm


	He's got nothing on Duke Nukem Forever. I swear they make that trailer on purpose!

Spriteless Girl
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Spirrow
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Commented on: Sat Sep 13, 2008 @ 10:20pm


	Yeah Panagrammy! This is like putting your turn signal on 5 miles in advance! burning_eyes I don't like being teased! edit: YAY! I REJOICE!

Commented on: Sun Sep 14, 2008 @ 01:56am


	@all: Yah, sorry about that, the placeholder was just meant to be a 15 minute thing. sad

Panagrammic
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Cube B
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Commented on: Sun Sep 14, 2008 @ 02:23am


	It's fine. XD Oooh, GIM. I'm excited about that. And I stopped using Adblock. Though I miss it a bit. Some of these banner ads are annoying. X_X

Commented on: Sun Sep 14, 2008 @ 03:13am


	It's actually 15 hours Pan. Hehe But it's okay. I always have patience for your exciting journal. xp I'm using AdBlocker Plus for Firefox 3... Here are my sites blocked as of now: http://creative-origin.myspace.com/design/_js/rants/ads/* http://cms.myspacecdn.com/cms/Modules/* http://.openx.org/ http://.tribalfusion.com/media/ http://.washingtonpost.com/ http://.i.com.com/* http://.doubleclick.net/ http://*.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads

muhaymin
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Kiyoske Dante
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Commented on: Sun Sep 14, 2008 @ 04:46am


	Currently, I only have popup_ad. .adcentriconline. .atdmt.com/ .clixgalore. .clickthrucash. *huge4.jpg blocked. I'm pretty sure that only two of those are plausible here on Gaia. Thanks for the update Pan!

Commented on: Sun Sep 14, 2008 @ 09:00am


	Just thought i'd post about the adblock thing. I use adblock plus. I'm very untrusting of many ads and such. (expecially since i am the kind who out of boredom plays the stupid little games they use to getcha....) I have a crap ton of places blocked (like i said i'm very untrusting of other sites). Unfortunately i would have no idea how to find what sites i have blocked, although i can surf the net and never see an ad unless it's a part of the site (like the ones that grey screen the background and you have to click on the X to close it). Yeah...i'm lame...lol

Rya Dracosin
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Aldo
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Commented on: Sun Sep 14, 2008 @ 11:47am


	Not sure if I'd ever use GIM, I use MSN Messenger and so is everyone around me, so it will take a lot of convincing to get me to switch or something. I'm still missing all guilds I'm just member of (instead of captain or crew) from the My Guilds list. sad Besides that: yay overworked QA, that means there's a lot of cool stuff coming up! e: I don't use adblock but I messed around with the connection settings so now ads aren't just blocked, there is no way for them to even load on my PC. Pretty much everything with .ad. is on it, but google's text ads are not. I sometimes even glance over them because they are usually relevant, not obnoxious and they usually link to vaguely respectable site. (except those damned gold seller sites neutral )

Commented on: Sun Sep 14, 2008 @ 02:28pm


	Hiya Mr. Pan Sir - As for the 'ads for donators'....when I dontated straight through PayPal and got items that way, I never saw ads (to my recollection). But. I tried to switch things up this past month (August) and not have my money going three different ways (GC, CC payments, and PayPalling to get letters). I just bought extra Cash Cards (conveniently now located at the 7-11 right outside my neighborhood) and got my letters that way. And I got bombarded with advertisements. Wii-Stephanie was particularly annoying, I must say. Could the code be tweaked that anyone who buys a letter in La Victoire (and ergo had to buy GC to support Gaia, therefore must be supporting Gaia with real money) is also put on the 'magical donor list' and is exempt from ad-spam? ~Anai

Anaidiana
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Autumn
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Commented on: Sun Sep 14, 2008 @ 02:45pm


	Donated and I'm still seeing ads in the actual shops. the most annoying are the talking ones. Looks like most if not all of the others have been taken care of, but I'll keep an eye out!

Commented on: Sun Sep 14, 2008 @ 09:20pm


	I don't have adblocker on this computer, but I was forced to install flash blocker when the ads on forum threads started. My computer easily lags if there's a lot going on, and it's hard trying to fish with a flash ad in the background, and now there's like... nowhere to hide on Gaia. I look forward to GIM and the guild changes. I can't access two of my guilds at the moment though, but hopefully I won't need to go there until it's fixed. Question, are you working on fixing the account preferences? I've seen a lot of people having problems with changing their options, because things check and uncheck themselves automatically. As always, I enjoy reading your journal.

zieLiz
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Chema
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Commented on: Mon Sep 15, 2008 @ 01:47am


	Can we get less captchas in profile comments soon? Also, I notice that colons, ":" get removed from comments if they aren't part of emotes sometimes.

