Town Hall Tomorrow
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 3:54 PM by: Jeska LindenWe hope you can all join us tomorrow for a Technical Town Hall with Cory Linden, previously announced here. Also be sure to read Cory’s post about the work we’re doing on stability and performance. Hope you can join us either in person at the Pooley Stage or via the Linden Town Hall Closed Captioning Group!
Event Details:
Event: Town Hall with Cory Linden
Date: Thursday, May 3 (tomorrow) from 12pm-1pm PDT
Format: Text-based Question and Answer, moderated
How to Ask Questions: You will be able to ask questions via the Linden Town Hall Questions group (you will need to join the group in advance)
Location: In-world at the Pooley Stage, with text repeated in the Linden Town Hall Closed Captioning group (again, please join the group in advance). The Town Hall questions and answers will be pasted into the Group IM which will allow you to “listen in” to the Town Hall from anywhere on the main grid.
If you wish to chat with fellow Residents during the event, please join the Linden Town Hall Discussion group.
Can’t make it tomorrow? Don’t worry, we will be posting a full transcript of the Town Hall in this blog shortly after the event.
Please note, individual billing or support questions will not be accepted. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, it is not always possible for us to answer all questions during the Town Hall. Get there early to get a seat!
May 2nd, 2007 at 4:11 PM
/me braces for the stampede of angry comments in this blog post . . .
May 2nd, 2007 at 4:14 PM
If I can’t get on to the meeting, can someone please ask, if they are any plans on having more protected land.
May 2nd, 2007 at 4:15 PM
Why the hell these things cant be held on a US Saturday is beyond me - Saturday for you guys would mean Sunday for Europe and Aus and Asia, which means we could at least have the possibility of attending without having to take time off work, or be so late for it that it didn’t matter.
Please, please - the US is not the only country involved here
May 2nd, 2007 at 4:23 PM
[...] UPDATE: Jeska Linden posted on the blog We hope you can all join us tomorrow for a Technical Town Hall with Cory Linden, previously announce… [...]
May 2nd, 2007 at 4:23 PM
I too won’t be able to attend, I’ve got school at that time (actually at that exact time frame I’ll be in my “working with engines” class). I don’t mind really, as long as someone answers these questions either before, during, or after the town hall. As a programmer I must know these things or I will self destruct from anticipation and lack of info. >3
May 2nd, 2007 at 4:23 PM
@Shai
Noon - 1pm PST is 8pm - 9pm in the UK, 9pm - 10pm CET.
Do you mean you work evenings?
May 2nd, 2007 at 4:29 PM
I sincerely hope someone asks why in the world Group Notices and Group Chat are still not reliably working. These features are extremely important to my in-world business and I cringe each day that I cannot get a group notice to go through
Also, why in the world do you hold these things at NOON PST… when you KNOW that most Americans are at work. Do you somehow think that the Europeans attending will be less abrasive about all of the problems on the grid?
Just my two cents… I will be watching with great anticipation to see if anything actually comes out of this meeting, or if it is just a “feel good” session to appease all your big tier customers.
I personally think that if you are not going to sell Linden Labs to someone that can provide reliable resources to run the game, you need to clean house and replace your entire IT department. Again, just my two cents… the problems are getting out of control, and are going to end up costing a lot of people a lot of real-life money.
May 2nd, 2007 at 4:30 PM
Noon - 1pm on a weekday is not even a good time for most people in the US. I would think a Saturday would be a much better time for those people that would like to attend in person.
May 2nd, 2007 at 4:33 PM
Well I’m in the US and I can’t make it, so none of this “the US is not the only country involved”. Actually European users will have a better chance of making the meeting than US residents as many of us will be at work/school during the meeting and while my laptop can run SL the firewalls here at the office prevent SL from connecting.
Also they did give us the option/chance to send in questions to be answered and will be posting the transcript of the Town Hall here afterwards. If you have a question then send it to them before the Town Hall and it may get answered. Then just watch the blog for the transcript. That’s what I’ll have to do.
May 2nd, 2007 at 4:36 PM
Is there a way to submit a question for those of us in time zones that make it impossible to participate? It’ll be 3:00 am my time, way past my bed time.
Either way, I look forward to the transscript.
May 2nd, 2007 at 4:46 PM
[...] « Town Hall Tomorrow [...]
May 2nd, 2007 at 4:55 PM
Just like hundreds of thousands of other people across the United States at that hour, I’ll be at my RL job. I sincerely appreciate Linden Lab’s effort to meet with residents, but I think the scheduling for this very important town hall session was poorly thought out. Noon on a weekday?
Regardless, I really hope there are major, solid steps taken in the right direction after this meeting. I would like to see what scores of other SL residents would like to see: Put an immediate stop to implementation of all new features until the current ones work. Please. Second Life is currently as rickety as a raft in a white-water rapid. Thank you.
May 2nd, 2007 at 5:38 PM
Scott, this is designed intentionally to keep the pitchforks and torches at a minimum. By having it during the day when everyone in the US is working, they are setting up a barricade. Now granted, the town hall will still be packed, no question about it, but my money is on the fact that the time slot for the meeting was WELL thought out and why.
May 2nd, 2007 at 5:40 PM
@5 Travis Lambert - yes an amazing concept, some people do work evenings and nights (even weekends!), so you can get a beer at the bar, eat in a restaurant, watch a movie or play, tv, and get your morning bagel and newspaper, get your self patched up at the hospital, or your fires put out and even your ISPs have staff so you get your internet connection…
That’s because those are the times people want the services, so people work then so they get them. This is something Linden should really get on with. They run a recreational item which is used heavily in evenings and weekends in time zones around the world, but mostly centred around CET.
Linden’s own metrics show just 31% of users in the US, in fact only 39.9% of users in all American timezones compared with 52% in Europe (44% on CET and 8% UK on CET -1). And 8% on other timezones.
Certainly on the planet I come from, it’s standard business practice to provide those services and staff when people want and need them….
May 2nd, 2007 at 5:50 PM
[...] will hold a Town Hall tomorrow to discuss the stability and performance issues raised in both Project Open Letter and additional [...]
May 2nd, 2007 at 6:01 PM
Hmm im happy to see things are beeing discussed now! Even though im not sure if I will be able to make it, the many people that will do will probably have the same complaints.
My top 5:
* not beeing able to walk or teleport many many times due to lag
* buying and paying for items but receiving none and getting customers complaining about the same
* uploading textures which do cost money and are unable to rez
* people reporting they see my avatar with a female shape when i have loaded and see my common male shape (this is a common one)
*my avatars feet sink into the ground in some places which makes it look like he has no feet. i have been having this error ever since joining in november, ive searched the database for it but did not find any information about it (does anyone know what to do about it?)
I am looking forward to the improvements! *happy things will get better now*
May 2nd, 2007 at 10:07 PM
bah! Come on people, if it’s not payment info versus non, it’s my country versus your country, give me a break. I personally feel there’s enough pandemonium in the world. This is a case where we as human beings need to stick together and lend support in whatever way we can.
To anyone not in the Pacific Standard Time zone, or SLT as it has been dubbed… you are, I am afraid, at the mercy of the sun. Linden Lab is a company based out of San Francisco, Ca. What this means is, you are, at least at this point, going to have to accept the fact that regular business hours are appropriate for meetings regarding new business, old business, and even nunya business:P If I were paying for a service that was based in the orient I would hardly expect anything less than opposite support hours from my own.
Honestly 12 noon seems to be for most people, albeit very late for Australia and other far hemisphere lands, at least during the part of the day where most are awake. What’s that can’t make it cuz youre at work? well catch it on a transcript, plan ahead and submit your questions ahead of time, not like he will be able to even scratch the surface of all the curiosity in one hour anyways. I expect he already has a fairly good idea of what he will say , and will present a volume of information in a clear and concise manner that allows for maximum information transfer with a minimal time hit. Thus allowing those who do find time to grab a break and sneak a login from the stock room or the deep freeze… to hear most of it and still get back to what they were doing without interrupting their day too badly.
Ah well, I digress… my point you ask? Don’t argue amongst eachother like a crowd of rabble rabble. Stick together, we are all residents of one world and looky here, a second one…
Make do with what we are dealt and make the best out of it, and then your concerns for the future are at least addressed in the most positive and mature manner possible, providing the most likely desirable outcome. There now, much more befitting of the world’s most creative and socially advanced populace, don’t you agree?
May 2nd, 2007 at 10:26 PM
They had to pick a time.
There is not a single time that they could pick that wouldn’t have a significant portion of the userbase unable to attend. So they picked a time that was easiest for them to make sure the town hall ran well, without making us all wait too terribly long.
May 2nd, 2007 at 10:59 PM
wow i love my new bong, and ill bring it with me, tomorrow @ 12
May 2nd, 2007 at 11:52 PM
[...] Linden has written a post on the Official Linden Blog regarding the upcoming Town Hall Meeting and Project Open [...]
May 3rd, 2007 at 12:02 AM
Gee I HOPE Group IMs actually work by tomorrow LoL
May 3rd, 2007 at 4:30 AM
Um, Group IMs don’t but I suspect that’s why the Town Hall has been organised so early, to cut down on the number of questions, complaints and responses
Not a good way to get your feedback lol. Ask the ten biggest landlords how best to run sims and yes, it’ll be their wish list not the community’s. Make the forums (the only place Linden says they look at) inaccessible to NPIOFs and you’ll never hear of problems with trying to get PIOF status.
As for time zones, well when you run a global business, especially one that is most heavily used in recreational hours, you have staff in who know what they’re doing covering those hours. At least that’s the way the rest of the world does it. In any case, it wouldn’t harm to roll these things around, like update times, meeting times. Share it out fairly, and you may even get different responses from the ones always there is your time slot.
And actually, European users get it pretty good. Our play time is PST office hours, so there are people manually balancing the load, which explains why when Linden go home, the system degrades even though the numbers drop from 38k to 20k as Europeans go to bed.
And weekends, well ditto, because they obviously don’t trust the few weekend monkeys they do have on to do that, and so the whole of the grid destabilises until Monday morning California time. Now that affects everybody.
And if US users aren’t familiar with the concept of working anti-social hours, then push a few job offers our way, we’re used to it lol. I’ll do it for one…
Some of these things don’t have to be hard. There are far more French and Spanish speakers around the world than German, Japanese or Korean speakers, yet look at the bottom right corner of this web page. No French and Spanish translations, despite there being French speakers in Canada, which last time I looked at the map wasn’t too far from California, and I know there are a lot of Spanish speakers in California itself, since there was even a move to make Spanish the official state language lol.
So, shoddy service is shoddy service which ever way you look at it, or whatever excuses you give.
May 3rd, 2007 at 4:37 AM
When LL can figure out how to make the real world run on SL time then maybe everyone can attend. Face it, we could have advance notice of a full year and still people would have other obligations.
We have options for being there in person, listening inworld from other locations, transcripts, more.
Call in sick if it is THAT important to you. You know you have done it before.
May 3rd, 2007 at 4:45 AM
I would just like to get assurance on the Town Hall that the inroduction of new features, new developments and new technology is not stopped for the sake of “only” fixing bugs
We long-time residents are used to bugs. There have always been bugs. They used to be pretty more serious in the past than today. At least nowadays we can fix them on the open source client if we wish and have the expertise to do so.
By contrast, certain new technologies are impossible (as yet) for residents to implement, even on the open source client. We have to rely on Linden Lab to roll out those changes. Stopping all development suddenly and focusing on getting rid of the 5000 or so bugs tracked internally will make Second Life be as obsolete as ActiveWorlds in a couple of years — when everybody will be demanding realistic avatars like the ones available on Sony Home very soon now.
A trade-off has to be met when considering the balance of bug fixing vs. new features. In my mind, we have far too less of the latter, just because a few people are demanding stopping the development all the time. SL looks just like it was in 2004, with some minor cool tricks — better lighting, flexible prims, better group tools, and far better occlusion tricks and hardware-based rendering. But it’s still pretty much “the same product”. A product that stands still in time is losing its technology edge, and we cannot afford to lose the Metaverse race — new products can introduce radically new changes immediately since they don’t need to listen to complaints from a yet-unexisting user community… Second Life’s biggest advantage, an economy and society with 6 million residents, is its biggest handicap: some of those complain. All the time. But the vision should be set into the future — granted, in some cases, this means not pleasing everybody — and not looking to the “good old days” in the past like so many “demand” these days.
