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

Some hot issues that we're working on this week:
Site Is Slow For You?

UPDATE 10/18
- problem with forum messages getting truncated is being worked on; we expect it to go out next Tuesday
- optimizations for ad loading goes out today
- found problem with donators seeing ads in certain countries! Turned out to be a problem with the ad server. This fix should go out Tuesday and will speed up the site for donators, to boot.

Kaya the Indefinite Feline
I wanted to clarify the Kaya the Cat issue, since there's a lot of confusion over it.

The Kaya the Cat (not Tiger, it changed at the last minute) is a bonus item when you purchase a $25 Gaia card from Target. You still get $25 of Gaia Cash to spend on MCs (or whatever). Only the $25 Target card gives you the tiger -- the $10 Target card doesn't give it to you, nor does the Rite-Aid card, or anything else.

In my humble opinion, the current market prices for Kaya are nuts. They'll be flooding the market as soon as people start getting the cards.

Outages
We've had bad luck with outages lately. We had the flooding from the first rain, and our upstream provider cut a link and failovers didn't, and then today we have a database burp in journals. Amazingly, there were a bunch of different causes, and we're fixing the underlying issues.

Speed Issues
We've been tracking down extraneous loads and ads and tracking pixels and whatnot. We removed some last week, and will be removing more this Thursday, so we're hoping that the site will be much smoother for people. But, as always, if you're having issues, please post your information in the thread mentioned above; the information from that thread has been very useful, and we've ended up working directly with a handful of users.

Patch Schedule
I don't think I've ever mentioned the patch schedule. In general, we patch the site twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays around noon -- that's when a bunch of bug fixes go out, small UI changes, so on and so forth. Emergency fixes or quick graphics changes or whatnot can go out at any time, but for the most part the site will change the most on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Ads Being Served for Donators
The wrong ads are being served in some very specific geographic locations -- basically, donators are seeing non-donator ads. We're working with the ad server on this and hope to have it resolved soon!

Theoretical Discussions
One of the things that we've been talking about is this: how do you measure the "wisdom of the crowds" when you're dealing with a society within which members can clone themselves at will and completely arbitrarily?

For example: the notion of a "democracy" doesn't apply when people can create arbitrary numbers of mules. So, one-vote-per-avatar doesn't work, and then you postulate restricting to particular IPs, but it's obvious that won't work either. Eventually every discussion about this leads to either a) a karmic-based system with various elaborate adjustments, or b) some notion of validation which is unworkable.

Any interesting links about this topic would be appreciated!

Other Stuff We're Working On
- more fixes to the BBCode stuff that causes forum posts to go all whack
- new posting form (next week at this point, not this week)
- miscellaneous query optimizations to speed up different sections of the site
- some seriously cool stuff will be hitting in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned