Wednesday, June 28, 2006

http://www.gaiaonline.com Gaia Announcements http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15017211 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15017211 Hi everyone,

Gaia now has a RSS feed for Gaia news and announcements! You can see the little RSS button on the front page's News & Announcements section. Those of you who already know what it is will know what to do with it; those who are new to RSS can continue reading below to find out about this technology.


What is RSS:
Rss is a way for sites like Gaia to distribute content to other sites. In this case, you can now see Gaia Announcements from other sites, like Livejournal and Google.

How do I use it?
The best way to learn this is to probably use it! Try the following out:

- For Livejournal:
We created a Livejournal account to feed the RSS: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/gaia_rss

You can add the feed to your Livejournal friend's list so you can see Gaia Announcements in your LJ friend's list ! ^^

- For Google:
If you have a Personalized Home for Google (if you don't have it, see the top right when you go to google.com), click Add Content, then Add by Url and add the link: http://gaiaonline.com/rss

When I click the RSS button I see gibberish!
Yes, that is what Rss feeds look like! You are supposed to just copy the link and feed it to places that accept RSS, and it will output pretty things for you ^^

Enjoy~! The feed updates about every 30 minutes. http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14933521 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14933521 Hello everyone,

There's been a lot of concerns over the look and feel of the new site re-design, and I just want to say that we've been collecting everyone's responses, and putting together a list of things to change for making the new layout better.

As the majority of the comments from the last layout was that things where too dark, we tried to make everything more vibrant. Though we must admit that we seem to have overdone it. That, among many details will be addressed bit by bit. We really believe that this is a layout that easier to navigate, and allows more dynamic content to be shown or customized. Not to mention that they're a lot smaller and make pages faster to load.

So please give the new layout a chance. The more we tweak it, the better it'll become.

There's been talk about Gaia being sold yesterday... Just want to let everyone know that didn't happen. We're only getting funds for more people to help make new features for Gaia. Gaia started as my hobby, and I wouldn't allow its size to change what we meant to do since day one. We're all committed to the one goal of making Gaia fun and free, always.

As usual feel free to send us your feedback. I might not have time to reply to all of you, but I'm always listening.

-Lanzer http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14884995 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14884995 Hello again!

Goodness, so much going on right now! Right now the new features for Gaia Towns are available for everyone!!

These new features will allow you to find a place to live easier, search for active areas, and create topics in towns to talk about. Not to mention if you shake a tree, shrub or hit a rock you might get GOLD

Make sure to check out homes; lighting effects are back!

What's New

• Create topics in Towns and Homes
  
• Create personalized name for your Town (The town where your house is placed) and Home
  
• Check your PM from your mailbox
  
• Shake trees, shrubs, and rocks to find Gold!

Navigate System

• You can now mark towns or homes as "My Favorites" and never have to search for them again
  
• View the most recent 10 topics in Towns and jump to that location
  
• View the current active population of each Town and be where the crowds are at
  
• Mouse over home icons to get detailed information. No more walking door-to-door to see who's living where
  
• Jump straight to your home by using "My Home"

Homes

• Lighting inside houses is now supported
  
  To see lighting in your house, use the editor to place light(s), click VIEW and click on lights to turn them on. Then click SAVE. For a more dramatic effect, turn off global lighting (sun icon in top right corner).
  
  
• house owner's journal and profile accessible from inside house
  
• walls and floors should always display correctly and update as soon as you save your house
  
• avatars should no longer appear in front of objects

System Requirment

Flash Player 8

Enjoy~ http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14646165 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14646165 Hey guys~

Just wanted to let you know that we are ready to update Towns today!

The guys are going to be working on Towns from about 1pm - 3pm, PST and during this time Gaia Towns will be offline.

Thanks a bunch~ http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14837901 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14837901

Hey everyone!

As most of you may know, there are new starter sets for new members! NO MORE PEASANT CLOTHES!

*ahem* ^^;;

Getting to the fun part --- Every single member is able to get their very own Starter Set for Free once you complete the New User Tutorial!

But wait ... there's more!



Barton Boutique now offers all the clothing in the Starter Sets for a very reasonable price! Now everyone can collect all three sets on their own! Just sort by price -- you can't miss it!

Last but not least, there's some new housing stuff too



The Factori now offers a number of items from those same Starter Sets to accessorize your house for not a lot of gold. ^^ Just sort by price -- it's all on the first page!