The old days were not good. We just have short memories.
May 3rd, 2007 at 5:05 AM
If the only question you people are going to ask is “Why can’t you do everything I want you to do at the TIME I want you to do it?” I’ll skip it. I can see why the Lindens don’t do this very often - you’re all a bunch of whiners crying about your petty little personal annoyances over all else.
The answer is - BECAUSE THAT’S WHEN THEY’RE DOING IT.
Now, can you think about some REAL concerns that should be addressed? Think hard - eventually you’ll find something to complain about that isn’t about what time you go to bed or not.
May 3rd, 2007 at 5:28 AM
“Some of these things don’t have to be hard. There are far more French and Spanish speakers around the world than German, Japanese or Korean speakers, yet look at the bottom right corner of this web page. No French and Spanish translations, despite there being French speakers in Canada, which last time I looked at the map wasn’t too far from California.”
Yes but they have to show a image that thre are those at the meeting its the way.
May 3rd, 2007 at 5:37 AM
Why did you take away the in world money tranaction for instant help ………you seem to take away things that are helpfull and leave things like traffice that many think helps promote sales when we all no it does not you remove live help for instant help and have a web site with so much teck stuff many dont understand. and as for you Email I am still wating for help (no answer ) on a private matter about My account problem ….and also problems from the 1.4 update thank heaven My friend found a Lindens on line to help Me. or i would still have the same probelms with My AV you forget the little pepole that dont understand all this teck talk easy for you computer buffs not so easy for Us players that come to have fun but spend big money on your site I for one have 4 full acounts and use then
May 3rd, 2007 at 6:11 AM
[...] Corey Linden posted on the Linden blog today to pre-empt a number of likely questions at tomorrow’s Town Hall (being held 5am Friday morning Australian east-coast time). [...]
May 3rd, 2007 at 6:15 AM
Gwyneth Llewelyn makes one of the strongest points here yet: SL is in a metaverse race. What do all of you want the “metaverse standard” to be?
Stats show that most SL residents have good educations and (needless to say) are tech savvy. So most of them know that the trick in the history of technology, again and again: establishing a standard. Sometimes it’s not the slickest or the most flexible product that wins. Otherwise Americans would have the sort of great cellular service I’ve seen in Europe. . .
I’m a relative newbie (and quick learner) who finds that, again and again, SL gives us a unique ability to create content without Linden Labs okaying everything we do. For me, that’s the “magic” in-world and the reason that I’ve found other virtual worlds tedious and online gaming of no interest.
I hope the Town Hall can resolve the very real complaints in the Open Letter, because if SL does not become the standard for virtual worlds, a locked-down but less buggy one might.
May 3rd, 2007 at 6:27 AM
those they took away from us was to lessen the stress but look at it now? did it help? No. What happen instead was what you see in the bugs that occured in the last 2 weeks.
May 3rd, 2007 at 6:53 AM
Thanks, Jeska. Those are the better news i had in a long time from Lindens, as the Open letter says (i’m one of the signants) it seems Lindens are closing ways of communication between the Lab and the residents (forums, voting, etc.). Your speed in your Town Hall porposal gives us two main ideas: Linden Lab cares for the residents, and Linden Lab wants to hear us. Anyway is a few sad to need to sign this letter as a way to make you react because i’m sure all Lindens know the issues, by own experience or through the contact with other residents.
@Gwyneth: Of course a system of the level of Second Life has always bugs, but last times are getting WORSE. I’m a resident since October and in this last few months i had more TP problems, more attachments ended in my bum after teleporting, more Friends List bugs and more problems with lost inventory or object transfer than in my first months. We are not only residents, are costumers, and as costumers we can demand a quality service.
Of course we all want new features, and sure the LL will work on them, but more good new features with the same basic problems is what we want?
May 3rd, 2007 at 6:55 AM
Thank you Cory for a refreshing post. A starte of the union.
do you think, and I know it is a lot ot ask, but could you do it every two weeks. I know it is a hassle but you seem to be the fist person so far who acualy sees what is going on and given a realistic account.
I look forward to being at the town hall and hearing what else Cory has to say. The issues have not gone away but there is some light on them.
Thank you.
