Welcome to Gaia! ::


Thanks to the Easter event one of the older bug related to item opening or item using had been fixed.

Another easter egg that some users might find are links which says "daily" and "all time" on the bottom right hand side of the forum topic listing page. The ability to view the most popular threads will be available, as thread rating will also be a means of easily finding good quality threads in every forum. These features will be online real soon, probably next week.

Part of the requirement of Gaia reaching beta is the ability to scale according to demand. It's the idea of making the site faster by adding more machines with programs that make the machines work with each other instead of upgrading one machine to make the same old programs run faster. The task is easy on static web pages, but for the Gaia forum it's a big challange. The last bit of details had been planned out, and we just need some time to write and test the code at this point. Of course, nothing really happens to the user's end, pages just load faster. sweatdrop For us as developers though, it's a goal that's taking more than two years to complete. whee
After an entire week of debugging the new site re-structuring is complete. There will be no change to how things work around the site, but in general the URL of many scripts will be changed. sweatdrop

To eliminate server lag there is a whole new navigation system in place for viewing threads and topics. It isn't the easiest way to navigate, but I do believe that it's better than having to move back and forth through time values than through page numbers.

On the background, the reason we made all these changes is so that we can have our web servers boot up and work without having a hard drive running! With more than 70 web servers, hard drives can die out pretty often. If we no longer need hard drives then the web servers will last much longer. 3nodding That is part of it, the other part is that we will now have a "version control system", something used to avoid mixing up changes when a lot of people are working on the web site at the same time.

The new version of Gaia Fishing will be here really soon! blaugh Can't wait for B5 to finish with the changes. The new inventory organizer is about to be finished also.
There were a lot of major bugs caused by the recent restructuring. Avatars weren't being saved, people could not register new accounts, rare event not showing up, etc...

Hopefully most of the bugs had been fixed. In a few days I'll be working on the database stuff yet again to fix the problem with old posts not being able to be edited. We've got this gigantic storage area network (SAN) that will be put in service real soon. eek

Meanwhile, part of the profile page is being re-written in Flash. The cool feature will be announced real soon, followed by the next version of Gaia Fishing. blaugh
The big storage network is finally up and running. Very soon the forums will start using it and we should see better performance in the forum areas.

The graphic server had also been updated to a really fast web server. Users with fast connections should see images loading much faster now, hopefully. whee

The problem with accessing the profile page for those with a lot of items has been fixed. The problem will also be resolved when the inventory re-arranger goes live next week.

There are also a lot of changes that will take place regarding avatar saving and displaying. Soon everyone will be able to have static URL for their avatars along with small icons that they can use freely outside of Gaia. 3nodding
Sorry for the many broken avatars found around the site. The servers for handling avatars are being changed right now and soon everything will be back in working condition. sweatdrop

The forum server ran out of space again. . . More emergency work had done to make space, and hopefully within two weeks our new forum database system will be in place, and once everything is up and running there should be no more disk space errors, no more trouble with archiving servers, and no more lag because there won't be any more database replication happening. whee

Many of our focus lately had been towards expandability. Though it's all coming to an end and we'll be able to strictly focus on features, stories, quests and games before next month. wink
The recent rollback hit us real hard as developers. More than 40 hours were put into restoring the accounts back to what things were, and to restore moderator actions and donation items.

We can finally focus back to working on new features now. The rearranger should be officially released sometime tomorrow, and other flash related features are almost done! Still a lot of work to do on the backend for handling bandwidth, but everything should be transparent to everyone.

Preparation for Fanime is going along smoothly. New t-shirts, posters, and postcards are being printed right now. Can't wait to meet everyone at the conventions! xd
Some of you might have noticed that all HTML tags are being converted to bbcode when editing existing messages, and also quotes are no longer stackable to more than 6 quotes deep. These are some of the changes that are meant to be released from the forum re-write, but where introduced when we placed a lot of new code to the site due to the rollback.

These changes, along with a lot of other changes and enhancements, will be announced very soon when we implement our new code. 3nodding
The recent server side changes involves the addition of a lot of database servers for handling the new forum code and also servers for handling downloads, plus the addition of new avatar servers. Meanwhile, the development on the new forum system is almost complete. Though there won't be a huge difference in the look and feel of the forums until the next web site re-design, the backend system will be ready to handle a lot of load and should be faster even with twice the amount of users online.

The first game in Gaia Casino is just about finished. whee The idea for casino games had been around for years, and it's great to see it finally coming together. More games are in the works, and meanwhile development for Gaia Towns is still chugging along. Hopefully by AX we'll have something to show everyone. wink

PS - Our new user sign-up had finally reached 2 million! blaugh
After the forum migration it's been sleepless nights trying to get the new code working properly. There were memory leaks, script errors, and errors on the web server itself causing all sorts of slowdowns.

Wasn't until an hour ago until all the major bugs were fixed. Finally all the web servers are running smoothly again! surprised

Now to continue fixing OTHER major bugs. xp
AX was a lot of fun, we hope that everyone had a great time also. Met lots of people, chat with hundreds of Gaians, and even got bitten during the panel. blaugh

For those who are wondering about the new OMG hat, the new T-shirts and posters plus the OMG hats will be for sale on the online store soon.

Meanwhile, we've made the decision that the link list will be taken down very soon because Gaia is moving more towards a social gaming site than a resource site, and instead, the library in Barton town will be the place to get information such as the past storylines, and other stuff like downloads also.
As we pull full steam ahead with Gaia Towns, we have a lot of technical aspects we need to cover, and a lot of art to create. We're still aiming for an inital release next month though, hope it'll be ready before Otakon.

Guilds had been running slow now mainly because of the amount of increased access. More hardware upgrade will need to be added. Hope things will be fast again before the 24th.

More planning had been done for the battle system, since it'll most likely be something to be released after Gaia Towns.

A lot of users had been having trouble with the donation system not granting the thank you letter automatically. I'm troubleshooting the problem and at the same time adding the option for user subscribtion so that they don't have to submit every month and risk not getting the thank you letter.
The web servers are running slow due to the large increase of users over the summer holiday. sweatdrop We're getting a lot of web servers ready to be added right now and I've also added a lot more tighter security to keep hackers from slowing the site down.

At the same time, people who are botting will also have their accounts banned. Users who are hitting the site hundreds of times a minute with scripts or macros will be banned without warning. confused
Finally got the archive database server back on-line. All the old posts are back. Though the data still need to be moved to another database with better performance. That's a project for another day. sweatdrop

The recent change in the database server which handles the art arena had also caused the stats to stop updating. The problem had been fixed and the overall ranking plus user statistics is once again working. 3nodding
A lot of wires were re-arranged at the Internet facicities last week which caused a lot of outages. xp Hope to be done with that soon.

The new diskless servers are finally here. Now servers are easy to install and mantain. 20 new servers had been added, and soon we will have much more. Yay for speed~

On top of all the hardware changes, focus is still on bug fixes for me while others are working hard on Gaia Towns. Some should notice that the arena rankings are working once again, and some pages in the arena should be faster also.
All the new servers that were added pulled too much power which blew out the circuit breaker, and 1/3 of the web servers went down two days ago. gonk There's always something to remind us that expansion is never an easy task. sweatdrop

There had been some strange problems with the domain name server. I hope to have it fixed ASAP.

Quick Reply

Submit
Manage Your Items
Other Stuff
Get GCash
Offers
Get Items
More Items
Where Everyone Hangs Out
Other Community Areas
Virtual Spaces
Fun Stuff
Gaia's Games
Mini-Games
Play with GCash
Play with Platinum