OMG Gather has changed the world is ending WTF BBQ? (August 27, 2008)

I'm going to Myspace or Facebook or Yuwie where my opinions matter! It's not fair! The world is ending! My life is over because a website has performed an upgrade! Oh my freaking seven star god! Someone once told me that you had a boyfriend who looked like the girlfriend that I had in December!


Please. Grow up, people. Why is it that the same people make the same speeches every time Gather upgrades, even if Gather adds the features they were screaming about not having last upgrade? If you're going to quit, delete your content and get out of the way so the rest of us can enjoy our website without having to listen to you. If you're not going to quit, and there's problems, report the bugs you find through the Member Support form. If it's not important enough to report, it's not important enough to post twenty-seven articles to 'every group on Gather' complaining about it.

Sorry, just posting this in advance before I look around, because it seems traditional with every Gather upgrade for twenty people to start virtually cutting themselves, five people to scream about how they and all professionals are leaving Gather for (another site that pays or doesn't pay for them being there), three people to act like condescending adults trying to badger Gather into compliance with their demands by treating them like recalcitrant children, and one person who threatens to go to Boston and assault staff members. And possibly for someone to come up with a way to make themselves and everyone who agrees with them show their true conformity by adopting a common standard of icon ridiculousness while calling everyone who disagrees with them 'sheep'. The tendency of these people to start trolling Gather and downrating or flagging all the content of anyone who says the upgrade is good is expected at this point - if your content gets flagged because one of these trolls hits your work, just report what content has been flagged, and it should get unflagged shortly.

Now that the obligatory has been taken care of, it's time to go see what parts of Gather broke due to the upgrade, what improvements are working, and whether the bugs of the previous upgrade are still there... and to enjoy the site and have a good time, whether the trollsheep like it or not. Here's my to-do list:

The Chain Game - Chain Game One-Offs. In this chain game, you have to come up with a word that can be associated with the primary word used to start the game. Simple, fun, and annoying to the overly serious.

Comment Speedway - Help These Images. Images are selected for featuring in a manner similar to articles - however, since there is no image title feature on Gather, all images are titled 'Click Here', making it a grab bag of unknown imagery. Still, just like last week, all images we feature this week are going to be from the Summer Pics Promotion, so if you're wanting to help out those brave souls, this'll be the spot to go to.

Take pictures! I need some more pictures to post, so I need to find more of my summer pictures - and to go out and take some more while I can.

Find missing book. I was about to start writing up another Save This Book article, when I came to the realization that I hadn't seen my The Cat Who... delivery confirmation slip amongst the others from yesterday (the one for the package to be sent to the prizewinner, that is). I'm sure it was in the mailbag, but now I'm not sure whether or not it got shipped, which is bugging the heck out of me now. Rrrrgh. I'm going to look around and see if it got out of the mailbag, or if it just got shipped off and the lady forgot to give me the confirmation slip for it. I'm betting on the former, because things've been really chaotic here lately.

Job applications. I've also got a number of jobs to apply for today, either over the phone or through email or the web. Here's hoping for some sort of reply aside from 'leave a message in the voicemail'.

Summer Points Promotion. Since correspondents are eligible to play in and win this one, of course I'm uploading some of my summer pictures to participate. In fact, I (and probably everyone else) am uploading pretty much as many as I have time for. If you'd like to help me out, check out the pictures I've uploaded so far -- I could use the help.

Half.com. I've still got about half a box of new books to list - but right now I've got over 500 books up for sale, with selections from every category -- there's bound to be something in there you're interested in. I'm going to make a habit of lowering the prices every Monday to help move inventory along, because the sooner I can get things cleared out and back to normal here, the sooner I can go back to saving books from the Goodwill dumpsters. If you're so inclined, you might want to pop in and see if anything interests you. I'll be setting up a new Save This Book either tonight or on Tuesday - this one's going to be for multiple books, so you won't want to miss it!

Legend of the Green Leupak. Although 'critically poor' tends to detract from my ability to work on the game, I've been scratching out some notes on one area I really want to cover -- expanding the game's skill and class system so that you can earn more cool powers (and so that I can finally fix up the battle menu. It gets cranky when there's too many skills in there.) Whether or not I'll get time to get any work done depends on whether I can eat (and make payments on the rent), though.

Get out of my head! Yes, this is a category. I keep coming up with ideas for things I want to work on, and sometime this week, I need to write them down again, so they'll stop haunting my brain and using up resources that could be better applied to solving my real-life problems.

Group Moderation. Lately I'm focusing on the Comment Speedway images backlog after I check over the rest of the groups. I'm making acceptable headway, but whenever I check back it's as full as ever -- not least because some people've been adding the summerpics tag to older work and republishing it to Comment Speedway, even if it already has several hundred comments. Incidentally, guys, your images have to be newly published to count for the promotion - not edits of older images.

Check for Gather glitches. I wrote down a list of some Gather glitches I want to watch out for yesterday, so I should probably keep an eye out for them and start writing up trouble tickets for whatever looks broken.


Yeah, lots to do, and little time to waste. What are you up to today?