Thanks for listening~

Happy shopping *runs off to buy stuff too!*

http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14773507 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14773507 And, welcome to the new site. We'll be doing small updates and hotfixes throughout the day in order to catch any glitches that may crop up. Please come by the feedback thread and let us know what you think. http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14773507 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14773507 593 files changed, 12086 insertions(+), 4877 deletions(-)

Here we go... See everyone on the new site design! http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14773507 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14773507 In our final runthrough, we noticed a PM table didn't get updated properly, so we're taking a brief moment to disable PMs and bring it up to speed. After that, we'll get the redesign up. http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14773507 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14773507 Hi Everyone!

We're burning the midnight oil right now getting ready for the site redesign launch. The goal is to launch the new site at 10 AM Pacific Time (6PM GMT) assuming no major problems arise. As with any new feature, there's going to be some good and some bad, so like always, we welcome people's thoughts in the Site Feedback Forum, and specifically in this thread: dedicated to the redesign feedback.

Some very important points need to be addressed though:

Profiles: You will notice that the profile system looks slightly off. This is because minimum integration was done at this stage, as we prepare to launch Profiles 2.0 (now in a semi-public test). We actually had a crazy idea of launching it the day after the site redesign, but we figured that would probably do bad things to the servers. As a result, we'll have Profiles 2.0 up pretty soon.

Towns Update: Okay... this didn't happen. The towns update we announced at Fanime is almost ready! It's going through some stress-testing to make sure we don't break the site when it goes live. Soon, we'll all be shaking trees for money.

And moving on to some things you might notice about the redesign:

More "White": Based on the feedback from the previous site redesign in December, this design has a lot more whitespace, and is a lot more open. The paint splashes give the site a worn feel, and the overall look is a bit cleaner than before. Also, the logo has become a bit more orange in color to compliment the colors.

Landing Pages: Over the past 3 years, Gaia has grown to be not just Forums, but Forums+. Plus guilds, plus journals, plus profiles, plus houses, avatars, arenas, and art. The landing pages under My Gaia, Community, Games, World, and Contribute provide an overview of the content areas, and help bring our members forward with pieces such as the Featured Spotlight and Winner's Circle. We're going to keep these rotating pretty regularly, so there's always going to be something interesting.

A-Z Index: At the bottom of most pages, you'll find the A to Z index. When we changed up the design, a few things moved in the navigation. For example, Shopping was moved under the World tab. If you can't find something, this is the easiest place to look. Everything on the site is listed, and you can even jump to the Full A-Z Index and pull up forums, map names, store names, and more.

New User Tour: New to Gaia? Awesome! Old to Gaia, you might want to check this out too! The New User Tour is a great way to explore and see what Gaia is about. For simply wandering over to the tour, you get the new Starter Sets. Free items that go beyond the Peasant Set! (And old users can pick up their starter sets for free too.)

---

Thanks everyone for all your support! It's been a crazy past 3 months working out all the bugs, and I hope you'll enjoy the new things coming to the site. I look forward to everyone's comments both good and bad in the dedicated redesign feedback thread. http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14646165 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14646165 Sorry everyone, we don't think that the new version of Towns is ready to be released today, especially with the new site re-desing coming out on Tuesday at 10am.

We will delay the release of Gaia Towns until after the release of site re-design and after we fixed all major problems related to the re-design.

Thank you for your patience.

-Lanzer http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14646165 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14646165 Hello everyone,

We will be releasing a new update for Gaia Towns next Monday the 19th. In order to upgrade the servers, we will need to shut down all the mini games and Gaia Towns for a few hours.

The downtime will start from 10am till the early afternoon. We will update everyone with the progress of the update when the time comes.

-Lanzer http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14629709 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14629709 Hello again!

Apologies to our testers -- There were some problems with the testing server, causing pages to load very slow, making it difficult to test.

We have set up a thread for anyone who wants to have a thread to go to;
http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14637327
Only testers should post in this thread!

Thanks again for your help and understanding http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14629709 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14629709 Hey everybody ^_^

There's been some confusion about testing for the new Profiles. Some members who have donated (or a donation was given on their behalf) have been asked to test the new Profile system.

Why are we doing this? Because everyone has different computers and use different browsers. Before making this feature available for everyone, we want to do everything we can to make sure it will work well for as many members as possible.

How have we contacted people? A message asking members to participate was sent through the automatic PM system, using the Admin Account. There is a link in that PM telling them where to test and instructions to post in Site Feedback.

