I was experimenting with different representations of the traffic of Gaia; it helps give a better feel for who is doing what on the site at a time. For your enjoyment, you can see the map from about 3:00pm yesterday:
Of course, this is running live in our offices, so it's interesting to see how the visualization changes over time (although I clearly need to change the way that the site traffic is represented -- ugh, more time).
Guilds Changes
Over the next few week you'll be seeing one small feature addition and a bunch of UI tweaks to guilds.
We think that people are overwhelmed by the number of guilds, and the difficulty in finding an appropriate one, so we're adding the capability for guild captains to add keywords to their guilds -- that is, five words or phrases that best represent your vision for the guild.
This is part of a longer term plan to make it much easier for us to promote guilds to people; we can, for example, offer them likely guilds based on the interests that they've filled out on their profile.
I always hear from people that keep asking us to do something about guilds, so this is a good chance to demonstrate that guilds are important to you -- fill out the keywords for your guild! We're hoping to get a good set of keywords so that when we turn on keyword searching for the users, they'll be able to find stuff.
(Another way of looking at this: if you fill out your keywords, you'll have an advantage over every other guild that does not fill out the keywords).
The reason guilds hasn't been updated in a while is that it's running on an substantially different source base than forums. It's been on our list of things to renovate; it's just a lot of work that needs to be done to migrate it over, and we're trying to prioritize it against everything else that needs to be done.
GuildBot
GuildBot was broken for a bit -- we had to go in and clean up some stuff, and it should be working again.
Inventory / Shopping Changes
You probably have already seen the announcement about some of the inventory and shopping changes that we will be pushing live in the near future. The look is substantially different (and seems well received by about half the people, hated by the other), but the advantage is that it should perform substantially better; fieryange1 has done a bunch of changes to try and make it speedier for you to use.
The inventory arranger won't be touched in the first update. I'm still hearing about a number of problems with the arranger -- mostly that it is slow to load and sometimes still jumbles items up.
New User Quest
We're reactivating the new user quest in the next couple of weeks. The rewards aren't amazing -- no exclusive items or anything -- and it offers nothing challenging for most of the readers of this journal, since it is really basic stuff: voting in a poll, updating your avatar, stuff like that. However, it does offer a more... gentle approach for Gaia, since the feedback consistently received is that Gaia is kind of overwhelming to the first time user.
Edit Buttons Vanishing Mysteriously
We had a problem in the forums where people would suddenly not be able to edit their posts, or they would have an edit button for other people's posts, or something like that. [72] had a suspicion that it was the template cache -- a cache that we use to speed up page rendering. He changed forums to disable it, and it turned out that it appeared to fix the problem (or, at least, the users that I was talking with say that it's fixed, so that is good enough for me -- I always found the bug perniciously hard to reproduce).
Page Speedups
Over the next month we'll be retooling some of the Javascript code on the site, trying to make it load and run faster. Coaster_vn has been taking a look at our menu code, which is apparently ungodly inefficient, so he's replaced it with a much lighter, faster version that speeds up both load time and makes the menus work much better.
Invading North
This isn't definite yet, but -- we are seriously looking into making our cash cards available in Canada. More information if this becomes definite.
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