AtS July 26th, 2022 Responses

[AvatarRoku05]

sup-qt

Misc

Thinking about leaks, do u have any leek recipes? I got two big ones growing and no idea wtf to do with them, it was just fun to have leeks spring onion and chives all growing next to each other.

Lanzer (Admin Lead): "The only thing I can think of is hitting people with it."  

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A Silly Canadian

Hi Lanzer and staff!

How is the human baby doing? Also checking in on the fur babies too!

Lanzer (Admin Lead): "Baby got chub" (Lanzer shared a photo of his daughter in the thread with this post)  

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B a n i r a b u

Features

Would it be possible to make a feature that allowed us to search specific items in the outfit marketplace, so that it will show us all outfits with that item? There are so many outfits with items that have no listings in the marketplace and it would be so useful in finding them.

Lanzer (Admin Lead): "That feature didn't make it in the last update because it takes a lot of changes in our system to make the outfit items searchable. We will see if we can have that added for the next update."  

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Quote:

User- +[Skarekrow]+
Happy Tuesday, staff

Features

In the drop down menu when looking at a user's Wish List would it be possible to add a little check box to show unlisted items on their WL only?

Lanzer (Admin Lead): "Unlisted items as in items not in the marketplace?"  

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Mercedex

Currency Conversion
When do you intend to complete the currency conversion from gold to platinum?
This cannot be an if, it must be a when.
You already have too much on your plate with one site interface to keep intact.
There are multiple bugs gold users can exploit as a result, such as in auction bidding even now, as gold users are still able to input 1g bids up to 10p.
I switched currency back and forth a lot in my first month back, and I firmly believe it only led to confusion and a genuine culture shock between the different currency userbase populations.
If you intend to ever return to a common community culture, we need everyone playing the same game.
It’s been 5 years since Platinum’s introduction, according to the: Gaiapedia Platinum Page
If the economy has any hope at all, gold currency has to be addressed and phased out.

Lanzer (Admin Lead): "Sorry we had been putting off conversion because of the strong feedback. The minimum bid requirement does have a price trigger but you're right, we should make it 1p minimum for everything. We will focus on conversion again later this year."  

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Mercedex

Astra items
Is there any intended future for this beloved feature?
I am aware there are many challenges involved, and many options such as the flairs are not available. But I’ve noticed animated kin in the forums, and some of them are quite large and seem similarly complex to astra.
Would it be possible to import the astra animations into the same digital space as the kin?

Lanzer (Admin Lead): "There's a plug-in called Ruffle that is capable of playing older flash files, mostly Action Script 1 & 2 stuff. It won't be able to run our flash games as they were all written in the "newer" Action Script 3 code, but it might work with Astra items. I'll check and see if that plugin will work.

As for the implementation between kins and Astra items, kins are animated gifs behind avatars, while Astra items are actual vector drawings or sprites animated through timelines, hence they're animated smoothly at high framerate. Making animated gif with most of our Astra items would result in a huge animated gif that won't even look as good unfortunately."  

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Tornboy

Features
This may have been asked before, but is there any way we could get a feature on an item's marketplace listing that lets us know when that particular item is being sold in an outfit?

I sometimes go item hunting in the outfit store because a lot of unlisted items hide there and it's kind of annoying having to do that especially when looking for a specific item.

Lanzer (Admin Lead): "This feature will be available when the search outfit by item name feature is implemented. Currently we don't have a good way of cataloging all items from the outfit shop. Once we do we will be able to have such features."  

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SugaSharra V2

Features
Can we have an option to sell multiples in the MP at one time?

Lanzer (Admin Lead): "Do you mean selling multiple of the same items as one listing or creating multiple listings of the same items that you have multiple of?"  

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Miku Asukito

Features - Avibuilder Undo Glitch
This has been occurring for quite a long time now so I don't know if the staff already knows about the problem but-

The undo button in the avibuilder is glitchy. It works fine at first when you start building an avatar then after a while it says 0 chances left to undo changes. This 0 does not change even when further alterations are made to the avi and said behavior continues for a quite a while. Then it starts to show random amounts of undo chances that are more than the usual 10 only for a short amount of time after which it returns to the 0 problem again if you continue to use the builder.

It seems to reset to the initial proper behavior if you leave the avibuilder for a few hours and return but the same glitch repeats.

Basically, undo only works properly when you first start building an avatar. It would be great if the staff can look into this issue.

Lanzer (Admin Lead): "I'll try it out and see what are the conditions to replicate what you see. If you have a series of actions that lead to the bug showing up, please let me know."  

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bloodwitch

Features
hello, I wanted to ask if we could get a previous button in our store/vend log?
(https://www.gaiaonline.com/marketplace/vendlog/USERID)
currently, we only have the next button:

Lanzer (Admin Lead): "Sure we will add the button ASAP."  

