Hello everyone! In response to concerns that have been voiced in forums over the past couple months, we feel it’s important to provide some details around how we are managing the site and business. We will strive to provide clear communication about what is rolling out on Gaia in terms of features and policies. Watch this space, as our plan will be to issue periodic communications of this sort every two months.

State of the Business
Like any business does, over the years Gaia has experienced its own peaks and valleys. We want to communicate to you, our loyal supporters, that we are in a better place now than a few short months ago. Because of the activity and transactions on the site, we’re able to roll out new features, events and new items, many of which are detailed below. We enjoy working to provide a robust and engaging website full of activities and items that enhance people’s lives. Our future will always be dependent on the financial support from the active loyal Gaian base and new community members, so maintaining a healthy dialogue and receiving your feedback on new features and items is crucial to providing the service that you’ve come to enjoy.

Still free… a Community Swimming Pool…with a Snack Bar.
It does take money to operate a community. Our goal is to grow and provide value to our shareholders, as well as a good user experience for our customers and a great workplace for our employees. Like any online community, we have expenses associated with running the platform – servers, hosting fees, and network operations costs. So, the money that Gaia does bring in on the sale of items is a fundamentally necessary thing.

For folks out there who choose not to fund their accounts with Gaia Cash by spending real money – that is fine too. Nothing’s changed about us offering a free-to-join, free-to-play experience. There are and continue to be no cost mini-events and free-to-enter games, tournaments, forums and other experiences. And a lot of the things you see on our site now, while annoying to some, help keep Gaia healthy and free for all.

Briefly, here’s a recap of some of the things we’ve done recently and some sneak peeks at upcoming events:
• Recolors. We recognized that big portions of the Gaia community enjoy different color variations of popular items, so we released those recolors and made them available for Gaia Gold.
• Gold Shop updates
• Towns 2 Update, which featured updated graphics and avatar enhancement for better movement
• Holiday and seasonal events, including our St. Patrick’s Day and Summer Event
• Mini-events, including the current Carl the Elk event
• Halloween 2013. This promises to be the biggest Halloween event yet! We have a massive interactive game in store for you, and a bunch of fun activities and games along the way to get you in a spooky mood leading up to Halloween.
• Working on more games, a Loyalty Shop and other features which we’ll be announcing soon!

Keeping it Real
Finally, it should be said that we absolutely do care about the overall experience of Gaians on a deeply personal level. There are staff members - from engineers, to artists, to Community and Customer Service, to QA - who go above and beyond their call of duty by spending time after work hours researching account issues, monitoring forums and working to help answer questions from the community. Gaia also has a customer service and safety telephone line that is staffed 24x7. With that in mind, we feel it is right to point out here – as we do periodically – that inappropriate, defamatory, or abusive personal attacks on other Gaians and Gaia employees will not be tolerated, --doing so will be grounds for accounts being banned. There have been nasty things written about other people – including release of personally identifiable information, senseless name calling, and we want that to end. We respect when members want to voice their opinions, dissenting or otherwise-- praise or constructive criticism. We just ask that you keep it civil.

Ultimately, it’s your choice where to spend your time and money online. We recognize there are a variety of community, forum and ecommerce options that exist. We all have one collective goal and that’s to keep a site where Gaians enjoy interacting with other community members, and the exchange of items and information, so we’ll strive to keep this mission front and center to what we do.

Over the years, Ask the Admin (ATA) has been a forum where staff has fielded questions and concerns from the Gaian community. Because of the volume of questions/posts, we just haven’t been able to answer all questions. In fact, due to the sheer bandwidth of our staff and resources, we haven’t even come close to being able to individually address all the concerns that come our way. So we are re-evaluating the way we manage communications to come up with more effective ways to accomplish this. As a result ATA as it is now will be discontinued and a better solution put in place soon. In the meantime, please send your questions to usertalk@gaiaonline.com. And, check this space periodically for updates as we intend to keep an open dialogue and communicate more detailed answers about topics of interest and upcoming site features.

Regards,
Narumi Misuhara, Lanzer, siskataya, Zero Omega, milkbun, Princess Angelishia, Sandokiri, Mishiri, Jak Bauer, Uncle Kenny,CodeMonkey37179, gem2niki, pyawakit, reapersun, ethe, Ubermegatron, oxydizer, cantceemee, na1995, starzXnight, myers9s123, Asaphira Sachi, baby D_2211, Kailani Sedai, tahoerelay, carbonphyber, Finni, Miori