Gaia needs a staff blog - but thanks for the staff listing!

Gaia needs a blog!

Yes it does!	80.1%	[ 109 ]
No it doesn't; its communication is fine	8.8%	[ 12 ]
No, it would be too much work for a feature noone wants	11.0%	[ 15 ]
Total Votes:			[ 136 ]

[KiaraKeni]

Ling

Chisa, this is a great idea. We've actually wanted to make something like this for quite some time now, such as implementing a forum where Gaia staff are free to create their own individual threads and post to it with new updates like how Lanzer does in his thread in Q&A. For whatever reason, the project never took flight; maybe it was because no one had the bandwidth to drive it at the time. sweatdrop I can suggest it again to the appropriate staff for this and see if we can look at the project again. Thanks.

Yay! 4laugh Thanks for the reply Ling. heart 3nodding

[[DarkDreams]]

Chisa, i dont think theres anything you've suggested i have disagreed with yet, i love this idea and its very true, i guess thats what the whole concept of the weekly newsletters were about, but it seems to be more about advertising than anything now.

Lanzer hardly ever updates his workdiary and its a bit of a hassel to go through and find all the dev's and admins profiles just to see if they update their journals with information about gaia.

[Chisa]

Ling

Chisa, this is a great idea. We've actually wanted to make something like this for quite some time now, such as implementing a forum where Gaia staff are free to create their own individual threads and post to it with new updates like how Lanzer does in his thread in Q&A. For whatever reason, the project never took flight; maybe it was because no one had the bandwidth to drive it at the time. sweatdrop I can suggest it again to the appropriate staff for this and see if we can look at the project again. Thanks.

Awesome! Thanks for taking the time to post Ling ^_^ I do think a group blog would be better personally so I can just have one feed rather than subscribing to a ton of threads, and it would give the appearance of busyness and activity with less overall posts since it's all together. But any further communication here is a good thing biggrin Thanks for putting it forward.

I guess I'll let this thread sink now you've seen it, although I would be interested in hearing the opinions of other staff members who would be the ones posting to this kind of thing.

[Chisa]

Okay, I said I'd drop it but just saw a few more relevant examples >_>

Last.fm blog
I didn't look at this blog at all until recently, but like the Google one it seems to be on a similar track to what Gaia needs - detailed explanations of features, decisions and staff life smile The main thing I wanted to point out was how they dealt with last.fm's recent acquisition by CBS, which for a lot of companies create a lot of controversy amongst users. Sure, the user reaction is not all positive, but the way they explained the decision and preemptively answered some of the questions that were sure to come up from users would have gone a long way to allaying their fears compared to just going ahead with it with a one line announcement. Plenty of controversial decisions have been made on Gaia in the past - with a chance to explain the reasoning behind them I'm sure a lot of users would feel a lot better about them.

Juno's post in her journal about today's salon updates is also a really good example of the kind of thing that would be great to see in a blog - the kind of detail that not everyone wants so shouldn't really be in the announcement, but that people who are interested should be able to access more easily.

[dBEf-GAEc-18E-BBAf]

Chisa

Juno's post in her journal about today's salon updates is also a really good example of the kind of thing that would be great to see in a blog - the kind of detail that not everyone wants so shouldn't really be in the announcement, but that people who are interested should be able to access more easily.

A developer's forum or general area to access dev journals is definitely perfect for this kind of thing. A big sticky at the top to let people know that these aren't official announcements would be nice.

Ex: Fleep and Juno making "promises" (at best, they've posted ETA's), and having people take them as official release dates. *shudders*

[Chisa]

Mmm I still think a blog would work better - if it was a forum where devs could keep journals like Lanzers there would be a lot of threads (if it has the kind of participation level that I'm hoping for) so it would be a bit annoying to subscribe to them all or to keep checking back in that forum. With a blog you could subscribe to a single RSS feed, which is much easier.

But yeah, there'd either need to be a disclaimer somewhere saying that these are opinions only and not promises, or staff posting there will have to make sure they're a lot more vague with that kind of thing sweatdrop

[Chisa]

This region specific quest/anime thing is another example of where a blog would be useful - many users don't know why they are being left out, and are assuming Gaia is doing so just for the sake of it because there is currently nothing official saying otherwise. With a blog the reasons behind this can be explained - obviously this will not satisfy everyone, but either way I think people deserve to at least have this acknowledged sweatdrop And be made aware that future anime-based releases are likely to be under similar restrictions.

Sorry for necro~ing this thread, but y'know, another reminder >_>

[Chisa]

Another new feature release that could have benefited from a staff blog >_>

I've seen devs and artists posting in SF today allaying fears that the sponsored cars game pushed back releases of long promised features like Tattoos and the Battle System, but obviously not everyone will see these things and will assume the worst sweatdrop

Same thing with the region/age specific contests released recently - people don't know why they are region specific, so some assume that it's because Gaia's staff simply dislike foreigners, some assume that it's impossible to hold an international contest. Not many people know the truth, and I think it would be nice to know...

I've also recently seen posts from staff expressing pride in their part of recent features, items and upgrades - which is great, and would also fit perfectly into a blog and help generate buzz around their work ninja

[Arc Angellus]

I agree

[Chisa]

Thanks whee

Hate to sound like a broken record... but Lanzer's most recent post in his work diary about sponsorships is yet another thing is currently not visible to all but would be perfect for the blog smile Its the kind of explanation that everyone should see.

[Delirium K]

I would love that, and I agree, about lanzer's most recent posts, I didnt even know about it until I saw the link in a thread.
edit-I didnt even know about lanzer's journal

[Chisa]

Yup, Lanzer's done a really good job of posting recently, but only those that stalk watch his thread really know about it. It's a bit hard to find unless you know exactly where to look as it is.

[SykoSilver]

Y'know, I was thinking about it, and even something as simply as a "Developer's Notes" subforum in the Announcements would be good enough.

Each developer could make their own thread, or each project could have it's own thread.

[Chisa]

It would definitely be better than nothing, although I'd rather a blog simply because I have so many thread subscriptions already and prefer RSS feeds xd It would definitely be easier to implement and might be easier for some users though.

[ijustworkhere]

I think a list which has links to all of the developer's journals would be best. Fleep and Ling keep good updates and I've been adding what I'm up to to my journal.

I think this would have a better shot of happening if some of the users compiled a list of developers whom keep active journals and post that than wait for us to do it. There's just too many higher profile projects that we're working on right now to do that....

ninja