Welcome to Gaia! ::

Guilds Landing Page
User feedback was straightforward, but one key message was:
- you did the landing page but you didn't add my feature here

Where my feature here is usually guild PMs or thread subscriptions or reasons to spend guild gold, but could also be almost anything else.

I hear you. We've been promising to clean the house, and when we say that we've finally started doing something with the house, you go there and discover that it's a new coat of paint everywhere -- very pretty, but doesn't address the issue with the moldy food in the refrigerator or the laundry that still needs to be done.[*1]

But, imagine that paint was lethal, abestos-laden lead paint? You'd feel differently about it, wouldn't you?

It's maybe not obvious why we're doing things in this order, but it actually does make a kind of sense; there's a certain order that we need to tackle these things in order to addresss the issues in guilds. It's a code base that's three years out of date, moldy beyond belief[*2], and there's an ordering that is the most efficient. We improved the searching, we improved the landing page, and the next thing we'll do is take a look at the admin functionality. One thing we do need to do is gut out the guild forums and replace it with our new forum engine: this is a task that is daunting on many different levels.

To be honest, it will be a huge motivation if we see guild traffic start to increase as a result of our efforts so far -- many of the devs believe, fundamentally, that guilds is core part of Gaia, but we'd like to know that our changes have been for the positive.

...

Arenas
I posted in a couple of forums about the Avatar Arena, asking if we should increase the fee. The general indication seems to be... yes, increase the fee, if only to keep up with inflation, but also add back in the 4-votes-per-IP limit and randomize the spotlight a bit more. This is something we've talked about quite a bit, although we're a little worried that it would unfairly penalize people that log in from schools and the like. Anyway, we made some adjustments to the spotlight, so we'll see how it goes this week and then evaluate what to do.

Nartian Rock 2
Second evolution: Musical influence #2

Franz Ferdinand - Darts of Pleasure

(Btw, consider these more like influences, not so much direct references, with the feeling of the song being more important to the stage than the group's background or genre of music. Like an unofficial item soundtrack. It's just for fun, doodz.)

Orphie is suuuuper bored.