Good afternoon, Gaians. This is Cindy Donovinh with a quick bulletin from the Gaia staff. In case you're daunted by all these words, here's a quick rundown:

  • This week's Cash Shop/Evolving update will happen on Friday.
  • Another big sale in the Gaia Store! Plushies $5 off!
  • New privacy settings in your account page. Check it out please!
  • The finalists for the Torso Contest are in! Time to vote!
  • A couple of changes to the Marketplace. Vendors, lend us your ears.

Read on for further details:

Cash Shop Update: How'bout Friday?
    The Opinion Primate recently ran a Weekly Poll to ask which day of the week would be the best time for Cash Shop updates. Most people seemed to prefer either Monday or Friday; Mondays updates would be more difficult for the team to pull together, so we've decided to give Friday a try.

    This week, the Evolving Item Report will be released on Friday. If it works well for you guys and for us, we'll try to continue doing Friday updates. If not, we'll keep looking for the right time to do it.

    Thanks for all your feedback on this!


ANOTHER Amazing Sale!?
    You'd think that our bargain muscles would be all sore and aching after last month's ridiculous t-shirt sale, but we've decided to push ourselves even further over the CLIFF OF THRIFT!

    We're knocking five bucks off the price of each and every plushie in the Gaia Store 'til the end of the month! Please feel free to take advantage of our temporary insanity and snag some cheap stuff!




Coming Soon: Find Your Friends - New Privacy Settings
    Sometime in the next few weeks, we're going to launch a pretty cool improvement/replacement for our invite system. The Find a Friend feature will let you search for all your friends who are already Gaia members-- you may have friends here that you didn't even know about. It will let you enter email addresses (or even import your whole email address book) and then automatically search for Gaians who match the addresses. If none of your friends are already here, you can easily send them invites and earn some Gold.

    Of course, privacy is important with a thing like this. Starting today, we've added new privacy settings that will let you decide in advance whether or not you'd like your friends to be able to find you by searching for your email address. By default, members will be able to find you in an email search. If you'd prefer to stay hidden, just visit your "Account" page, scroll down to the "Friendlist" section, and change the "Allow other users to find you..." setting to "No."

    Even if you set the option to "Yes," your email address will never be displayed or revealed to anyone unless they specifically search for it.



    Remember: you can always change this setting again later if you change your mind.



Torso Item Contest: Votey Votey!
    The finalists are in! We've got a bunch of great user-submitted capes, shirts, backpacks and whatnots to pick from, so scrutinize them carefully and choose wisely.




Some Marketplace Changes
    In order to make the marketplace fairer, more functional and more difficult to abuse, we'll be making a couple of changes next week:

      1) After the first five minutes, auctions with bidding enabled cannot be cancelled. The ability to cancel listings freely has created a lot of problems in the marketplace. Currently, a huge percentage of auctions (something like 30%) are cancelled early. It's a vicious circle: sellers cancel because they're not getting enough bids, and buyers won't bid because they don't want their Gold held up by an auction that may just be cancelled anyway. This has been a major complaint among a lot of marketplace users, and we hope this change will, in the long run, make things better for both buyers and sellers.

      Listings without bidding enabled ("buy-only" listings) can still be cancelled at any time.

      2) If a listing is bid upon during the last minute before it expires, the listing will be given an automatic one-minute extension. This is intended to prevent 'sniping,' giving users on slower connections a more level playing field and making it more difficult for botters to exploit the marketplace. Sellers can still choose to accept a bid whenever they want, so they won't have to worry about auctions that drag on forever due to constant outbids.

    Both of these changes have been requested by Gaia members for ages, and after a lot of thought, we've decided that these could make using the marketplace a better experience for everyone. For more marketplace help & info, check out the FAQ.


Thanks for your time, and have a fantastic day!