This feature is VERY close to being complete! To everyone who is not testing, don't worry, you'll get to use this soon http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14598961 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14598961 Hello everyone,

For the longest time we had been trying to put together a new site re-design that is easy to navigate and a design that look and feel similar across all the features.

After months of planning and development, the new site re-design is almost ready!

Here is a preview of what the new site will look like. We'll also post the preview in the Site Feedback forum for your feedback.

http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14590889 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14590889 Hello everyone,

The June donation items are finally here! For this month, Gaia donators can choose between the counterpart to the Angelic Halo, the Dark Halo or cool G Blade!



Thank you for supporting Gaia Online and we hope you enjoy the items!

If you don't know how to make a donation to GAIA to receive these items, you can learn how to here. http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14561401 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14561401 Hey everyone! GAIA IS GOING TO BE AT ANIME EXPO @W@~~!!!


What? Where? When?

Anime Expo, July 1st - 4th, 2006.
Anaheim, California.
Gaia Panel: 9:00Pm - 11:00Pm, Sunday, July 2nd.

We hope to meet as many of you as possible and will be bringing lots of kiki and coco plushies to give away



Here's a special announcement from one of our mods, Twistex.



Hello there, Gaia Con-goers.

As many of you know, Gaia will be attending AX this year, and holding a panel.

As some of you may already know, I've coerced our beloved admins to letting me do something extra special for this convention, and I'd like to let you in on all the details. First, however, a short preamble to how this all came about...

I've been a tech-head for years. If it's computers, cars, or things that go boom, I'm into it. I've been building and customizing computer systems for myself, friends and family for about 10 years now. Having spent countless hours on Gaia, and noticing an abundance of computer parts in my home, I decided to build a custom, Gaia-themed computer. I finally settled on a grunny-infested G-Corp theme.

Why does this matter to you? Because you have a chance to win it. I've been lucky enough to receive approvals from the admins to give this custom computer away at the Gaia AX Panel! Following the raffle for assorted Gaia prizes, we'll have one last drawing, and the lucky winner will receive this customized computer, keyboard and mouse! (*change as necessary to fit actual events*)

What the prize contains:

A fully working, customized PC!

Specs: Athlon 64 2800, 512Mb ddr ram, 40Gb HDD, BFG Tech Geforce 6600 GTOC, DVD Player, 2.1 Speakers, Customized keyboard and mouse, Remote Control and Windows XP Home.

The PC has a custom paiontjob with color-changing paint, window etching, lighting, and custom graphics assembled by some very generous members of our moderator team! There's also some nifty things that you'll just have to see for yourself.

I'm very proud of the work I've put into this machine, and I look forward to giving it away. See you at the panel! http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14488483 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14488483 Hey everyone ~

Gaia Towns was not working correctly over this past weekend. There was a problem that we did not know about until today -- The problem has been fixed!

I also wanted to make sure everyone knows that Gaia Towns are going through some improvements right now -- we expect to be finished soon! So stick around to see some exciting changes!

Thanks for reading~ http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14380161 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14380161 Greetings to all, from your friendly Bank Lady. ^_^

There has been a great deal of confusion surrounding some changes made to the Search function of the Marketplace. The original system was functioning, however it was not the best for the site. A different type of search is now being used, which caused some changes that we did not anticipate to cause problems. Today I would like to clarify these changes, as well as give everyone a few tips on how to use the search effectively with these changes.

• Searching with Multiple Words
  The new search system will search for each word individually when searching for an item with more than one word. To narrow the search, add quotes around the words to search for that exact combination of words.
  
  Example:
  
  • Angelic Parasol will return all entries found with the word Angelic and any entries with the word Parasol.
    
  • "Angelic Parasol" will return all entries only with the exact match of Angelic Parasol.
  
  
• Words with less than four letters
  Currently any words with less than four letters cannot be searched for. Items such as the OMG, BTK, Bao, etc will not return any search results. The search system is designed to work this way by default. We realize this is a problem since there are a number of items with three letters in their name.
  
  The good news? We will change the system to allow searches on items with three or less characters. ^_^ There is no estimate on when this change will be completed, but you can rest assured that the change will be made as soon as possible.

With that being said, our apologies for the inconvenience and our gratitude for your patience in this.

Have a pleasant day~

Sincerely,
Meredith
Bank Lady for Gaia http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14245943 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14245943 Hey guys!

