[Changelog For Residents: GI v5.2]

Thanks for your patience. It was wholly my mistake-making fault that a whole bunch of stuff had to be done twice, and that there really wasn't any way to turn back.

The changes are partially cosmetic, but mostly functional, as most of the seemingly-cosmetic changes were designed with making practical changes in mind. Summarily:

Streamlining: All the graphical changes are there to streamline things so GI works better, for more people, and doesn't limit who can participate. All the room depictions were redone more to make them physically smaller, and compressed to transmit faster, than to update the actual depictions -- although something new is always intriguing, to me.

And the new layout overall is more about decreasing the amount of stuff that has to be "redrawn" as you move about the Island, to smoothen and streamline, than anything else. (I really wanted to achieve in interactive, moving navigation that depicted you zooming into a given part of the lovely Island map what Maylou made, as you chose to go from place to place, but I just didn't want to delay getting the Faerie running any longer!

* The "frames" layout, which only refreshes the actual view that actually changes when you move around

LOOK-AND-FEEL

The use of frames is a different approach, but there was a lot of wasted bandwidth (which makes it hard on dialup folks, and those that're Net-metered, and adds up to being expensive to serve) from stuff that didn't change from one page to the other, like navigation menus and header graphics and stuff. So now only the actual meat of the room you click into, or the thread you open up, is re-displayed as you move around the Island.

[i](Frames can be controversial, so I'm braced. I don't like them, myself, and this arrangement isn't convenient to me, 'cause I usually open a bunch of different pages in a bunch of different tabs, for each task I'm there to work on, so I can just close each one when I'm done, and the next one is waiting for me. But that doesn't really work in this configuration, so personally, I'd rather have each whole page load fresh and complete. However, the single most common suggestion in the Suggestive Box were complaints about how bandwidth-unfriendly we were.

In fact, my stepfather recently complained to me that it loads so slowly at their homestead-deep-in-the-Maine-woods-without-cable-access haven, that it never really finishes!

So I'm going to try to adjust, so we don't accidentally discriminate based on geolocation).[/i]

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Resident-Selectible Skins: Per many Suggestion Box requests, Residents can now select from three darker or lighter skins.

* Island Grasses is a green theme with a medium-light background, and varous shades of green highlighting things.

* Sandcastles is a relatively Earth-toned look with sand coloring, and slightly darker accents, on a lighter background tone.

* Deep Blue Sea is relatively close to the color scheme of the previous version of GI (dark sea-blue background).

Go to YOUR SETTINGS -> Island Options to choose the color theme you'd like to see GI in.

~ ~ ~

* SVELT MODE: Residents can now toggle off the display of room-depicting images and sounds.

* Room depictions have been shrunken and optimized

THE LOOVER
The Loover P. Loompa Memorial Art Museum

Loover Loompa was a part of the first family of Northern Loompas, brought to GI (then named Guarded Island) by my grandmother in the 1950s. He was a bung-maker at the boatshop, but what he really loved was to draw and paint.

Ironically, it was a terrible, terrible winter way back when, which changed Mankind forever, and Loover was right in the middle of it!

Seems the GI Faerie was on it's way back to the Island from the Maineland for the last trip of a day, when the N'or Easter caught to blowing, and the rolling seas pounded the bungs right out of the Faerie's hull, sinking her in deep, deep water!

Well, for weeks the Loompas raced to finish building a replacement boat, and Loover felt so awful that everyone thought it was his loose bungs that lost them their only contact with Maineland, so he holed away in his loft over the shop every minute he wasn't working!

Soon though, and long before they could finish a new Faerieboat, folks began to run out of the luxuries of life, and people were getting more and more use from each teabag, let alone luxuries like crunchy-frog jam!

Well, during these dark times, with Loover locked away alone, too ashamed to meet anyone's eyes from the shame of the loose bungs incident, the only comfort he found was in his art -- so much so, that one windy night, a chilling mini version of the fateful storm that'd disconnected them from the world, his last threadbare paintbrush gave up the ghost, and whiskered out.

Which is how Loover Loompa became famous for inventing Finger Painting, and had this Memorial art museum dedicated to him by a grateful world, after he passed on... and all because of a case of loose bungs!

It truly is a wonderful world.

