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This week started off really roughly with the age restriction system in place. Since the beginning I had never studied safety laws closely to realize the potential risk that our community site can have towards minors. In the past few months I had been educated on all the COPPA related issues and found out that there isn't a good way for Gaia to be free of censorship yet available to pre-teens at the same time. I don't think that denying services to our users is ever the right way to do things, and I'm still looking for ways for us to provide safety and privacy for all users yet not harming the freedom of speech and expression for all users.
Aside from the big issues, I've been hearing over and over that the marketplace have had problems for quite some time now. Just want to let everyone know that a re-write is taking place. Hope to have a bug free marketplace within a month.
This week we also launched the mobile payment system. It seems like we're doing a lot this week, but the mobile payment was actually a project we started in August of last year. We had went through so much trouble with cell phone carriers and compatibility problems that months were spent just to meet the basic criteria. Imagine that we couldn't even charge $6.99 because the price points must be odd numbers like $5.99 or $7.99.
Meanwhile, everyone's hard at work on fixing a lot of areas such as the journal and profile systems. The changes to how the systems work will be minor, though they'll make sure that these features work fine when we have 2 or 3 times the users accessing them.
Another big thing we did was launching the first sponsorship with Last Mimzy. Overall I hope that everyone enjoy the free item, and that the promotion isn't intrusive at all. A lot of people had been asking Gaia about sponsorships on a lot of different brands and products, and we had been picky on only working with people who would only offer something that Gaia members would be interested in.
Ultimately, sponsorships will be a part of what keeps the Gaia development team running. Support from everyone in getting monthly collectibles had allowed us to get to where we are today, though the cost of development is still higher than what the monthly collectibles can cover. Hopefully, with the help of sponsorships, we will actually be able to cover all the cost of development.
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