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Hello everyone,

There's been a lot of concerns over the look and feel of the new site re-design, and I just want to say that we've been collecting everyone's responses, and putting together a list of things to change for making the new layout better.

As the majority of the comments from the last layout was that things where too dark, we tried to make everything more vibrant. Though we must admit that we seem to have overdone it. That, among many details will be addressed bit by bit. We really believe that this is a layout that easier to navigate, and allows more dynamic content to be shown or customized. Not to mention that they're a lot smaller and make pages faster to load.

So please give the new layout a chance. The more we tweak it, the better it'll become.

There's been talk about Gaia being sold yesterday... Just want to let everyone know that didn't happen. We're only getting funds for more people to help make new features for Gaia. Gaia started as my hobby, and I wouldn't allow its size to change what we ment to do since day one. We're all committed to the one goal of making Gaia fun and free, always.

As usual feel free to send us your feedback. I might not have time to reply to all of you, but I'm always listening.

-Lanzer

After a ton of hard work we finally finished the new site re-design. Although we met our deadline for the release, there are a lot of small things that we still wish to do. Some involves having better layout, and many relates to the comments given by everyone in the feedback forum. We'll still need to make many changes until the site looks good.

Today was also a lot of excitement, with the whole team helping to get the new Gaia Towns released. A few major bugs halted the release but everyone was really quick in fixing them. Hope everyone have a chance to have a home in Barton town now.

There's been a thread saying that Gaia was sold. That is very not true, though we did received help in investment lately. The cost of the servers, bandwidth, and the cost of having a big team making so many new features at once wouldn't be made possible without outside help. No matter what, our goal from day one still remains the same - Gaia will always be a fun and free site for all. We'll continue to keep developing new features from listening to feedback from everyone.

Upcoming features:
Profile system ver 2
Gaia Towns update
Site redesign

Hello again!

Goodness, so much going on right now! Right now the new features for Gaia Towns are available for everyone!!

These new features will allow you to find a place to live easier, search for active areas, and create topics in towns to talk about. Not to mention if you shake a tree, shrub or hit a rock you might get GOLD

Make sure to check out homes; lighting effects are back!

What's New
• Create topics in Towns and Homes
• Create personalized name for your Town (The town where your house is placed) and Home
• Check your PM from your mailbox
• Shake trees, shrubs, and rocks to find Gold!


Navigate System
• You can now mark towns or homes as "My Favorites" and never have to search for them again
• View the most recent 10 topics in Towns and jump to that location
• View the current active population of each Town and be where the crowds are at
• Mouse over home icons to get detailed information. No more walking door-to-door to see who's living where
• Jump straight to your home by using "My Home"


Homes
• Lighting inside houses is now supported

To see lighting in your house, use the editor to place light(s), click VIEW and click on lights to turn them on. Then click SAVE. For a more dramatic effect, turn off global lighting (sun icon in top right corner).
• house owner's journal and profile accessible from inside house
• walls and floors should always display correctly and update as soon as you save your house
• avatars should no longer appear in front of objects

Hi Everyone!

We're burning the midnight oil right now getting ready for the site redesign launch. The goal is to launch the new site at 10 AM Pacific Time (6PM GMT) assuming no major problems arise. As with any new feature, there's going to be some good and some bad, so like always, we welcome people's thoughts in the Site Feedback Forum, and specifically in this thread: dedicated to the redesign feedback.

Some very important points need to be addressed though:

Profiles: You will notice that the profile system looks slightly off. This is because minimum integration was done at this stage, as we prepare to launch Profiles 2.0 (now in a semi-public test). We actually had a crazy idea of launching it the day after the site redesign, but we figured that would probably do bad things to the servers. As a result, we'll have Profiles 2.0 up pretty soon.

Towns Update: Okay... this didn't happen. The towns update we announced at Fanime is almost ready! It's going through some stress-testing to make sure we don't break the site when it goes live. Soon, we'll all be shaking trees for money.