Commented on: Mon Sep 15, 2008 @ 06:31pm


	I'm using adblock, and I have gaiaonline.com/advertise/* blocked. At least, I think that's the biggest one, most of my ads went away when I added it. I may have a few other sites blocked. sweatdrop I also have a.tribalfusion.com/* blocked, which is another big one.

SIammy
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Smaddy
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Commented on: Tue Sep 16, 2008 @ 02:21am


	I'm glad MyGaia is finally working okay, and I'm glad that more options will be available. Customizing the Feeds is key to making it really useful, so I'm excited to see what other options we'll have in the future. I can't wait for improvements to be made to the inventory system. Neither my own nor my mule's inventories are behaving themselves, and strangely enough each has their own unique problems! sweatdrop

Commented on: Tue Sep 16, 2008 @ 10:56am


	Hi Panagrammic, It's great to hear that so many things are going on, it's going to be truly great once all of the new features are added and bug issues are fixed. I have actually created a feedback thread which has some bugs which I and other guild owners or members have found, I hope this will be of use to you. Guild Bugs Thread

GamesTesterJan
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Jiang Ryudo
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Commented on: Wed Sep 17, 2008 @ 12:04pm


	heart Thank you for re-enabling Gifting, I didn't realise how much I miss that lil feature!! surprised GIM...? Interesting! heart crying I hope the avatar page can be fixed.. Gods it's hell toggling through tabs... crying

Commented on: Thu Sep 18, 2008 @ 05:42pm


	so does this mean you're still going to be fixing the inventory so it stays arranged how we have it and doesn't put it back at the end if we wear it?

dizzledobsession
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France Hopper
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Commented on: Thu Sep 18, 2008 @ 09:00pm


	I see GIM is "up". Gim System Message: AOL could not be reached. Please try again later when AOL is back up. Buddylist will now close. (502) Good news is with my new screen it fits nicely in the corner. Edit, new one: AOL Rate Limit. We are working on the issue (502). Good to know it's being working on at least. I really want to see what it looks like in action.

Commented on: Fri Sep 19, 2008 @ 12:55am


	Mildly amused that GIM already seems to be broken, but I'm looking forward to trying it out. Guild chat sounds really interesting - is this by any chance the 'broadcasts' feature that has appeared in our moderator panel? I hope you guys can fix the glitches in guilds soon! gonk

JVCA
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Millie Baldessari
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Commented on: Fri Sep 19, 2008 @ 03:22am


	seeing this made me so happy. I feel better about everything now <333

Commented on: Fri Sep 19, 2008 @ 04:09am


	Gaia, Thanks for all your effort in fixing everything while making new fun things. I'm guessing it's really hard to satisfy all the Gaians here! Well, just telling you my thanks for everything that you guys do! heart TeChNo_RaVe Funny thing is, poor guy seen it coming...

Trance Pacifica
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Bunai
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Commented on: Fri Sep 19, 2008 @ 04:31am


	i think there should be a page added to the scroll menu that keeps Users updated about Bugs and Current Developments because people are believing that the Staff are not working on anything

Commented on: Fri Sep 19, 2008 @ 10:51am


	I just subscribed to this journal and I'm not sure what is ok to post here, but I can say I AM a BIG donator, and I'm still having LOTS of problems with ads popping up. ESPECIALLY from CIRCUIT CITY .... they have a couple that when you accidentally move your mouse over them, it OPENS UP to cover most of the page, and hides some of the options in the scroll down menu from the title headings at the top of the page. Others have people walking across the page, etc. I'll have to make a better note of them when they come on. I HAVE a pop up blocker but that does not seem to matter. I also have a virus checker and a spy sweeper that routinely blocks some cookies here that are looking for personal information. ALSO: Who can I ask about the recent marketplace glitch problem? I'm sorry to post this here but since you are a programmer I thought maybe ???? It seems that alot of items from the zOMG box that are ALSO sold in stores and were being sold back to the stores weren't being recognized BY the stores since they THEY WERE GENERATED/ORIGINATED FROM THE BOX. If they are not being recognized as legitimate, alot of people who opened their boxes and sold the items either in the market to someone who bought them and sold them to stores, or sold them back to the stores themselves because the market was flooded and they got a better deal selling them back to the stores - are gonna get hurt, and a lot of them recently have gotten banned for "selling back to the store for purchasing store items for no gold" or some such thing. But many are saying they didn't ... that some of the items came from the zOMG box. If it IS in fact the zOMG box items and something with coding not recognizing the store items that CAME FROM THEM, people should be WARNED about that. I'm kinda scared STIFF about selling anything I got from the boxes I opened, either to the marketplace, or to the stores now that I've heard of this recent problem. I have way too much invested in Gaia to jeopardize my account, and have already gone through that big game item SNAFU, which had me on hold for a few weeks until they sorted it all out and cleaned my inventory up. So for right now, they sit there, just in case it is a glitch, until some answers are forthcoming and I can feel safe again.

rainbowlady1
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