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I said I would write a journal this week... so I will! Even though I'm tired and cranky and full of Christmas beer cheer.

You're STILL the Featured Journal? LAME
I agree. That's why I'm in the process of writing a feature that will allow users to suggest journals, profiles, and guilds for spotlighting on the landing pages.

Up until now, one of the big reasons why those things on the landing pages never changed is that it's a tremendous pain in the a** to find new journals, profiles, etc. One of the only reasons I ended up there was that an Admin came up to me one day and said:

Admin: "Hey, people like your journal right? I don't really have time to look for another one. Would it be okay if we featured yours?"

Fleep: "Durrrrrrr, okay!"

So no, I didn't bribe anyone with rare valuables -- it's just that there's never been a good system for that.

2006 in Review
I've talked a lot about stuff that's been done in 2006, how it's the dawn of a new era for Gaia, blah blah. Let me just give some of my final thoughts about it...

I started working at Gaia on July 5th, and when I got here it was a really cool place, but you could tell that things were disorganized, LOTS of stuff was broken, and people were still running around doing whatever they thought needed to be done.

Since then, Gaia's greatly increased its development team and customer-service team, defined processes so that everybody did things the right way, and actually set defined goals for the site.

New Features
We saw a lot of new releases: Invite System, Daily Chance, Word Bump, Jigsaw, Quest System, Tagging, PM reporting, Topic Voting, Gold Notification, Weekly Comic, Announcement Notification, Standardized Buttons, Newsletters, Going Postal re-release, lots of great new merchandise,

Fixes and Upgrades
There were also a ton of improvements and fixes throughout the site, some of the more notable including: changing the "Tropicana Kids", updated the ToS and Privacy Policy, lots of server improvements so the site doesn't go down as much, much more stable events (with 90% less mean-ness!), major friends list updates, major Towns updates, simplified password-retrieval interface, fixes to slots and cards, a ton of new items, the most popular Donation Items Monthly Collectibles we've EVER had, and hundreds of other bug fixes around the site!

Hidden Awesome
We've also made a ton of improvements that aren't visible on the frontend that improve stability of the site, improve the scalability of the site so it can grow without crashing, improve moderator response time, anti-botting, etc.

And that's just the stuff that's been released. We're sitting on top of a ton of other releases that are in development and are either ready to be released, or will be released in the near future: Tattoos, Battle System, new moderator system, rewrites of some major site features, a redesign of the entire site, etc.

And this was all within the last 6 months.

Going Forward
So Gaia has been growing even until this last month. Now we are a much better team than we were when I first came on board in every way imaginable. We have a stronger development team with better processes and tools. We have a strong customer/member support team with better processes and tools. We have teams that decide what the best MCs and item releases are going to be. We have a strong art team, people who manage site events, people who will organize cons, people who write content for the site, people who work on the user-interface (FINALLY!).

So these first 6 months have just been the tip of the iceberg in terms of us making Gaia fun and stable. You're likely to see an explosion of major improvements forthcoming in 2007 -- some so exciting that it's violently depressing that I can't tell you what they're all going to be... yet.

2006 Sign-Off
I wanted to write more, but I've got work to do rofl I had a lot of fun in 2006, and I hope I see you all again in 2007 and onward. Happy New Year!