Welcome to Gaia! ::

God Hoo, get the ******** picture yet?

You aren't wanted here.

Take your ******** ugly mule out of the Wishing Well.

BUTILOVEEVERYONEHERE gonk .

BULLSHIT! you do that kind of stuff to spam all the time! if its anyone that needs to be banned its you

and spam i didnt drag anyone into this! i didnt say this guild was s**t thought, i might have been thinking it but left you with some respect but if you want me to ******** off that bad i see why not. i just wanted to leave in a nice manner

mozzy-im still here cuz you keep talking s**t about me and i have things to say about it. your the last person i would trust anything like that with. and if your talking about stupid choices your the one that broke spammys heart with stupid whats his name partick or whatever

Congrats on your panel!! :heart: This is such a thoughtful idea, and I hope it's a rousing success.  I probably don't have the most valuable insight as some others might, but I'd love to share my experience if it potentially helps! I'm a bit of a yapper, but please believe me when I say that I did my best to keep brevity in mind. :sweat: [spoiler] I joined as a tween back in 07, where Gaia Online was my "social media" before social media became what it is today. All of my friends had one, and it was a valuable platform to build community. The gameplay loop of the Flash games granting gold for avatar items was fun. It was great to have zOMG as an accessible MMO without the funds or hardware for a larger, established MMO.  Perhaps the most personal gift Gaia gave me was that it helped me find my taste in alt fashion as a confused little emo girl. I would literally take my cash allowance and snail mail it into the site for Monthly Collectables, because I wanted the site to be successful! While that was great while it lasted, we could all feel the site's decline. I specifically stopped feeling excited for it after the Flynn's Booty gold super inflation. I can't recall the exact year, but I stopped probably close to 2012? Everything had stagnated, and now deteriorated. Even today, much of the layout, art, and games remain unchanged from those days, broken by old, incompatible frameworks like Flash. Nobody I know of still uses it, and hasn't in well over a decade. Perhaps my current check-ins are too sporadic to even qualify me from being considered an active user, but I had started thinking of it more and more during the baffling and short lived NFT and Metaverse crazes. Each time some out of touch tech bro talked about how it was "the future," all I could think was how Gaia's been doing these things for years! I got curious, and saw the site was staunchly anti-AI, now supported RLC art sales and was back in Lanzer's hands. It felt like the potential start to a real redemption arc.  I did a little digging to get back into my account. As for now, the only real use the site has for me is a tool against artist block. I'll peruse the Project Tie Dye color palettes and avatar builders to inspire me to try a composition I normally might not. I want to be excited to use more of it, and support Gaia, but it's difficult to in it's current state. Still, the site and it's framework is an important capsule of when the internet was [b][i]actually fun[/i][/b].  I'm no site designer, but I use other sites like VGen, Toyhouse, and even Discord (RIP), and think that some of the features on those sites could make excellent integrations into Gaia.  Realistic, non-costly implementations:  [ul] [li]Less Announcements that are just cash shop sales multiple times a day. I feel like the Announcement feature is useless now, when it used to be exciting.[/li] [li]Artist spotlights finally becoming a feature. The artists both on the official team and in the community have always been the backbone of Gaia.[/li] [li]Monthly prompts and challenges for creative projects[/li] [li]Some new emoticons. I don't know why this bugs me so much, but it does. :|[/li] [/ul] More complex or costly improvements: [ul] [li]A smoother profile builder[/li] [li]Booths or panels at anime/comic cons where you can get redemption codes for small items or memorabilia on site (Kind of like what you're working on now!)[/li] [li]Revamping Guilds to make it a viable Discord alternative. IMAGINE.[/li] [/ul] As for something funny: Over the past year or two of periodic re-checking into Gaia, I almost had a sense of embarrassment of being caught using it by my partner. I would alt tab when she walked by like I had been caught doing something naughty. (Which is hilarious given that we've openly worked in and been members of the kink community for nearly a decade now.) Come to find out that she also used to be a prolific Gaia user back in the day, but not for the artistic or dress up features. She just loved getting into arguments on the forums. The GaiaOnline user to goth sapphic pipeline must be studied. [/spoiler]

its not april fools you dumbass talk2hand heart