Mid-March news (original) (raw)
As many of you are relaxing on your Spring Break, the LJ team has been hard at work to bring you good news for the springtime!
More Userpics for Paid Accounts
The good news for paid accounts is that we're doubling your userpics to 30! If 30 is still not enough, paid account holders can purchase the userpic add-on to increase their limit to 100.
We're also excited to announce the Loyalty Userpics program for paid account holders. For every three months that you have a paid account, we will award you one bonus userpic. The bonus userpics will continue to add up for as long as you have paid time, but if your paid account expires, your limit will fall back to the free level. Whenever you renew your paid account, your bonus userpics will be restored.
To reward you for the paid account time you've had in the past, we are going to increase your limits retroactively. If you want to earn your retroactive Loyalty Userpics, make sure you are a current paid account member or that you renew your paid account within the next 30 days (our retroactive offer expires at midnight GMT on April 14, 2006). Permanent account holders will always have the maximum amount of Loyalty Userpics possible, which as of today is 32 (bringing their total to 132), and will accrue Loyalty Userpics at the same rate going forward. Please see the FAQ for additional details. It might take a little while for your retroactive userpics to kick in, but you should see them shortly.
If you want to earn Loyalty Userpics, sign up for a paid account and have your credit card billed automatically with automatic payments, or get a paid account with manual payments. Check out your new userpic limit now!
New Virtual Gifts
bradfitz and ryanfitz (it's jtrevino's birthday too!) Wish your friends a happy St. (Fitz)Patrick's Day with our Good Luck Clover virtual gift. You can also send a clover to wish someone luck with a test, a game, a competition, or anything important in their lives.
Send your friends a Bubbly Brew when they've had a hard day, or when the weather heats up and your friend needs a tall, cool one. Next time you have to miss a party, you can tell your friends "drink one for me!"
Fixes and Features
On Friday night our operations team accomplished a major database hardware upgrade with less than 10 minutes downtime to our users (under our 20 minute prediction). We expect this upgrade will greatly reduce the number of database errors you may have been getting and early numbers indicate that wait times for all users are almost half what they were prior to the upgrade. Keep an eye on 
lj_maintenance for updates on server work, including our soon to be announced memories fix.
We just added a feature that lets you play a voice post recording directly from your journal or friends page, rather than having to download the file and launch a separate player. (Voice posting is a paid account feature.) You can also preview our new rich text editor by clicking on rich text link from the Update Journal page.
There's a lot going on and we want to keep you all involved, so keep an eye on lj_biz, lj_design, lj_spotlight and 
news for all the latest.
Last but not least, long-time volunteer burr86 is joining us as a development intern to coordinate and maintain our bug and issue database. Welcome to the team, Abe!