The maintence from Monday was completed on Monday. Today we seem to be having some new problems with avatars, which are unrelated to that. But don't worry! We'll get the Dress Up page working smoothly in no time!

Thanks for your patience http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14263949 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14263949 Hey everyone~!

There are more new items for your homes in Aekea's housing store, The Faktori, with equipment to pump up your Avies! Let's get in shape! ^____________^~!!!


http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14245943 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14245943 Scheduled maintence: 12 Noon - 1 PM PST ( 20:00 GMT).

We will be putting the avatar system into read-only mode while we do some scheduled maintenance. According to our tests, the total operation should only take an hour at most. During this time, site registration, avatar saving, and avatar arena / housing arena will be disabled. We will display a system message to let everyone know what's going on during the maintenance operation.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14116423 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14116423 Eep, sorry everyone. The 403 message has returned.

Don't worry, this is still being worked on. http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14116423 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14116423 Hello everyone ^^

Sorry to have caused any panic. Today we were experiencing some technical difficulties and the following message was seen:

Quote:

Forbidden You don't have permission to access / on this server. Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

This message is telling you that you can't view this site, because it was not working when you tried viewing it.

This message is not saying that your account has been banned.

The problems have been addressed, Gaia should be working fine for everyone again.

Thank you all for understanding. http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14057279 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14057279 Hi guys,

Sorry, but the gift credit system ran into technical problems beyond our control during last two weeks.

For those who didn't receive gift credits between that time period, you should receive your gift credits within the next three days.

If you still haven't gotten your gift credits after June 2nd, please fill out a feedback form (choose the subject "Gift Credit Problems"), and we'll take care of the issue for you as soon as we can.

Thanks for being patient with us.

Update:
The data feed has been restored and has now been replayed; everybody our systems knew about with outstanding gift credit orders should have been granted.
Anyone else with outstanding non-grant issues at this time should use a non-grant report to let us know ASAP. Please be sure to provide your PayPal order confirmation number and your Gaia order ID in the report.
Thank you! http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13828017 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13828017 Gaia will be at Fanime 2006!

NOTE: The time was changed for the panel from 2PM PST to 1 PM.

Come visit us anytime at the exhibit hall, check out our new posters and merchandise, and get a chance to spin the Gaia Wheel for a chance to win an item on Gaia, including the chance to win a halo!

On Saturday at 1 PM, we will have a panel to talk about the latest features, development updates, new characters to appear, and give away prizes.


See you there!

* FanimeCon will be held on Memorial Day Weekend, May 26th-29th, at the San Jose Convention Center. For more information, visit http://www.fanime.com http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13802905 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13802905 Hey everyone~!

Theres a big new update in the Barton Boutique, featuring some cute doggie items! Also the new police uniforms arrived in H.R. Wesley's shop in Durem But what I'm happiest to announce is the salon update with tons of new hair ^___^!!!! I might try something new myself :3 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13631627 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13631627 Update: Awesome, it's all done.

Hey everyone--

We're almost done with the migration of our databases to the new servers. When all's said and done, we will have moved over 2,700 tables and over 800,000,000 rows of data! The new databases work together to make sure everything is up all the time. If all goes well, we should have the last of the databases moved by Thursday.

However, there's one piece of hardware we have which doesn't have this sort of redundancy, and that's the Core Switch. Not being a hardware guy, the best I can offer is the "Core Switch" connects Gaia to the Internet, and since it needs to go down for an upgrade, we're going to be disappearing for a bit. During that time, http://www.gaiaonline.com won't go anywhere. For those interested in the facts:

What: Planned gaiaonline.com downtime for improving the Core Switch
When: Wed 05/17/2006 from 9am to 10am Pacific Daylight Time (1700 GMT)
Down?: Everything but we'll be back!

The upgrade should be the first step towards making the Core Switch part of the "never-goes-down" club.

For those who use the Marketplace a lot: we're going to add the downtime to the auction times so that everyone's auctions get the proper duration. http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13607989 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13607989 The data migration completed without incident. Thank you for your understanding! http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13607989 http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13607989 Originally Scheduled Tuesday May 16 @ 1600 GMT, it is now complete.

There will be a brief period of scheduled site downtime between 8AM and 9AM Pacific Standard Time (1600 GMT ). We will be migrating data to new servers to provide a more reliable site experience. The entire site functionality will be disabled for a short period of time ( approximately 45 minutes or less, if all goes well). Once the site has been re-enabled, all operations should resume as normal.

Thank you for your patience.
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