Moderator for The Loover:

      - create categories for albums
* upload your own pictures into albums
* leave comments and discuss images
* Need a Moderator for the Loover. Would that be you?

ARCADIA NATIONAL PARK - The GI Arcade

* Lots of games, but they haven't all been vetted. Play at your own risk.
* Need a Moderator for these games?
      - duties include contests
      - We will be able to give awards for contests that will appear with your name and
            avatar for everyone to see!
      - could you make little graphics for awards for the winners of various contests?
* Challenge room? Like, I post a challenge to someone... or anyone...?

GRAFITTI WALL

A quick-post note board for leaving notes to each other within the forum.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING (from Suggestion Box): a bar appears near the top-right of every thread for you to bookmark it via any of the social-bookmarking sites. This could help us find new blood as we go, as those bookmarking services offer recommendations to like-minded people.

PERSONAL BOOKMARKING: You now have a place to bookmark GI threads of interest to you. Pretty straight-forward, as you'll find an option to bookmark a thread when reading it, and a link to view your bookmarks on your Comm Panel.

MEMBER MAP: This one was inspired by seeing other applications of this Google technology, and I didn't write the code that does the actual mapping and viewing of maps -- Google offers an API (Application Programming Interface) to programmers to let them link their own code to Google's technology and use it for this kind of thing. We're just maintaining our own database of your pinned locations, and using their API to display our points on their satellite imagery. But I thought it might be fun.

NAVIGATION: Preview of threads on-the-fly displays the first 100 or so characters of posts under their subject in the lists of threads within any given room, and hovering over the subject will pop up an even longer preview of the thread (not all browsers and versions will do the latter correctly, but the former should always be there).

Msg Preview on hover:

AWARDS: I've added fields to the data that's stored about each person, which will give us some fun little options, such as the ability to give out "awards" for things like contests, or good behavior, or anything we can think of, which will be saved for a person indefinately, and will appear with their avatar when they've gotten one.

OTHER FIELDS: The database has been converted such that the information stored with each Resident's account can be increased for all manner of useful purposes, rather than remaining static as before.

During the Upgrade, I've only had a chance to add a couple of new fields, which you'll find via YOUR SETTINGS -> YOUR ISLAND SETTINGS, which are meant to show you where I'm going with them. They are:

* My Family Album Entry: Where you can put a link to the thread where your Album entry is, as many of you have put in your signature text.

* Seeking Friends Only: So those who're in relationships, or otherwise sure they're unavailable to consider one, can easily flag would-be Guardians to not waste either of their time.

* These will be expanded, now that the upgrade is online, to be a full profile of information that I've designed to replace the Family Album (in addition to putting much more useful information, more particular to this lifestyle, as part of embracing Adoption, and the new Adoption Center).

* These pieces of information will appear near your avatar on your posts once you go to YOUR SETTINGS -> Island Information, near the bottom of the page, and set them.

* Your avatar might be gone if you uploaded it to our servers originally. I apologize, but if we were storing it for you, you'll probably need to upload it again.

IGNORE USER

Yes, after being requested since the dawn of iTime (Island Time), you can now be freed completely from reading those annoying people who drone on and on, with little apparent point, sucking the life out of a subject by over-thinking (in quantity of thought, *not* quality) these perfectly wonderful and organic concepts, that are special to you each, without some maroon ruining it with dentist-drill-like, boring cadence, fractured and tortured beyond any possible artifice by sophomoric -- nay, clumsy! -- overuse of punctuation. You can filter out the posts of particular persons.

YOUR SETTINGS -> Ignore User Options (under Modify Profile -- on the left) is where you set options.

ADOPTION CENTER

The last of the things which had to be done a second time is the new Adoption Center, within which we're going to embrace the search for Adoption, rather than be scared on behalf of would-be adoptees, as I usually have been.

We have in-depth profiles that offer much more ability to guage whether a potential Ageplay partner will suit you, in terms of actually *having* the relationship (what their life is like, what they can devote to the relationship, what actual experience they have, etc. etc) which will serve as "matching" software, fine-tuned for these particular lifestyles.

In addition, the new Adoption Center features resources devoted to helping sincere would-be Guardians learn more about Innerkids and what it is to be Guardian to an emotionally-real one, etc., etc.

Much more, but actually documenting everything became part of the last steps of installing it, so I'm most behind in that part. Stay tuned, please.