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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?

Bugs We're Working On
Fix for donator ads showing up for some users in particular countries goes out tomorrow. Also, the new posting form should be going out this week if everything goes okay in QA.

Also: this week we'll be announcing some improvements in community communication, although with the word filter controversy it might get put off a bit.

Word Filter
I'm going to do something that I normally don't do in this journal, and that's to talk about something controversial, but I'm pretty sure that both of you that read this will be fine with it.

As no doubt many of you noticed, the word filter went active Friday night. To say that it was controversial would be understating the case -- suffice it to say that it galvanized the community like nothing else, even more than the 2% marketplace fee.

But the thing is that nobody here liked the word filter either. Gaia has always stood for freedom of speech, and we go to considerable lengths to try and ensure that.

However, as Gaia gets larger, it becomes a more and more tempting target for a lawsuit, and it is important to realize that the law doesn't always make sense. Laws are why we have warnings on coffee cups and peanut bags and medicines, why a sharpie pen can be considered an instrument of copyright circumvention and therefore outlawed, and why insurance is so expensive. Especially in the area of technology, the law often makes no sense at all, because technology is so fast moving and most lawyers and judges don't know the basics of how a computer works, and we have to be so careful in this area, because law enforcement takes it very seriously.

So the word filter rushed out on Friday for reasons that I can't go into, and no one was happy with the solution, and while the lack of announcements might have made it look like Gaia the Big Evil Corporation was ignoring everybody, in fact the e-mail and phones were burning over the weekend, trying to figure out the right thing to do -- right for both the community and the company.

So, we looked at it, and decided to take a step back, to eschew an automatic filter, to trust in our ability to proactively fight against those who would harm others, and to depend on the amazing efforts of our moderator team. I think it's the right decision.

Ultimately, I think what defines us is not the mistakes that are made, because mistakes will always happen. What defines us is how we react to the mistakes, and deal with them, and learn from them, and I think we learned a lot from this incident, and we'll pay attention to the lessons as we go forward.

Halloween Event
Gaia is a complex beast and hard to predict at times.

Load testing is something we do a lot of before rolling out an event. Unfortunately, it is hard to determine what will happen -- there is some amount that you can do automatically beforehand, but in reality it is difficult to calculate what will happen when 130K thinking, breathing people all hit the site at once.

What hit us on the Halloween event? Normally, someone reads for 20 minutes, makes a post, so on and so forth. Call it 3 posts an hour. With the Halloween event, your typical user is making a post every 120 seconds and refreshing a lot more than they were before -- they're making 30 posts an hour. Suddenly, the load jumps a magnitude higher with more people than ever before.

So, while the servers didn't melt down this time, they did start creaking under the load, and if we had any red-shirted Scottish engineers around they'd be saying, "Cap'n, I dinna know if she can take much more o' this!"

So, we found some bottlenecks with the different usage patterns. We're trying to fix 'em -- we'd really like this to be the best Halloween event ever.

Cash Shop
VJ went out and caused some interesting load issues, so we delayed Cash Shop to this week. Cash Shop caused the usual uproar, and I won't go into the issues in much detail, but would like to point out some things:
- Cash Shop items are very much like monthly collectibles, except with a greater range of prices (making them more affordable)
- they are fully tradeable on the marketplace, which means that even if you can't afford them from the Cash Shop, you will still be able to get them in the marketplace
- prices for Cash Shop items should drop to the same conversion ratio as MCs. So if there's an item that you must have that is 25 cents, don't buy it for 1M gold on the marketplace -- wait a bit, and it should eventually drop to about 1000-1500 gold. (I say "should" because it's all up to the marketplace, but in general prices will trend downwards).
- between making a wide variety of items available, and giving people some free Gaia Cash to play with, and allowing the items to be traded on the marketplace, and a whole host of non Gaia Cash items we've released, I think that we've tried to do the right thing for all people on the site, not just the donators