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Updated: fixed glitched stores half-sentence.

Hemingway talked about a "clean, well-lighted place," but I think that's changed in the 21st century -- I'm all about looking for a "clean, well-lighted coffee shop with wireless," which doesn't scan as well and perhaps explains why I'm not a Hemingway.

Easter
Happy Easter! Didn't the events team do a rocking job?

Now, the funny thing is this -- I'm on the site 8 hours a day, reading forums and fixing stuff and testing stuff -- but even though it's my job to be on the site, I've only picked up the second basket. I think I missed that gene that selected for egg-spotting behavior; I guess my ancestors never had to deal with wooly mammoth eggs.

Guilds Landing Page
User feedback was straightforward, but one key message was:
- you did the landing page but you didn't add my feature here

Where my feature here is usually guild PMs or thread subscriptions or reasons to spend guild gold, but could also be almost anything else.

I hear you. We've been promising to clean the house, and when we say that we've finally started doing something with the house, you go there and discover that it's a new coat of paint everywhere -- very pretty, but doesn't address the issue with the moldy food in the refrigerator or the laundry that still needs to be done.[*1]

But, imagine that paint was lethal, abestos-laden lead paint? You'd feel differently about it, wouldn't you?

It's maybe not obvious why we're doing things in this order, but it actually does make a kind of sense; there's a certain order that we need to tackle these things in order to addresss the issues in guilds. It's a code base that's three years out of date, moldy beyond belief[*2], and there's an ordering that is the most efficient. We improved the searching, we improved the landing page, and the next thing we'll do is take a look at the admin functionality. One thing we do need to do is gut out the guild forums and replace it with our new forum engine: this is a task that is daunting on many different levels.

To be honest, it will be a huge motivation if we see guild traffic start to increase as a result of our efforts so far -- many of the devs believe, fundamentally, that guilds is core part of Gaia, but we'd like to know that our changes have been for the positive.

LIHP
The new logged-in homepage went out, and other than one quick bugfix it all went smoothly. User reaction was pretty good except for a couple of things:
- people liked having the friends module on that page
- "Lights On" + announcements seem redundant

Both of these are things that we're looking at. However, be aware that we're going to adjust the header and footer for the site in the next month or so -- shifting around functionality, adding some stuff, and I will finally get the system announcement indicator that I've been begging for. After we make the changes, the friends that you have online will always be available to you.

Stores
The stores rework is in QA and it's looking good -- we hope that you'll like the changes. I know that a lot of old-time users have been lamenting the demise of the different NPCs, but you'll actually see that they aren't getting pushed into the background. Lanzer feels that the NPCs are actually critical to the atmosphere of Gaia, so they are not going away.

Arenas
I posted in a couple of forums about the Avatar Arena, asking if we should increase the fee. The general indication seems to be... yes, increase the fee, if only to keep up with inflation, but also add back in the 4-votes-per-IP limit and randomize the spotlight a bit more. This is something we've talked about quite a bit, although we're a little worried that it would unfairly penalize people that log in from schools and the like. Anyway, we made some adjustments to the spotlight, so we'll see how it goes this week and then evaluate what to do.

EI Museum Updated
At the back of Gaia, there is a locked and barred door which has no key and cannot be opened. Behind the door is a monster, ancient and fierce, that cannot be harmed by any weapon nor tricked by cunning strategems. The monster guards a computer which cannot be turned on, and on this computer is the one program that can access the EI Museum.

Oh, wouldn't it be cool if that were the case? In reality the EI Museum wasn't updated because... it hadn't been updated. Pirula finally decided she had had enough of this nonsense, and went in and updated the database entries, and what's even better than the fact that the EI museum is updated is that she has fallen afoul of ancient custom that states "the last person that touched any site feature now owns it!" Buwahahahahahahah....

Fixed Trade Page
Some users with tons of trades (and by tons I mean hundreds) have been reporting whitescreens when they go to the Trade page. This is a memory limitation; since there's no pagination for that feature, at some point you could have enough trades that PHP would run out of memory when trying to render it. Anyway, we've pushed out a temporary fix -- you'll only be able to see about 50 of your current trades. Rest assured that your other trades are still in the database, you just won't be able to see them until you cancel or complete some of your trades.

Long term solution for this is to add pagination to that feature. One more thing for the list of stuff to do...

Mailer Updates
Our current mailing system, held together by baling wire and tape, is getting a shiny new replacement on Monday. There may be intermittent problems with the alert mails on Monday night, but otherwise we expect no complications from this. This will allow a number of things that users have been asking for -- for one, it will allow people to opt out of particular types of messages, but even better, it improves the bounce handling.

Previously, all it took was one bounce for you to get put on a blacklist -- and e-mail providers like Hotmail frequently bounce back e-mail, just because the host is too busy and they want you to resend it later. So users would get into this situation where they couldn't log into their account (because they couldn't remember the password), and then couldn't send themselves a password reminder (because they were on the blacklist).

I've ended up fixing scores of these situations -- it's kind of a painful manual process -- but the new mailer system is much smarter about putting people on the blacklist, and will make it much easier to remove people from the blacklist as well.

Bugs Fixed

- Users not able to get upgraded rods even if they have gold and previous rod.
- Old Arena links takes to white page
- RSS feed does not watch the Community Announcements forum anymore
- Mobile Wallpaper - Promo tab removed
- Menu enhancements
- fix for showing item description instead of item ID
- Spelling fixes by the Ninja Grammarian Squad

I have three piles of clean clothes: the clothes in the dryer, the clothes on the dryer, and clothes near the dryer. I view this as efficient; why bother moving the clothes from the dryer to the closet when they're just going back into the dryer eventually anyway?
[*2] Ironically, one way you can tell old code in the Gaia codebase is the use of "molds."