We are slowly getting the site repaired. I've spent the last 3 months working on hundreds of small bugfixes.
Recent Projects:
Speed Improvements:
The overall layout of the site is much faster to load. We've reduced the number of files your browser has to download and we'll continue to do this. Some features like the "floating footer", some ads, and tracking pixels now wait for the more important parts of the page to load before they load themselves.
Newhires:
We've hired two more Devs to help with these chores and to make the site more fun and usable. These two Devs sit right next to me and we all share our enthusiasm for making Gaia work better and faster.
Centered site fixes:
I've been massaging the kinks out of centered site. There are still a lot of pages that need updating but we're at least halfway towards making centered site a neat feature that you can keep activated. Hopefully we'll have some fun new backgrounds sometime in the near future.
PowerUser Menus:
My new labs feature - PowerUser Menus -- is hugely successful. It's enabled us to restore the useful links into the navigation that experienced users missed and it's kept the menus clean for new users who don't know what those features are. The opt-in nature of the labs features fits well with this project.
Smaller files:
A new project I'm working on will allow us to compress every script and style file on the site. This should yield slightly faster pageloads (up to 10% on some slow internet connections).
Smaller files:
Another new project will be to update the "avatar dress-up page" a little to help new users. It shouldn't be as empty as it is now and the success message (the message you see after saving your avatar) should be more friendly. If you want to change your skin, eyes, or hair, that should be easy to do (or to find) from the dress-up page.
Gaia Live:
"Gaia Live" (the purple-blue-aqua logged out homepage with the live feed of user activity) was rolled out a week ago. It's not nearly as funny as "Big Button", but our preliminary testing shows that it's about twice as effective at getting users to sign-up. Lots of users on Dial-up state that it's a very slow loading page so we are working on making it easier for users to login before the heavy part of the page loads.
Gaia Search:
We'll be rolling out the second phase of a huge new search project soon. If you search forums, you'll see some changes. In the near future, you'll be able to search from the header (on every page). The new search is much more powerful than the old one. You'll be able to search for users, items, or any kind of forum/arena/journal/guild/etc content.
In addition, I've built a search appliance to allow you to search from the address bar in new versions of Firefox or Internet Explorer.
Facebook Game:
Ocean Party is a hoot! I <3 Scrubbles.
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