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Mercedex

Banhammer Overkill
I’ve been seeing a lot of threads about hasty userbans that are the results of troll reports OR apparently possible mod application report quotas. I have even seen users threaten to mass report people that were annoying them, which is an incredible tool of forced censorship for immature and particularly cruel users.
There are dozens of quotes in likely dozens of threads that share what seems to be common knowledge information among your most loyal userbase. All of this is in my own words in order to protect the users who shared this information, I have no desire to encourage unnecessary censorship.
If the reports came in the span of an hour, sounds like someone went through her post history since they work on reports in order.
If they all for different things then someone dug through her post history.
Let me remind myself of ToS, just in case, oh wait--.
ToS does't matter, it's just what the given mod chooses to do.
Says a lot about the mod community and values.
In order to be hired as a mod you must reach quotas similar to corrupt law enforcement. Similar to a cop setting a speed trap, mod applicants will dig through dead posts and stretch truths to be considered.
This knowledge makes me incredibly uncomfortable to say the least, as I am a shy and withdrawn neurodivergent code monkey who desires to invest in this community, but it doesn’t feel like a safe environment for me to learn in.
I’ve had many good solo interactions with people, and I wish to continue to grow my presence and understanding of this Whole New Gaian World, but I need to know the MODs are, in the words of one user, as bad as the trolls.
We deserve a community wide apology, and the hundreds of ban overturn request tickets that are clogging your que more than deserve to be address with a second glance.
I got a raise at work recently, and I was very excited to buy the year account subscriptions at the start of the month, but I am no longer so sure, as this event has proven to me perhaps this is not a safe environment for women and children, despite your claim of PG13 friendliness.

Jak Bauer (Gaia Staff): "Hi there,

Accounts are not typically banned from one report unless the offense is sufficient to warrant it, typically an account will have to have had repeated offenses, warnings, and then temp bans before we even consider a permanent ban. And every report is looked into to see if there is a real violation or not. Just reporting someone will not result in a ban or warning if the account doesn't merit it. So rest assured that the rumors you have heard are just that, rumors.

Part of why there is a quota is to make sure that YOU understand the rules before becoming a Moderator. We check your judgement to see if what you are reporting really is a violation. We have turned down plenty of people who report for the reasons you listed, and only let those whose reports are valid move forward.

Even then, just making the reports doesn't guarantee that you will be put into Mod training. We then have a panel of Moderators look at not only the reports that you have done as part of signing up, but your overall account history. If you've made the required amount of reports, but go on trolling sprees, well, you can expect not to be made a Moderator.

Quite often people don't believe they should have been banned for the reason they were, despite their having broke the rules, which is why you hear many complaining of unfair bans. While there are some who have valid concerns about their bans we are always glad to talk to a user about why they got a ban and direct them to file a Ban Appeal if they believe that they were unfairly banned. At that time, a separate team from our Moderators review the bans and make the final decision to leave the ban as is or return the account to the user."



V (Gaia Staff): "Whether there's one report against a topic, or 1,000 reports against a topic, our moderators are going to be manually reviewing the reported content and handling it based on the results of the investigation. If it's a violation, it's going to be addressed as is deemed appropriate based on the severity of the violation in combination with other user-specific factors, including, but not limited to, did we just talk to this person in the last month or so about this type of behavior, and how extensive is this behavior from this user?

If what was flagged up to us is not an issue, it's marked as such and the moderator moves on to the next case.

If it is a matter of 1,000 reports being filed against a user, and we're able to see that another user is maliciously targeting that person by filing blatantly invalid reports hoping it'll result in trouble for the reported user, the reporter in that case is held accountable for their actions and can be warned, and even banned, for Report System Abuse.

There may be an uptick in reports/mod activity around the time that people are preparing to apply or when we have expanded our team, however that has nothing to do with meeting quotas. I can't speak for police quotas, but we have no expectation to issue warnings or bans. If we could resolve all of the site's reports by kindly asking the person to stop (violation) going forward, we'd handle things that way, instead. The uptick in activity that you describe may instead be a combination of content that may not otherwise be flagged up to us within specific spaces being reported by those preparing to apply, or having the additional people once those in training have become moderators that are able to work through these reports.

Mods aren't trained to look for situations that they can warn or ban for. Our primary goal when stepping in to deal with violations is, and has always been, education; informal warnings and warnings are a form of education as these simply inform you of which rule was violated and how, however some situations or circumstances are more severe and unfortunately result in consequences in addition to these warnings, such as temporary or permanent bans."  

[AvatarRoku05]

That concludes all of the answered questions from this week, thank you!