Welcome to Gaia! ::

Hey, Guild Owners, Captains and Co-Captains!

I'm the product manager at Gaia for guilds, as well as a guild owner (I'm just starting) so I wanted to give you a sneak peak of what we will be announcing and releasing next week (*crosses fingers*). We're working on some long-term improvements to the guilds system, and below is the first step for those changes.

We're making changes to overhauling guild searching (right now we only search by guild name) and adding keywords that, in the near future, will enable us to recommend guilds to users based on their interests. Our goal is to improve traffic to guilds and help increase your membership.

WE NEED YOUR HELP! Before these features go live, we need your help getting all the pieces in place. Once we launch next week you will see new features in the Guild Admin Panel, and we need your help filling out those fields.

Here's what's new in the panel (note: these changes will not be viewable/searchable by you or users until the next release after tomorrow's – which will be very soon! We need to “prime the pump”!):

• Keywords: (you guys wanted this!!) Enter up to 5 search keywords describing your guild and the topics it covers. This will help with both searching and interest matching.

• Guild Description: Enter a short description of your guild. Something that sums it all up in one sentence, like "Gaia's oldest dog training discussion guild" or "Your place for all things Harry Potter."

(those 2 items above will be included in a new UI on the Guild search page, as well as guild home page - next release - very soon!)

• Guild Name: Because a lot of guild names are ridiculously long and hard to read/understand, we reduced the character limit to 60. Guild names need to be shortened before a designated date that will be communicated in the post, or they'll get truncated automatically. You guys are good! No need to change the name icon_smile.gif

We're also cleaning up the guild home page (shown for each guild) for the next release and I think you'll be happy with the improvements!

You'll receive a notice next week once we launch with a link to read about all of the details and where to leave formal feedback, but I'm happy to get your initial response here!

Thanks for your help and support.

EDIT: looks like the launch is pushed out til next week...

From what you've written thus far, I love the new changes! I'll have to see them in action, of course, but wow, excited! mrgreen

I think the main reason why guilds have had such long names is because of the lack of a 'tags' system or a description box, so I think the 60 character limit is perfectly reasonable - and I'm glad you've limited the number of search tags to five. Hopefully this will stop people from adding on random tags with nothing to do with their guild just so it will show up in the search. Speaking of which, will we still be able to search by guild name as well? Or will it just be by keywords from now on?

I look forward to hearing more, as well. Let's hope we finally get into the gear we've all awaited for so long.


What kind of feedback and suggestions would you like?

Hello,
once we launch the guild keyword search, I'd love your feedback on how it works, etc.

We also have some future changes coming where we want to get your opinion before we start developing, and that should be in the coming months smile

Overall, I'll keep the communication open and hope you all do, too!

We have 4 new features that were all slated to launch at the same time, so our QA folks have been extra busy, hence the delay. We also found some last minute bugs that required some new coding and another round of QA, so looks like if it doesn't go out tomorrow, it will be early next week. I'm just as anxious as you are!

I have a suggestion: fix the ******** guild join requests. That glitch is ruining guilds. Gaia should stop adding new features until the ones it has work right. And please stop deleting my posts, Nazi. I didn't break any rules. If it's swearing that you don't like, why don't you have the stupid swear filter turned on?

Hey, it's fixed. ******** finally. That only took a few months. rolleyes

I'd like to thank wesden, her team, and others involved with the improvements of the GGN for being so receptive to user feedback. Interaction and caring goes a long way on Gaia.