Ahhh Sophie, that's where we disagree. In my opinion, staff has plenty of time, the problem is that they lack the follow through and the leadership to properly prioritize.

If there was time for the "minion zoo" to be created, there was time for this to be fixed.

And while I will concede that this is a feature that isn't necessarily needed, it exists and clearly numerous manhours have gone into creating the trees and ornaments and coding to decorate them. Perhaps the system of gift giving via these methods should be altered but it would be a shame to see the trees themselves go away, all over poor coding and even poorly prioritization.

Also, does the manual system have the ability to delay gifting? Or would using it to send gifts intended for delivery on the 25th mean people need to be ON Subeta on the 25th? Because if that is the case, that's a pretty crappy solution as well.

We could open trees on the December solstice?

I don't want the aesthetic part of the trees to leave. This is fine, and while it's glitchy and laggy at times, they are working well. I do want that to stay, but I am very, very salty over the other feature (gift giving) still not working after three years.

Keep the trees for aesthetics, I absolutely agree.

Also, LMAO MINION ZOO. Like, I'm expecting this to go live in 2019.

I definitely wouldn't mind moving the tree opening to a date besdies Christmas. Maybe on the 20th, or the solstisce like was mentioned. I wouldn't mind it falling later though, personally.

Maybe the trees can slowly open over time. instead of lasting one night, they last for seven nights.

I was all for the idea of the trees, but after this year, I agree that we need to stick to what works - for 2016, have the trees there purely for us to decorate, and leave the gift giving to the gift center. Ok, that means the gifts will arrive instantly, but at least it shouldn't require a programmer to be online to supervise it all (and sort it out when the tree gets muddled with what gifts to hand out).

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I like the tree presents, but I can't say it sits right with it all resting on a single member of staff to run and oversee it, no matter what day it happens on. Generally, if a feature can't be automated and left alone, I'm gonna worry about it going tits up x'D You add in the opportunity for human error and its guaranteed one day stuff will go wrong. There's not really much else I can say. I really like the idea of it but I don't like the execution. Sorry if I sound a bit grinchy but I think the tree presents (not the trees themselves ofc) might be better off gone.

Plus I didn't even factor in people getting thousands of gifts all at once, holy crud! Way to break people's inventories for days!

And I don't think it was an issue with how it's coded this year, grelca apologised (mad props for stepping up and taking the blame though) saying she ran the wrong script. So who knows, might have worked fine if the intended script was used shrugs

Obviously something needs to change or happen, but solutions aren't exactly easy to come by. I was actually going to suggest why not put a limit as to how many presents can go under the trees? Have a "sorry this tree is full" auto message come up after a certain X amount, and from then on people could use the Gift Center. That way there aren't so many presents clogging up the trees and people could still decorate and use them if they wanted? I'm saying this with no knowledge of how coding works, of course. I do like what KBBob suggested with the several nights of trees idea. It goes with the idea of lightening up the load underneath the trees and maybe that could help ease the problems? Again, no knowledge of coding what so ever, just thinking out loud and wondering

People bitching because they only got crap on the first two nights...with the userbase, I cannot see turning out too well.

The issue I see with having the trees open over an extended period of time is that unless staff does a gift for each of those days, there is a possibility that some users wouldn't get anything on some days... And I'm guessing that won't be the greatest feeling. Even getting the 'everyone gets this gift' and nothing else would be kind of a downer I think :/

About using the gift center instead... ehh I'd just rather staff just code the trees properly, than to keep all the gifts I'm going to give, try to remember who gets what, and then spend all day on Christmas sending out gifts manually from the gift center?? Sorry but no thanks, I'm preoccupied that day...

About the trees opening over a period of time... I think it could work if they started opening a week before christmas, but users get to choose when their tree opens? Like you can open it any of those days leading up to christmas and get all your presents at once. Know you're not going to be online that day? You can save your tree for the next day. Know you're not going to be online on christmas itself? Open it the day before. Staff should be online on the days leading up to christmas to make sure everything is working okay, that way it could potentially be left somewhat unattended on christmas day, so the single person in charge of it isn't pressured to watch it like a hawk on christmas. The people who were saving their trees to open on christmas can do it peacefully.

sure that's not really in the spirit, getting to open your presents before christmas, but neither is getting to open them five+ days later...

20 bucks says if they drop trees and have us all use the gift center, the gift center breaks down under the increased load and we have even more problems. :) Aren't people already having trouble loading it since there's no pagination and older gifts are never deleted?

Trees aren't really the problem. It's the lack of planning and organization. They fixed them last year, but forgot to clear out the previous year's gifts so we got duplicates. That should have been avoidable.

Then this year they ran old, outdated code from several years ago. That's not a problem with the trees, it's a problem with whoever was managing them. It was literally this:

So no, getting rid of trees is not a solution and I can't support it. Staff just need to pay more attention to what they're doing (and maybe make a backup before they flip the switch so they don't lose all their data in case there's an accident).

Maybe I should confess my idea of opening the trees over a period of 7 days was as serious as my first two posts on this thread (though my check engine light really is on) I don't expect it to happen, though it may be interesting. It would be a compromise of xmas and Hanukkah.

I say the staff should work on the coding for the trees, get rid of the stocking coding from the website completely, and if they can't fix the trees completely by next year, move the date up a week so staff is on for it.

I like the tree method and love to decorate the trees. I would rather see it fixed than removed because one script that should have been deleted long ago, ran by mistake.

I was lucky enough that even though I was one of the members affected by the glitch I didn't have a huge amount of items and deleted them via quickstock.

Anywho, I'd be up for having the trees open early, but like Sopheroo I'd be averse to having them opening on the 31st because it's right on the eve of another big holiday.

1. I'd be all for opening the gifts under trees on another date, but preferrably not before Christmas? Most people are quite late anyway with the gift givings, and I think a lot of students and workers only get time off close to Christmas, so the logical time should be between Christmas and New Year (27-30 December), when we are sure that at least one of the programmers is back from family time holidays?

2. I would prefer not removing the tree giving system. It's by far my favorite part of the site. If they just spend some (much needed) time now checking the code, they should be able to (finally) decently fix it, right? The gift center is just not the same thing, you can use that all year long. It's just something magical seeing those wrapped gifts appear under your tree (and the trees of others), without knowing what's in them.

i'm all about removing the trees' function to receive gifts. I know that people like their trees and decorating them - and this is fun. many users would be upset if they couldnt do it anymore, so the trees can stay. but it seems the function to open gifts is forever broken [as far as i recall there have been issues in the past with this options/ function.] removing it completely seems like a good alternative.
We already have the gifting center in place, we really don't need the for december.

I love the trees and decorating them. I wish they would make sure it was coded properly as well, and I think opening them on the 28th would be a good idea. That's directly between Christmas and New Year's Eve. Any time before the 25th and people may not be out of school or off work yet. It's better to open them after.

I mentioned on another thread it would be great if we could leave a message to the person we are gifting through their trees, kind of like leaving behind a Lumi (Christmas) Card. Now that I think about it, maybe there would be a way to just combine the two (gift center and trees) during Luminaire. Because we can already gift and message through the gift center, and have the choice of being anonymous.

OK so hear me out, and I might end up needing to put this into an image or something: Revamp the gift center a little bit to have a new main landing page for when Lumi comes around.

1. Give us the choice to either box up to 5 gifts and choose our wrapping paper (which will cost money) or to put up to 25 gifts under a user's tree, which we go ahead and type in the username, and it's free to do.
2. The first option leads us to the page we're used to seeing now. Leave a message, up to five gifts, type in their username, and choose to be anonymous or not.
3. The second option takes us to a page where we can see the user's tree (because we already typed in their name), choose up to 25 gifts, leave a message, and also choose to be anonymous.
4. Show our gifts under our trees whenever we open them as we see now on the "gifts you've given" page (everyone get's their own little section) and the message they left underneath the list of gifts they've given. (This is where I might have to show you guys an image of what I mean).
5. And for the love of all that is good, please give the gifting elf a face again.

What do you guys think of this or just any Lumi changes in general? Would love your input!

Ugh... so I had this long thing posted out and of course, it didn't post. That's just my luck. So, I will copy this one before hitting post just in case.

So, firstly I would like to say thank you to staff for all the effort they have put into trying to fix the tree situation and for trying to fix the site errors that keep happening. I know it seems that all you are doing is getting flack from everyone over how things didn't run properly or that they are upset over not being able to access the site, but I am sure there are those of us who are grateful for your effort. It's because we're all addicts(way to make the site so awesome in the first place) that we need our 'fix.'

Kudos to for stepping up and admitting the error was on their part as it was very big of them to say things messed up due to their error. I hope you had a good holiday with your family and friends. Sucks you had a nightmare to come back to.

My question is, why does only one user know the script for trees? I hope there isn't only one person and if their is, there should definitely be more. Back up people, as it were. I know this is a time of year that everyone wants to be off celebrating and there is a core group of people who stick around with us through the days right around Christmas to help ensure the site runs smoothly. I guess we ran into some hiccups this time and meh, it happens. To err is human.

I think staff has been more than fair in how they've tried to satiate everyone's frustration over the site having issues the past few days. I mean, we've had GAs given and extended due to the trouble, as well as csc and more. I think that what has been done in terms of compensation has been absolutely wonderful! Thank you for that!

I personally love the trees! I love the mystery of gifts beneath and I love decorating them! My tree this year was amazing(thank you for the extra ornament placement). I also greatly appreciated the ability to do 25 gifts at once for the tree. That made gifting sooooooo much easier this year! A great feature for sure!

I support making sure more than one person can run script and correct things if need be for the trees. I wouldn't necessarily mind them opening up a day or two later than Christmas day, but as someone else mentioned here before, that is what they look forward to because their holiday offsite isn't quite the same. I too look forward to opening them on the day once my own celebrations with family have wound down.

I am all for the idea of reducing cost or making free, the giving of gifts through the gift center for the month of December. I think this is a wonderful idea with a ton of merit behind it! It gives people a choice. I do think the clearing of archived gifts would need to be implemented for this to be successful.

As for the errors, I am glad the site was taken down to try and fix what was going on. I know we were missing the site over the past few days because lets face it, we're all addicted beyond measure, but taking the site down was really the best course of action. I'd rather they did that than have the constant errors that was just frustrating everyone to no end.

Again, big thanks to staff and we do appreciate your effort to try and keep everyone happy.