May 3rd, 2007 at 7:21 AM
[...] delays for $2,000+ cash outs of over 14 days! At noon today SL time there is a much ballyhooed Town Hall meeting at the Pooley stage [SLurl]. With the numerous problems lately, could be a large crowd. You can [...]
May 3rd, 2007 at 7:53 AM
Off topic, but can you please leave comments open in blog posts…by the time I see them they are capped and I don’t get a chance to comment…
Also if the cap is 100 why are there blog entries that have 5 or 10 posts that are closed??
Please don’t turn off comments to posts that you turn them on for…it looks very bad, like you don’t want to listen anymore and it removes any place for people to ask questions.
May 3rd, 2007 at 8:33 AM
I find it frustrating that all Help, Knowledge Database Wiki searches always wind up displaying the same few pages and i end up going in circles and getting no info except the basics. couldn’t even find a link to the Open Letter Project. Is this just ME? I do look forward to being able to import 3D from other sources and think another worthwhile improvement would be the use of programable 3 axis 8 button joysticks. i love SL; keep up the good work.
May 3rd, 2007 at 9:03 AM
The Meeting is a positive step, surely. Since I will be working at that time, I won’t be able to raise the red flag about the new changes in Billing procedures: some of us (I cannot determine on what scale) can no longer reliably purchase Linden dollars through our US credit cards. My bank assures me that they are ready to approve the charges–unfortunately, after hours on the phone and email with Linden Labs, I am no closer to any resolution. Response has been poor to a customer who wants to spend money.
Maybe there really are just a few of us encountering this problem?
Good luck.
May 3rd, 2007 at 9:08 AM
*Contacting: Billing Questions
***********************************************
Comments: It has now been almost a week since I converted Lindens into US
dollars and they still do not show up in my paypal account. Please note my
Secondlife email is not used for my paypal account. Tomorrow I will be moving to
the FCC and lodging a complaint with them as well as paypal and Visa. The lack
of response and communication with other people on SL indicates that this is not
an isolated problem and I’m sure a number of complaints have already been
lodged.
Sent by me to billing lets address some of these issues
May 3rd, 2007 at 9:10 AM
If this is going to be about stability problems, do you suppose they will be some answer about how to report stability problems in world in real time? So that they can be resolved when occuring? It is no longer possible in any published way to get the attention of an inworld liason to check a sim’s stability. No way. None. I challange any Linden to tell me of a way to report a sick sim that generates a response in less than 12 hours. Help Request used to fix these problems in a few minutes…sometimes taking as long as a half hour. Now..using the methods currently suggested, no response after 2 days. In fact, I know the sim i reported has since been restarted at least twice…once because it had already crashed while i was filing a report on it, and once for yesterdays restart of the grid…so my filed report is …useless…and going to take up someones time for nothing now…not the best use of scarce resources.
May 3rd, 2007 at 9:41 AM
if its any meaning I am NOW getting back feed backs bug reports from 1.13.? client……If this is any measure HOW slow the bug reports are going……….shakeshead think about it. thats what 8 weeks ago?
May 3rd, 2007 at 9:48 AM
@16 Metaphor Box - well, that’s kind of the point on this Town Hall isn’t it? Some of the input has gone ie Group IMs so fat lot of use it will be unless you are lucky enough to be there in person.
OK, perhaps someone who will be there, if I can’t get in, because I can’t post in the Forums because Linden in their wisdom don’t accept my French debit card and neither do PayPal (PayPal Europe don’t accept any other European debit card other than the UK one and that’s only 8% out of the 52% who are European, but obviously customers don’t seem important) will ask a couple of pertinent questions.
The server update bork is a good point in question. It wouldn’t have been necessary in the first place if Linden hadn’t borked things rushing out 1.15, which was rushed out to fix the complete bork that 1.14 was in the first place. Lack of testing.
So you fixed a bug in inv loss, meanwhile causing inv loss to people… Way to go. Many people now have items with 00000 UUIDs from just before the update. I’d like to know how Cory intends fixing that issue. It sounds like Linden “accidentally” forgot to save or cache the invs before running the bug fix and new scripts. Yet another example of how they break more than they fix, which is one of the points of the Open Letter in the first place.
So:
1) When are you going to fix this inv loss you just caused?
