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Wow, what a week.

Hacking and Scamming
Hacking and scamming is a problem. I know it must be devastating to put hours and hours into a character, only to have all your items ripped away overnight. Truth is, though, that hackings and scammings are expensive to fix. We have a bunch of people that devote time to them, and the average scam takes a couple of hours to repair. A lot of companies don't even try to address hacking and scamming, as it is too time intensive.

I'd venture to say that true hacks -- i.e., someone truly using some advanced, nefarious means to acquire somebody else's password -- are a small, small percentage of the total number of cases. Usually it's just someone with a fake login site (phishing) or a PM that alleges to be from a moderator, demanding a password.

Occasionally there are threads on the boards by users, claiming that there is no way that they could have ever fallen for a scam, that their password must have been stolen. I've looked at probably 20 or 30 of these personally, because the user was so convincing that I was sure that it would turn out to be a hacking. But, in every single case so far, it turns out that the user had been scammed by a fake login.

So, that's why we're adding more security features to the site. We blocked the common phishing sites with the blacklist, and tomorrow we'll roll out interstitial pages on external links -- basically, when you click on a link that goes elsewhere, we'll take you to a big red warning page first. (You'll be able to turn off the warning, if you want, but darn it, we want you to be sure!) There are also some sneakier things that we're doing that will be invisible to anybody but scammers.

What else are we doing? We're adding some more people to fix the hacks/scams. Also, we're going to be sending out a message to users asking them to confirm that they want their hacking case to be taken care of -- this will weed out the users that never log in anymore.

Cash Shop
Cash Shop was a wild ride last week. There were some really, really hairy issues with IE that had to be dealt with, and I won't go into details except to mention that IE is the devil's work, for sure. It makes me want to get an IE voodoo doll!

There was a sound and a fury raised over the evolving items over the weekend -- basically, an offhand comment by a new intern led people to believe that evolving items were never going to be finished. (I have to admit that sometimes it seemed like my poor attempts to explain things only confused people more.)

So, to clear up the major issues:
- there's a sticky up for the Evolving Items FAQ
- they do NOT need to be equipped to evolve
- we're good on both code AND data. This is not another [fill in your favorite languishing Gaia feature here]
- none of the items have evolved to the next stage yet
- the items will evolve at different rates, and we won't reveal the rates. (But you should be able to see some changes while eating cranberry jello).
- the poses available for the different items differ according to the item; some have incredibly complicated posing setups. We aren't going to give anything away but... when your item goes into the first stage of evolution, it'll be obvious.

They will turn out pretty neat. I'm not carrying this bottle on my back for my health, if you know what I mean.

Wallpapers
The new wallpapers are out, and not only are they cool, our own omgwhat (developer and cubicle-tin-foiler) has a wallpaper featured. I've always wished that I could draw -- it is one of those talents that has eluded me, like learning another language. Clearly the obvious course of action is to live in another country for a year while making a (scant) living as a street artist.

Coming In The Next Few Weeks
Interstitial pages and some backend speed improvements tomorrow; the friends list gets fixed in the "My Gaia" page on Thursday, and other miscellaneous bug fixes.

Major feature rolls out next week -- no hints allowed, sorry, except to say that it's very cool. Also, by mid-Novemberish we plan to roll out some neat ways to keep in touch with Gaia.