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Hey! This journal is updated through the week! So check every so often.

The hot issues that we're working on this week:
Site Is Slow For You?
Trading Not Working?

If you have either of these issues, please add your input to the thread! We're trying to get reproducible cases.

UPDATE 10/12 -- outage
It rained here in California. This is a rare enough event that people stop and get out of their cars and point at the sky, exclaiming, "Water! From the sky! Have you ever seen anything so strange?"

Perhaps I'm exaggerating a little bit. But the first big rain of the season does seem to bring floody catastrophes, and it happened here -- our server farm was cut off from the outside world.

UPDATE 10/12
Take new store items. Add thousands and thousands of people trying on their new stuff. Watch avatar servers melt down.

Updating avis last night was taking way too long, and it was because everybody was updating theirs at the same time. Should be fixed now, though!

Made more changes to the pages to make them load faster. Users had reported that the quantserve tracking pixel was taking a long time to load for them... so we decided to take it out.

UPDATE 10/11
Made some site tweaks to make pages load faster. Also, there was this really strange bug where some words (such as "windows" wink would cause page formatting to go all whack -- that's fixed.

UPDATE 10/10
Towns went down for a bit -- a bug had been injected due to some changes that we were doing for upcoming stuff.

We fixed the PM problem with the vend refund, so you should be getting your vend refund over the next week, along with a PM. There were a few thousand users that got gold without a PM (so if you're wondering why you suddenly ended up with an extra thousand gold, that is probably why!), but we'll figure out what to do with those users when we finish sending out everyone's money.

Also rolling out tomorrow: a tweak to make the site load faster for everyone.

Gaia Is A Web We All Weave

I received a bug yesterday via a note on my chair. It was from accounting -- they were complaining about the printed order form for MCs. They were complaining because they had talked to users, and users had complained that they had to print multiple pages. So eventually the bug made its way to development, and it got fixed.

If you trace the path of a feature or a bug through Gaia, you'll find that they each take different windy paths before being fixed. Some come from a developer that believes a bug is really important to fix; some come from the artists or accounting or other groups in the company; tons come the moderators; and many come directly from users posting in the forums (for example, the recent fix for dice in guilds came from forum feedback).

I'm not sure I really have a point here, I just find it interesting how input from so many different people across the globe comes together at Gaia.

Site Slowdown

We're still looking at this -- as far as we can tell, users in particular geographic locations are having problems. We're still actively looking at this, and we're working with a number of users to track this down. In the next couple of weeks we're also going to be doing a number of changes that should make the site faster; more information as we get it.

PMs Down For Three Hours

PMs w about 5 minutes. No data was lost because the other computers in the cluster had backups of the information. We failed over to one of the slaves, and we were running without a hitch...

... except later that night the slave went down from about 2am to 7am. Now, we _still_ didn't lose any messages, because we have backups upon backups... but still, the server that the web pages talked to was down, so people couldn't read PMs. So we fixed it (and by "we" I mean "other people did all the work and I'm just writing about it" wink , and then fixed the thing that caused the server to go down, so we should be good.

Oh, The Mail

To keep everyone informed, I logged in and made an announcement -- and since I couldn't remember the password for the NPCs, it being 6am in the morning, I just decided to post it as myself. Ten minutes later, my mailbox was close to maxing out.

I appreciate all the kind mail (and by "kind mail" I mean "all the mail except the people begging for gold and telling me that they hate me" wink . But I ended up deleting a lot of it because I am working with a number of users on speed and performance issues, and I didn't want to lose any PMs due to a full mailbox.

So... my sincere apologies for not responding and rejecting trade requests/friend requests for now. I read the mail, but don't have time to respond to it, at least not until it dies down.

However, to answer the most common questions, and in order, they are:
- the problem with Word Bump granting gold is that it is too easily botted. We're looking at ways to fix this.
- my "flaming Q-tip" is the July collectible, "Fire Flower."
- yes, working for Gaia is great
- no, I can't donate, I'm sorry!
- sushi!

Vend Refund

We're working on this. Some people have already received their refunds (as of last count, 250k people). Unfortunately, the sending of the PMs got bogged down, and we're looking at solutions for it.

Bug fixes rolling out

- mostly moderator-requested bug fixes
- art arena is now up to date -- instead of a backlog, when you submit a piece of art, you will find it quickly approved. So go ahead and post your best pieces!
- some speedups to the posting form, hopefully
- minor tweaks and enhancements