2) What sort of QA process are you going to put in place to stop this happening with every single update
3) Tell us your plans to employ some programmers, db and network specialists who actually know what they are doing
4) If you can’t scale above 38-39k concurrent, please tell us, this has been static for over two months now
5) Havoc and voice are all very well, but your main response said almost nothing about grid stability, client stability and db stability. The number one concern here is the usuability of the system. That means being able to login, being able to move, tp, see you have money, not have to relog every half hour when you attcahments end up your nether regions. And number one: lag.
6) Taking away ratings and new mesaging ws supposed to ease load and hence lag. Where are those improvemnts? If anything 1.15 is more laggy, plus it has borked yet more stuff.
7) Are any heads going to roll for these continued errors?
These issues are not all to do with lag. Once tps start failing they continue until a relog or crash. Ditto with stuff up yer bum. And your client will crash eventually, at least on Mac with the memory leak that has not been fixed for months and months and months.
Basically you rush out too fast too quick. You should not do an update more than once a month, and only after you have properly tested it it, and buy some load simulators if you need. Clearly the Beta Grid is entirely different software if everything works there and fails everytime you shift it to the main grid.
Often there are three or four or more versions to what was posted on the blog, so how you think you can properly test software in half a day while changing scores of stuff beats me.
And for those asking why there aren’t more Beta Testers….
Well I’ve tried it twice with different versions, both times the client crashed before I could get in, so kinda hard to test it.
But you have to understand also:
1) A lot of people don’t want to Beta Test (same in rl)
2) The client often prevents you testing anyway
3) Clearly it’s a waste of time because stuff seems to work on the Beta and fails straight away on the Main Grid so somewhat pointless
4) A lot of the stuff is ‘kewl’ features that people don’t want.
They want a stable platform that works as advertised. Then they might welcome new stuff.
Generally in science and engineering, when you are bug finding or fault finding, you isolate and look, you don’t keep adding stuff so the problem gets worse. Kinda programming 101 really….
May 3rd, 2007 at 9:52 AM
Usagi, please read the bug reply more carefully. They send you the open reports to check, if they are still valid with the 1.15 viewer series.
May 3rd, 2007 at 10:00 AM
When you are going to fix the problem with the untested cards? I have got an Ati Radeon Xpress 200M and my SL run slowly…. : (…. I ve read a lot of people with the same video card having the same problem…. What can I do when my FPS are 1-3 frame per second? I have all my setting in the minimun…and nothing happen….. I dont get any acceleration from my video card.
May 3rd, 2007 at 10:21 AM
This is ridiculous: 1 h 40 minutes to go… and the toy database LL are using has broken AGAIN. Nothing works. GET RID OF THIS TOY MYSQL FOR GOD’S SAKE…
May 3rd, 2007 at 10:43 AM
well one thing for sure if the TP stop working before the townhall meeting and they have to shut the system down to fix that .. good way to tell us to Hush Up about problems with SL.. goodness..
May 3rd, 2007 at 11:14 AM
What? There are inworld problems? Maybe they should be reported to someone so that they can be fixed…oh..wait…that’s right, no way to do that now.. here is a post I found on the forum that does a much better job than me at stating the obvious…
(and oh..for the pedants out there..read Live Help and Help Request as interchangeable terms…you know we are referring to the system of reporting a current inworld problem through a system using the help menu in the client).
” Live Help Was The Only Vital, Real-time, In-world Link With The Community
With the loss of Live Help, Linden Labs has now totally insulated itself from the need for any real-time intervention, or assistance, or involvement with its community. I was stunned when the only real-time, in-world link we had was severed.
It’s the equivalent of any community in real life saying we have shut down all 911 emergency services lines because we just can’t support or manage the volume of calls we get. So no more emergency access to police, fire, or life squad services. How ridiculous to even contemplate.
Someone breaking in, threatening your life? Email us. Oh, you have a raging fire in your home? Check our comprehensive library on fighting fires. Sim just bellied up? Email us.
When the only group who can provide emergency services to its community, both insulates and isolates itself in real-time from its own community, it’s time for new management.
I truly, for the first time, feel abandoned by Linden Labs. Have a problem? Drowning in the middle of an ocean void? Fire a flare. Maybe someone will see it. Maybe not. And even if they see it, they may elect not to respond. Ask the victims of the Titanic how they feel about that kind of a policy.
