New Homepages
Many people noticed that we added a couple of new home pages. This is part of an ongoing thing -- we're constantly rolling in new home pages to see what responds better to people coming to the site for the first time.
You can view the different ones by doing adding a paramter to the main page: www.gaiaonline.com/?newhp=<pagename> and the page name. The different page names are "express", "miniyou", "comm_anime" and "comm_photo".
Arenas
A couple of weeks ago, we rolled out changes to the popularity algorithm to try and make sure that entries with only five votes don't win. Looking at the winners for the past couple of weeks, it looks like the changes helped immensely, but let me know what you think.
Inventory and Avatar
DARKNRGY rolled out some changes last week that reduced the memory consumption of inventory substantially -- and it worked well enough that a bunch of people that had been unable to load their inventories for the longest time were suddenly able to load them.
But that is not all. Fieryange1 is currently working on improvements to both the back end and front end of inventory. The new UI is much cleaner (but more white, so we'll get complaints about that), but should offer all the same functionality in a manner that's more approachable to new users. She'll also be adding some changes to improve the performance.
7-11 Cards
Our $10 ZOMG cards hit 7-11 a bit early, which means that some people didn't get the items that they were supposed to get. That was fixed early this week; if you redeem your card now, you should get your items.
As for everyone that didn't receive their zOMG bundle yet: We're running queries to figure out everyone who should be getting their items (it's a slow query to our provider -- we actually don't keep track of the UPCs on our side), so as soon as that's done CSR will be taking care of granting everyone's items.
Guilds Being Changed
Over the next few weeks you'll be seeing some changes to guilds. Guilds is one of the great features of Gaia, but it's been kind of the ignored child in the corner for a while.
Anyway, to make it easier to use, we're going to add the ability for guild owners to specify interest tags for their guilds. When people are interested in finding a guild about, say, linux (I can dream!), they can search for the keywords that the captain has picked for the guild instead of relying on the title of the guild to contain the word. This is the first step of a bunch of other changes: following this we'll be trying to automatically match up users with guild based on the user's interests vs. the guild's keywords.
You'll also see some UI tweaks and whatnot as we try and modernize the look a little bit.
Bugs Fixed
- edit and delete buttons not showing up in arenas
- fonts too large in "view equipped item"
- fixed problem with feedback form
- fixed alignment problems in IE6
- fixed bad markup for deleted journal comments
- fixed verizon wallpaper
- fixed landing page rendering
- add refund when person withdraws avatar
- fixed <strong> and <span> rendering in profiles
-
Community Member
I like the new landing pages. Inventory is being worked on? <33333 AND guilds?! <33333333333
If it's possible with the storage arranger, I'd really like to see the ability to put separators. That way all my old envelopes are separate from extra sponsor items, etc. :3