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So, Gaia Spring Cleaning. What do ya'll think of it? We can just discuss it or whatever in this thread. Also, please feel free to link to any proposals you made/agree with/whatever for people in the guild to vote on. ^^
Personally, I couldn't be happier about this. As someone who's been on Gaia for like... what, five years now? Yeah, we'll say five years, I feel like I've seen this site go through a lot of changes. I'm gonna go on a grandma rant here and say I remember the good ol' days with no Cash Shop, cheap market prices, no constant promotional crap, forums that were possible to keep up with... I mean, don't get me wrong, I love tons of the changes Gaia's made over the years, and I'd probably go crazy if I had to return to 2005 with the sushi database glitches and lack of gender-neutral items. However, for the past two years or so it's felt like Gaia's become more of a 'company' and less of a 'community.'
We used to call Monthly Collectibles 'Donation Items,' because the community that Gaia did have was happy to donate to the free site they loved so much. Now it's like all Gaia has cared about recently is making money. I understand that they need income to keep the site free, I really do. But I also understand just how much the average user is paying to the cash shop, and how much bandwidth the average user takes up. It doesn't balance out.
And I guess recently it seems like Gaia's putting all of it's effort into Cash Shop items, means of advertising for other companies, adding new features nobody asked for... while meanwhile site glitches go on for months, years, and people keep asking for them to be fixed, and Gaia ignores them. So I'm just... really happy that Gaia's finally addressing this issue, and I hope they really deliver on some of the biggest problems on the site. I know it's a lot to hope for, but hell, so was Gaia giving a damn in the first place, and they at least achieved that.

Yes, I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much on major happy changes going on, but I am overall ecstatic at the start. ^^ I also get the whole company thing being better in many respect, but like... there's no line right now. We're getting new stuff in the Cash Shop like every week, and almost all of Gaia's energy is going into making items/events/stories that involve the Cash Shop. I think it's fine that Gaia is trying to make some extra money off the users through such a shop, but it is far too much of a focus, and it shouldn't have gotten to the point where people who can afford to buy $500 worth of items are suddenly richer than people who have been on the site since day one.
Considering that it is pretty much us users now who are making Gaia the most money (with how much Cash Shop spending is going on), I would just like to see Gaia put forth a little more effort into listening to our feedback and doing things for us.
I totally agree on the marketplace proposal. That was like the first thing that came into my head when I heard about Spring Cleaning. And yes, it would be wonderful if we could leave on just some of the items (like you know I almost never take off my fox ears/tail; my avatar just doesn't look the same without them), but at the moment I would just be happy to have a 'this item only' option in the market, Cash Shop, as well as the monthly collectible's page.
And the un-friend thing is true. I've had one such experience like that, and it has indeed caused some problems. Not enough for me to ever really complain or worry about it too much, but I can see where they are coming from.

Hey, no worries. I'm finding that during the summer I'm becoming too focused in other things besides online time like finding scholarships and playing video games and reading, so I've actually been on Gaia less than I am during the school year. I assure you I am not stalking through the guild and constantly refreshing waiting for you to post. XD Hope things start to go better for you though. Being depressed is no fun, but it happens to most, and a little depression once in a while isn't the end of the world for those who have to see their friends that way. Here's to things improving though.
Yes, it seems like the majority of Gaia's non-cash 'events' lately have been clicking sponsor items on the title pages. *sigh* And the story revolving around the Cash Shop is especially uninteresting. I mean, not only is it too focused on one small part of the site, but it's just not all that interesting to begin with. At least they finally got rid of Flynn.
Exactly. In the end, this site never would've gone anywhere if it wasn't for members joining and becoming active and donating. It doesn't matter how much money you make; if all of the members leave because you're ignoring them, then the money will stop coming in as well. Meh, summer cleaning works too.
As someone who looked forward to monthly collectibles every month since she joined Gaia (back when they were the best items on the site, and I didn't feel dirty donating five bucks a month to my favorite place on the internet), I've always needed to check out the MCs right away. I seem to be getting them less and less often, as they've lost a lot of their luster, but I still get excited to check them out on the Monthly Collectible's page every month, and it is annoying to have to strip my avatar to do so.

Yes, poor Timmy.
I don't mind buying pixels to an extent. To me the items are a form of art, and I'm definitely for supporting art by purchasing it. Pretty items on my avatar make me happy, and so does supporting a site I love, so I saw no problems in donating five bucks a month in exchange for donation items. Now it just feels awful though.

Haha, I'm far more visual than anything, so I'm pretty much good whether I can touch things or not. XD

Oh snap!

To those not subscribed to Spring Cleaning updates, here is what Gaia has sent out in regards to the topic:

"You're getting this PM because you voted or posted in the Spring Cleaning forum.