And moving on to some things you might notice about the redesign:

More "White": Based on the feedback from the previous site redesign in December, this design has a lot more whitespace, and is a lot more open. The paint splashes give the site a worn feel, and the overall look is a bit cleaner than before. Also, the logo has become a bit more orange in color to compliment the colors.

Landing Pages: Over the past 3 years, Gaia has grown to be not just Forums, but Forums+. Plus guilds, plus journals, plus profiles, plus houses, avatars, arenas, and art. The landing pages under My Gaia, Community, Games, World, and Contribute provide an overview of the content areas, and help bring our members forward with pieces such as the Featured Spotlight and Winner's Circle. We're going to keep these rotating pretty regularly, so there's always going to be something interesting.

A-Z Index: At the bottom of most pages, you'll find the A to Z index. When we changed up the design, a few things moved in the navigation. For example, Shopping was moved under the World tab. If you can't find something, this is the easiest place to look. Everything on the site is listed, and you can even jump to the Full A-Z Index and pull up forums, map names, store names, and more.

New User Tour: New to Gaia? Awesome! Old to Gaia, you might want to check this out too! The New User Tour is a great way to explore and see what Gaia is about. For simply wandering over to the tour, you get the new Starter Sets. Free items that go beyond the Peasant Set! (And old users can pick up their starter sets for free too.)

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Thanks everyone for all your support! It's been a crazy past 3 months working out all the bugs, and I hope you'll enjoy the new things coming to the site. I look forward to everyone's comments both good and bad in the dedicated redesign feedback thread.

Hey everybody ^_^

There's been some confusion about testing for the new Profiles. Some members who have donated (or a donation was given on their behalf) have been asked to test the new Profile system.

Why are we doing this? Because everyone has different computers and use different browsers. Before making this feature available for everyone, we want to do everything we can to make sure it will work well for as many members as possible.

How have we contacted people? A message asking members to participate was sent through the automatic PM system, using the Admin Account. There is a link in that PM telling them where to test and instructions to post in Site Feedback.

This feature is VERY close to being complete! To everyone who is not testing, don't worry, you'll get to use this soon

I’m not giving you any screen shots because were not suppose to but showing the invite to being a tester will not hurt.

Hello everyone,

The June donation items are finally here! For this month, Gaia donators can choose between the counterpart tothe Angelic Halo, the Dark Halo or cool G Blade!

Thank you for supporting Gaia Online and we hope you enjoy the items!

If you don't know how to make a donation to GAIA to receive these items, you can learn how to here

A stickie owned by Devilish Angel ‘This thread is to post your LineArt Drawings to be colored and for colorists to post their finished works for the artists ’
Any type of line art is excepted so if you need anything colored come here! It’s free ^^

Oh my I love having free art threads as my feature because it’s free
Invie & Myu's Freebies! ---------> Open. <3
Great art and it’s free. Like always be nice and follow the rules ^^

well I’ve decided to write another guest article.
this one's going to be about the new layout and the responses to it.


As I'm sure you've all noticed, there has been a change in the Gaian scenery recently. While most people enjoy most of the new layout, there are those that feel they need to complain. Maybe it's the fact that you don't like the new colour scheme. Maybe it's the fact that you're not liking the loading times. Maybe it doesn't fit your computer's resolution.

That's not to say that you're not entitled to your own opinion, nor does that mean you’re not entitled to express your opinion. Far from it! With the new poll in place, the admin are showing us that they do in fact value our opinion, and want our input. I don't believe the input they wanted was "OMG I hate it CHANGE IT BACK!!!111oneoneoneeleven". If it's a conflict of taste it can't be helped, but if there's suggestions I’m sure the admin will gladly read them and take them into considerationI’m not claiming that the new layout is perfect. What I’m trying to convey is that the admin worked hard on it, and deserve better than some of the comments that are being made by a small percentage of the Gaian population.

More than anything else, the one thing to keep in mind is that this site was free, is free, and will remain free. The admin are working their bottoms off bringing us new features regularly. It may be hard to believe, but they may actually have lives outside of Gaia. So before you get on your high horse and complain how it resembles some other site (which it doesn't) maybe you should reevaluate the usefulness of your comments.

Cheers,
mj