[NPC] Cindy Donovinh
Good evening, Gaians. This is Cindy Donovinh of Gaia 9 Action News, bringing you the latest updates from the Gaia administration team. It's been another busy week for Gaia, so without further ado, I will turn you now to the Gaia admins for some important announcements:
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Hey! do you like wearing clothes? Probably not, but it's a sad fact of life that we all have to, or else we'll get arrested. We might as well make the best of a bad situation, though! If you're going to wear anything at all, why not make it a piece of lovely Gaia gear from the GStore?
You can cover your shame in style with two cute new baby tees:
- The ILU baby tee, available in blue or white.
The Gwee Flame baby tee, available in dark grey.
Click here to check out our selection of hats, shirts, trinkets, baubles and knick-knacks. Feel free to order some stuff; we've got lots! We just got a tremendous shipment of enormous boxes of magnificent stuff, and now our stockroom looks like that huge warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones.
Okay, I tricked you, we're not releasing the Monthly Collectibles early or anything. But guess what? L0cke just handed me some pictures of the January items, and WOWZA! I know you probably think I have to hype them up just because it's my job, but you know what? I'm doing this of my own free will. I saw the items, I thought they were awesome, and I decided to add a special new bit to the newsletter about it, just because I wanted to.
So, to placate the hungry masses until the 15th, here are some hints:
- What's the capital of Syria?
What was Paul McCartney's band after the Beatles?
How can you hold a bunch of stuff when you've only got two hands?
What's that big thing they use at construction sites that's kinda the opposite of a wrecking ball?
What do you call the female version of a mixed-up dog?
Can you figure out what they are? Probably not! Click here to find out how to get 'em.
This week, we were pleased, delighted, thrilled, proud, and many other adjectives, to announce the winners of the Gaia 2006 Holiday Art Contest.
Click here to read the list of winners and check out their amazing entries! Many thanks to everyone who participated and voted.
We faced a bit of a hurdle in the process of selecting the winners: some of the images that Gaians overwhelmingly chose as the best were slightly outside the image size guidelines. We decided that since it's our first official contest, we'd be a little more flexible than we usually would. In the process of judging, we paid more attention to the quality of the artwork and the number of votes from members than to the guidelines about size.
We realized that this would upset some people (and boy howdy, it sure did!), but we felt that it would be against the spirit of the contest to throw out so many great pieces of art and so many thousands of member votes over something so relatively minor as the size guidelines. We think that the people who we (and the community) chose as winners were the people who truly deserved to win.
Next time, though, we'll probably be much stricter about the rules. No more Mr. Nice Gaia!
Things have been going full-tilt around here, and we've got some great improvements coming up very soon, as well as some fixes to some long-standing problems. There's some annoying bugs floating around the site right now, but have no fear! The developers are busting their backsides to get everything working better than ever. Here are some of the things we've been up to recently:
- We've updated the payment system for Monthly Collectibles and Gift Credits. It's snazzier and easier to use. Eventually we'll just build a friendly robot that will come to your door and you can drop your payment into his terrifying metal bucket head, but for now this is the next best thing.
We recently disabled the friends@gaia feature, which let members send PMs to everyone on their Friend List, and we stopped giving out gold for sending PMs. Here's what Lanzer had to say about it:
Lanzer
Hello everyone,
We've always been thinking of how to give more opportunities for you to earn gold, and recently we've increased the gold earning for PM, posting, commenting, and many other activities on Gaia. We'll soon be making more quests to give even more opportunities to earn gold also. Though on the downside, some people had found the new gold earning system as a way to exploit the site. They run bots which spam the site, and sell the gold for profit. These botters need to be stopped, and today there will be changes in the PM system to stop the botters.
The botting activities had caused our database to slow down, they cause a large amount of gold to be granted, making prices in the marketplace to skyrocket, and not to mention filling people's inbox with spam.
We are doing a lot in fighting botting activities, and I'm sorry to say that in the process, we will need to disable the "friends@gaia" feature which allows users to PM everyone on their friendslists. On top of that, gold granting for PM will be disabled also.
None of us wish to take away opportunities for you to earn gold, and we will be implementing other ways to earn gold on Gaia as well as make adjustments to the gold earning system to grant more gold on the side. Though more importantly, let's make Gaia free of spam and botters first.
Please be patient while we tackle the botting problems. We'll continue to make Gaia great, one step at a time.
-Lanzer
We've always been thinking of how to give more opportunities for you to earn gold, and recently we've increased the gold earning for PM, posting, commenting, and many other activities on Gaia. We'll soon be making more quests to give even more opportunities to earn gold also. Though on the downside, some people had found the new gold earning system as a way to exploit the site. They run bots which spam the site, and sell the gold for profit. These botters need to be stopped, and today there will be changes in the PM system to stop the botters.
The botting activities had caused our database to slow down, they cause a large amount of gold to be granted, making prices in the marketplace to skyrocket, and not to mention filling people's inbox with spam.
We are doing a lot in fighting botting activities, and I'm sorry to say that in the process, we will need to disable the "friends@gaia" feature which allows users to PM everyone on their friendslists. On top of that, gold granting for PM will be disabled also.
None of us wish to take away opportunities for you to earn gold, and we will be implementing other ways to earn gold on Gaia as well as make adjustments to the gold earning system to grant more gold on the side. Though more importantly, let's make Gaia free of spam and botters first.
Please be patient while we tackle the botting problems. We'll continue to make Gaia great, one step at a time.
-Lanzer
We hope this isn't too terribly inconvenient for everyone, but we feel like it's the right thing to do for now.
Have a great week, Gaians!