Spring Cleaning is winding down, but there are still bug fixes that will be live on the site in coming weeks, so we wanted to bring you up-to-date on the latest and point you to some threads that you might want to follow.

TL;DR: This is the last PM update for Spring Cleaning; further updates will be in the main Spring Cleaning thread, so subscribe in order to stay up to date on the latest.

What Happened Last Week?

- A new potion in Skin Tyte, the Gender Bender potion, that allows you to transform yourself into the opposite gender. Some users were asking about their free gender changes, and in response, we're currently working on changes to account settings that will allow you to get up to two free potions.

- Unfriending was fixed, meaning that if you unfriend a person, you will be taken off their list as well. Along with this fix, we fixed some exploits in the invite friend feature, and also added proper checking of ignore lists in aquarium and My Gaia.

- Selling and discarding of multiples is live. You should be able to trash multiple items, and we'll be pushing out a change later this week that allows you to sell back multiple items, as well.

- Trade window is undergoing a massive revamp -- take a peek at the thread if you're interested in what it might look like. This will take us a couple of weeks, so it's going past the two weeks of Spring Cleaning.

- New preview options in marketplace is another feature that's going to take longer. The thread has screenshots of what the feature may look like -- basically, you'll be given tons more options in preview in order to make your shopping / marketplace experience more enjoyable.

- Inventory Search is currently in internal testing, and will show up in Labs soon. This feature will allow you to easily find stuff in your ever-increasing inventory.

- Guild Homepage revamp is still in process and should hit testing later this week. The thread has screenshots of what it will look like, and we are also adding some much-requested features (such as the ability to remove users from a guild).

- Sparklies are now disabled completely by account settings, and some of the positioning issues are fixed -- there are still some pending bug fixes for positioning under some browsers that will be patched out later.

- Hiding soulbound items when selling on MP is now live -- there is a checkbox that you can click that automatically hides everything that is soulbound.

- Reporting of profile comments is now live on the site. This should make it much easier for you to report problematic comments to moderators.

- Canceling of listings with no bids outside of the time limit is also live.

- Signature length will be changed shortly. Instead of giving you 256 characters of URLs and 256 characters of text, we're just going to open it up to 512 characters of text.

Longer Term

Flash issues came up as extremely important to the users, and we're still trying to figure out exact timeframes and features and whatnot.

- Fishing was mentioned as definitely needing some work, and we're currently looking at the codebase to try and figure out the right way to proceed.

- Towns 2.0 was also extremely popular, and that is also something that we're currently in the process of evaluating.

Other Stuff

- Removing the floating footer is a proposal that could use your feedback, if you feel strongly one way or the other.

- We are still going through the remaining proposals (including the user Spring Cleaning proposals) to get a sense of what is important to the users. At some point we're going to lock the forums down, but we'll keep them up for at least the next week.

But there were tons of other fixes, as well. A partial list is in this thread, and we'll be updating the main Spring Cleaning thread as other stuff goes out. Many of the bug fixes that we'll be rolling out over the next week or so were based on feedback from the Spring Cleaning Proposals forum.

Some examples of bugs that were fixed: Performance improvements, little changes everywhere to try and make the site better (reworked buttons, adding commas to price confirmation in the marketplace), many UI tweaks, profile changes (report capabilities, "reply back"), fixed some problems with the inventory arranger, made forum search go back MONTHS instead of just two weeks, many My Gaia tweaks (forum notice not showing up if email notification was turned off, paying attention to ignore list for friend suggestions), and many other things!

One last note: If Spring Cleaning is at all a success, it's a success because of the involvement of the community. We might not have fixed everything that everyone wanted, but the developers and artists of Gaia did enjoy trying to fix a lot of the things that users had been mentioning for a while. We'd love to hear in Site Feedback what you thought about Spring Cleaning -- was it worthwhile? Is it something that we should be doing again? What worked and didn't work about it?

Thanks,
The Gaia Staff"

Looks like it's going pretty well. Gaia actually stepped up and took care of a way larger handful of problems than a lot of us were even expecting, and they'll be working on some things longer than the two-week spring cleaning period. I'm very happy about this, and hope we do more spring cleaning in the future. If you feel the same way, go ahead and say so in the Site Feedback forums; looks like Gaia's wanting opinions on if it should happen again or not. =D

Yes, I am just so happy that Gaia seriously delivered on what they said they'd do, plus much more. XD
I do agree on the footer though; that was the only thing I was like, "Really?" with. Sometimes the footer itself takes a while to load, but it has never made the rest of the site go slow for me. I wasn't aware that was a problem either. But I actually *use* the footer! I hide the majority of it, so I only have the little arrows in the corner, but I use that for the quick links like crazy! I have every page I regularly visit on Gaia listed there, and it saves a lot of navigating time. D: