Lanzer's Work Diary

[Lanzer]

• 05/30/2023 Database upgrade work continued.  Mostly work on getting rid of old database we don't need.
  
• 05/31/2023 Working on the application to write to both new and old databases simultaneously, but turns out that was a bad idea as the application layer doesn't have control over index keys if creating new entries.  Have to change strategies to only upgrade through the replication functions on the database level.
  
• 06/01/2023 Fixed shops avatar auto rotation script.  Not sure how long had it been not working.
  
• 06/02/2023 Majority of the work for database updates are going to be done by our IT manager at this point. back to working on the search engine.
  

[Lanzer]

• 06/05/2023 Though I'm done with Runway updates, but here I am.  Got some request for data analysis on the Runway admin panel, and realized that there are a lot more I can do with automated data analysis, especailly after I added new algorithms to display all runway entries for each voter before repeats are displayed.  This update should address all the concerns over Runway cheating.
  
• 06/06/2023 Ended up writing a lot more algorithms than I imagined.  Though a day that involves working with standard deviation is a good day.  Stayed up implementing the system after midnight.  Looks like about 3 to 5% of votes now get disqualified before trophies are granted. 
  
• 06/07/2023 Incorporating the system to the admin panel for runway mods.  Now back to search engine work.
  
• 06/08/2023 Surprising how much I forgot from studying search engine optimization from 2 years ago.  Installed new search engine client, still studying configuration info.
  
• 06/09/2023 My crash course on search engine setup continued.  Surprisingly few videos and articles that are relevant to the range of data I'm indexing.  Just found out that the profile links were broken for Runway museum, quick fix.
  
• 06/10/2023 Runway new display algorithm was displaying the submitter's own avatar for voting, quick fix.  Also fixed gofusion bug where sometimes the formula listing would be broken and inactive.
  

[Lanzer]

• 06/12/2023 Continued on my search engine crash course and setting up new indicies.  Fixed the Gaia Auto feature that was broken when running in the Waterfox browser.  Attempt #2 at fixing new user flood control issues on forum postings.
  
• 06/13/2023 Fixed problem where "items you own" notification is not correct because the quantity was the amount of items in a stack instead of actual items owned across features such as marketplace, trading, gifting, and temp stroage.  Adjusted flood control code for new users to be more lenient.
  
• 06/14/2023 Mods requested more info for runway admin panel, and I used the info to create a vote screening robot to remove invalid votes by end of day.
  
• 06/15/2023 The search engine was incorrectly configured, enabled some feature that woudl cost an extra $1000 a month.  Not much work to reconfigure a new one.  Still more work to do in setting up the indexes.
  

[Lanzer]

• 06/19/2023 Fixed museum links in Runway as well as admin panel for adding backgrounds.  Fixed counter reset bug in voter display counter.  Migrating old search indexes into new format.
  
• 06/20/2023 Search engine work continued.  More work on migration script.
  
• 06/21/2023 Daily treat now has an exit prompt if page has offer available.  Attempt to fix platinum payout for tournament mode in old Flash games
  
• 06/22/2023 Start migration starting with favorites data.  Once things test out to be working migration will happen for other features.  Forum will be last as that will take much longer.
  
• 06/23/2023 Finally fixed the bug where new users would get the flood control error dispite not having triggered enough posts.  Also added the cooldown timer when flood control is triggered.  Taking some time off as my order of lumber just arrived.  Gonna build a shed while the inlaws are here to help babysit.
  

[Lanzer]

• 06/26/2023 Migrated current favorites data over, but there is a lot of work with regards to making current data save to both old and new search engines during migration.
  
• 06/27/2023 Fixed making offer with gold.
  
• 06/28/2023 Work on search engine backend continued.  User related data is easy to migrate so that is being handled second.
  
• 06/29/2023 Fixed runway bug where contestants see their own avatar when voting finally.
  
• 06/30/2023 Reason why Alarmskeeter server wasn't working correctly was because the daily reboot script wasn't doing its job.  Same reason why other servers were unstable recently.  Simple error where some files were missing since the schedule server was replaced recently.  Did one final deep dive and found the problem keeping Slots from working.  The server rebuilt blew away some important config that took a while for me to dig and find out.
  

[Lanzer]

07/03/2023 This week is more work on data migration, but we're also taking a bit of time off with the inlaws in town to celebrate July 4th.
07/06/2023 Security fixes for switchem.
07/07/2023 Started some work in branching off our current version of LuckyCatch to work as a slot machine for getting tickets as a simple alternative to slots. Once all the artwork is done it'll be ready for launch

[Lanzer]

• 07/10/2023 Favorites data had been migrated, though the most useful aspect of being able to search by item still need to be implemented.  Next up is to revamp item search and see if I can improve upon the current system where we can only search by item name.
  
• 07/11/2023 Working on creating a version of golden catch that yields tickets so it can replace the old slots game.  Had to do some simple changes where item quantity can be defined and displayed.  Also changed the timing of the slot game so there's less wait time while I'm at it.  This will be ready as soon as all the art assets are ready.
  
• 07/12/2023 Work on item search continued.
  
• 07/13/2023 Taking a break from search engine work and fixing some of the wishlist inconsistency issues.  There had been some mistakes in the old implementation where some users who migrated to the new system somehow got changed back to the old system, so now some wishlist items were lost while some old deleted items had appeared.  Time to re-write how the migration is handled.
  
• 07/14/2023 Gaia's wishlist was a part of the profile system on day one, and on the wishlist upgrade I tried to extend the profile system to use the new wishlist system.  Reason for doing that was so that all other features that uses wishlist would not need any re-writes to continue working.  However the profile system was not designed to have any part of its data read and written in silo.  My attempt to save some time in coding ended up causing some horrible profile system bugs where profile data got wiped.  Ended up spending hours on bringing a backup database online and writing a recovery tool.  Ended up properly seperating wishlist from the profile system, and re-writing all the features that uses wishlist to use the new wishlist system directly.  Should had known better than to take shortcuts.
  

[Lanzer]

• 07/17/2023 Finally seperated all wishlist functions away from profile system and changed all wishlist related calls to use the new class.  Hope that's the end of wishlist issues.  Looks like I broke the data streaming client for Dropplr when installing the new search engine client.  Easy fix to get our custom client back.
  
• 07/18/2023 Added ownership check on the outfit equipment list page. 
  
• 07/19/2023 Today is the first day that Alita got really sick.  She would drink milk and then throw everything up in 15 minutes, and that kept going throughout the entire day and night.  It was all hands on deck and I get to experience what it's like to be the overly worried parent.  Looks like she got a case of stomach flu, and the prescribed drug seem to make her sleepy all day.  Most of the day were just spent having her on my lap.
  
• 07/20/2023 The stomach flu is supposed to be highly contageous, and that absolutely holds true.  Laine has now caught the flu and now we have two people in the house that need attention.  Alita is improving but still managed to puke in the morning.  By night time I started to feel a loss of appetite, and I knew things are gonna be bad real quick.
  
• 07/21/2023 It's actually been years since I got sick.  I spent 3 hours fighting the urge to vomit, but at 3am the flu finaly managed to empty my stomach.  What followed were all the typical flu symptoms from muscle ache, headache and vomiting. We're lucky that the stomach flu last for a short time, and Laine is already recovering.  I had no idea I can stay in bed for such a long time.  Finally by 9pm I can get up and walk around.  Welcome to parenthood!
  

[Lanzer]

• 07/24/2023 Disabled captcha for Bootygrab, continued work on search engine stuff.
  
• 07/25/2023 Wishlist limit increased to 5000, removed SCAS beta restriction for image upload tool.
  
• 07/26/2023 Anon gift pm reporting support, login error debugging
  
• 07/27/2023 Spent the whole day looking through the login authentication code trying to figure out why people's logins were failing.  Most probable cause was that the security token was not saved in the memory cache server properly, or long enough, so that when the user returns, the encryption token data couldn't be found.  Ended up implementing a second layer of web server based cache to see if that will solve the problem.
  
• 07/28/2023 Adding an additional layer of IP verification to login that will help ensure login success.  At 9 this morning I was having some sharp pain that dailed up to 11 within minutes.  I've had this searing pain before when I had a kidney stone.  That was 10 years ago.  For the past month I've been wroking under the sun, building a new shed and I probably got dehydrated?  Whatever the cause, I ended up spending half the day in ER where they made sure it's not something more serious, and went home with a bag full of medication.  Hope I don't need to use those pain killers.  The IP verification stuff still isn't done.  Have to find some time to wrap up the work.
  

[Lanzer]

• 07/31/2023 I'll be visiting family next week, so focusing this week on outstanding bugs and feature requests instead of the search engine stuff.  Still gotta wrap up some migration work, but search engine still has some ways to go.  Not sure what I did wrong with the new setup but search isn't working correctly.
  
• 08/01/2023 Marketplace expire PM now has link to relist item.  Gaia Rewards page now has owned/wishlist indicator as well as marketplace link.  While adding the link I realized that it's helpful to provide the number of active marketplace listing for each item.  Ended up extending this function to the inventory item detail page.  Removed flairs from equip tab.
  
• 08/02/2023 Added support for quantity in flower exchange.  Thought this was going to be a quick feature but because it was written in the oldest programming framework, the whole thing took over 4 hours to do... Good thing we don't have much of any features that still use the old framework.  Most had been migrated over years ago.  Finally removed animated items from the equip tab.  Turns out the reason it wasn’t excluded was because of an inherit limitation with the inventory class, which stem from a limitation from the database classes.  I ended up extending two root systems just to make the inventory class to ignore an item sub-type which ended up being another 4 hour marathon.  It's worth spending the extra time as we have a new animated item series coming up and it'll be used to manage the new items also.
  
• 08/03/2023 Runway security fix.  Updated voting database info for better abuse tracking. 
  
• 08/04/2023 Storefront random avis is somehow broken, it's refreshing properly now and I've added some randomness so there will be more avatars being rotated.  Also fixed positioning for Cloud9 storefront as well as the locked icon bug where Cloud9's lock icon will remain on the screen when browing other storefronts.  Due to a bug with item moving while search is active, the ability to search through temp storage has been disabled.  Also fixed bug where shopping cart items always fail for Cross Stitch items.
  

[Lanzer]

• 08/21/2023 Worked on some of the inventory filter backend code so that astra and flair items are filtered properly while I was away. Fixed runway winner position reporting in case of ties.  Back to working on the search engine.
  
• 08/22/2023 It's Laine's birthday, so there was cake and dinner.    Got a pet project that I want to finish, that's the draft saving function for forum so that you don't lose what you're writing if you lost your session, or simply if you switched computer half way through typing something.
  
• 08/23/2023 The draft saving feature was more work than I bargained for, need to make it compatible with the new visual editor which is another layer of challenge.
  
• 08/24/2023 Updated entry cost and payout for avatar arena contests.  Helped fix mod tools
  
• 08/25/2023 Quick fix on about me page and preview.  Forgot that I was supposed to get the inactive account recovery tool ready so hopped on that real quick.
  

[Lanzer]

• 08/28/2023 Inactive account automated recovery tool is complete, just need to do some testing before release.
  
• 08/29/2023 Received info about the Ruffle player being able to play some of the Flash games such as SmashBlox.  That's fantastic news as we have a chance of seeing the older Gaia games back in action.
  
• 08/30/2023 Been spending today and yesterday testing out all the flash games and features with Ruffle.  The Flash player had been in development for a long time, and earlier this year it finally reached the point of supporting more complicated functions such as network communications.  The player is far from complete, but it holds a lot of promise.  Right now many features still doesn't work with Ruffle and it looks like it is because those features are making calls to the Sushi or Smartfox game servers.  Those network calls are different than web URL calls, and I've been debugging the issue to hopefully help Ruffle get over this hurdle.
  
• 08/31/2023 Fixed astra tab not showing certain item types such as tail.
  
• 09/01/2023 Work on Ruffle is kind of a distraction, but it would be really nice to have all our flash features back.
  

[Lanzer]

• 09/05/2023 Looks like getting things like Towns in Ruffle is a lot harder than it seemed.  Game data uses a type of network connection called XMLsocket, and there's currently no way for web browsers to natively support XMLsocket.  The only available option is Websocket, and by going that route, we'll need to add Websocket support to the old sushi game server.
  
• 09/06/2023 For the time being,
  
• 09/07/2023 Bug fixing day.  Avatars with different flaires do not generate different avatar favorite entries anymore.  Although it's not retroactive.  One more attempt to fix the GoFusion javascript bug, hope third time's the charm.  Removed GC purchase option from Marketplace.  Was trying to add the missing item notification to avatar outfit closet but turns out my work on the marketplace already added this to the system.  Marketplce offer listing alternating color rows, display number of offers on item detail page, fixed listing table border alignment.
  
• 09/08/2023 Another attempt for dealing with alchemy not updating inventory correctly when refreshing.  Attempting to rebuild Fishing to not use sushi server, but after scoping out the flash code it looks like it'll take much more time than a day of work.  Gonna sit back and wait for a more universal fix where we get Flash XML stream data working with Ruffle, then the work will be on server side and all sushi games would work then.  Currently Ruffle will work with 3 of Gaia's games, with Gaia auto and aquarium partially working, we will be releasing a server side Ruffle plugin once we play test and fixed the critical bugs.
  

[Lanzer]

We've had a lot of discussion about the AI event and ultimately decided to not release the event.  I think it's good for us to look at our mindsets and what drives us to do what we do.

When we returned to Gaia in 2017, we were able to do so with the financial support of our investors.  It would had been great if previous management would had given the keys of Gaia, the company that I worked hard to build, back to me.  But reality was that the board had control over the company, and they would rather sell Gaia to the highest bidder than to allow its owner to run the company.  It's not too different than Steve Jobs losing control over Apple even though he founded the company.  (A big difference being that I'm no where as brilliant as Apple's founders)  So the situation was that in order for us to get back control of the company, we would need investment money from someone else so that we could buy the company back.  I wouldn't had believed it if that was the situation explained to me back in 2004 when I started the company.  But never the less there we were, finally able to take control of the company due to cash from investors.

As a team we had a simple set of goals between us and other founders.  They invest in the company, and Gaia would try to expand in both products and users.  As founders we each have our own focuses.  While I focus on fixing everything on Gaia and work on adding new features, others would work on new games and new ideas that might or might not be within Gaia.  We were under the mutual understanding with the investors that while we focus on Gaia, at the same time we would explore additional games and services to broaden the reach of Gaia as a company.  This aspect is strictly from the perspective of us as founders, and I understand this holds little interest to most Gaians who wish for more time and resources spent on GaiaOnline.  As many of you know, our plan and most of our projects fell apart when one of the 2 investors ended up not following through with the investment, and things went south as we struggle to reorganize and stay up float through the whole bankruptcy process.  Even with that, Gaia as a company still have its existing investor and promises to fulfill, with the dynamic of Bluecow continue working on expanding the business till this day.  That's why from the get-go, Gaia had been kind of like a hydra, with different heads focusing on our core community, but also new technology and industry trends.  Sometimes we do make baffling decisions on stuff like NFT related projects.  Though while many of these decisions often didn't make sense within the Gaia community, it still fall into the roles that each of us play since we returned.

So the whole setup that we have is like a catch 22.  We wouldn't be back working on Gaia if it wasn't for our investors buying Gaia back, while having investors require us as a company to expand the business through additional products and leveraging new technologies.  Note that Gaia doesn't necessarily need to leverage any specific technologies, but what happens is that if we as a company wish to hire more people to build more stuff, one of the easiest way to do so would be to raise more money from investors.  GaiaOnline being a company over 20 years old, focusing on online games and community cannot raise any money simply due to the nature of the industry we're in.  If we wish to raise money to make more games by hiring expensive engineers, that actually isn't possible for us.  However, if as a company we're building something related to fields that investors are willing to put their money into, then it's a whole different story.  One of the reasons why we're still here today is actually because we were able to raise some funding through our NFT related projects in the past.  In the future, we are likely to continue creating other products and features that have a high likelihood of raising investment funds.  At the end our goal is to be able to continue building fun stuff. 

Our goal ultimately, is to be able to have the funding or additional revenue to support more staff, and with that, there would be resources that can be shared back to Gaia.  Of course, none of what we do should end up impacting Gaians negatively.  Happiness of the Gaia community is still paramount in what we do.

[Lanzer]

Dug up the old laptop to work on the old fishing code to see if we can have a version of Fishing without the dependency of the sushi server.  Unfortunately, unlike Gaia's server codebase that was better maintained compared to flash games as at the time we had a much stronger engineering lead for server code than our flash games.  It' was very difficult to setup the game to be compiled and it's likely that I can easily mod the game to run without sushi.  Will try again when I can find a bigger time slot but this had been too much of a detour putting other jobs on hold.

Prisma feature is close to ready, just needed some bug fixes and additional support for previews.

Bugs fixed last week:
- Reverse marketplace sort by price broken due to confusion between listings made in plat vs gold
- Fixed profile reporting giving wrong error message when field is missing
- Signature allowed HTML encoding, had to disable due to security exploit