I rarely become angered. But this is bullshit. And all the blathering about new and improved comprehensive source documentation totally ignores the need for continuous vigilance and true emergency responsiveness. It is called stepping up to the plate and accepting the responsibility to maintain the well-being of your own community.
I don’t care how much people wish to malign the service that was in place, it was a LIVE LINK to Linden Labs. I have the upmost respect for ALL of the people who volunteered their valuable time, and life energy, to service their community. Was it their choice to shut it all down? I think not.
I have asked around, pretty extensively, with those who were on the firing line, INCLUDING Linden Labs people. And when politely asked why Live Help was abandoned, they just mumble in their beards, and scuff up the ground with their shoes.
For all of the candor claimed by Linden, the serreptious way Live Help was abandoned was a magnificent case of spin-doctoring, and slight of hand. No splash banner “Message of the Day” that said “We are considering shutting down Live Help. Please let us know what you think about that in Forum Blah-Blah.” It never happened. Not even close.
That there has been only 1 reply to this post, and only 14 views to date, saddens me.
I look forward to Thursday’s Town Hall Meeting, to see if this thread even makes it to the agenda.”
May 3rd, 2007 at 11:26 AM
Can someone ask when the Group notices will be fixed. It is really nuisance not to be able to use them; it almost defeats the purpose of having a group. Right now, we have to send a “group proposal” to communicate with the group.
Also, since the new update, I don’t see Live Help (using IM help) in the Help menu. That was really convenient. Is Live Help still available?, if so, how do we access it?
May 3rd, 2007 at 11:29 AM
[...] is highly disappointing to me personally. I expressed this sentiment in a comment responding to a post on Linden Lab’s official blog yesterday afternoon, (however my comment is apparently still [...]
May 3rd, 2007 at 11:38 AM
#26 - John…
It takes 5 to 7 days for you to get your precious $ that you suck out of SL into your paypal account.
Let me know how letting govt. agencies investigate your bank account goes for ya.
May 3rd, 2007 at 11:41 AM
Quote from an interview with Ian Wilkes, Director of Operations at Linden Lab:
“in our operation we say the Databases Are Not Special – this is an unusual view. Most organizations coddle their DBs, spend a lot of time and attention on them”
http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/interviews/ian-wilkes-linden-lab.html
Maybe Linden Lab should start coddle their databases too… nineteen minutes to go and both search and TP are broken.
May 3rd, 2007 at 11:43 AM
[...] you all up to date, Second Life has been making some people unhappy lately. So, Cory Linden called a special Town Hall meeting for Noon Pacific Time today to discuss some of the issues. You probably can’t get into the [...]
May 3rd, 2007 at 11:54 AM
Unfortunately even an hour before this event it was FULL. This is why TEXT town halls just don’t work. Bring back Voice response and broadcasting them via Radio Linden Please.
May 3rd, 2007 at 12:06 PM
Also it’s interesting that we are supposed listen in on something that we all are complaining about Being BROKEN.
May 3rd, 2007 at 12:11 PM
The Town Hall groups are not functioning properly. I’m not seeing anything in two of them. Here is my question (since I have no idea if it’s being dealt with)
“I often have upset customers who have lost animations or other no copy items when trying to transfer them from their inventory to a HUD. Other customers have lost their HUD altoghether. Since yesterday’s update, I’ve had 3 customers contact me with inventory loss issues. Two questions, 1) Is there a particular resource that I can point someone to who is experiencing inventory loss issues, like a page in the wiki? and 2) If you are noticing inventory loss after users attempt to move items in a particular way, can you provide a list of suggestions that I can pass on to my customers to avoid inventory loss?”
May 3rd, 2007 at 12:16 PM
I’m with Keiki, the Town Hall Closed Captioning group is not functioning properly, I’ve seen nothing of the meeting
May 3rd, 2007 at 12:22 PM
are there any repeaters in world.
May 3rd, 2007 at 1:14 PM
[...] Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 1:14 PM PDT by: Torley Linden Thanks to all who attended our Technical Town Hall with Cory Linden, whether you were onsite inworld or listening to the Linden Town Hall Closed Captioning group IM [...]
May 4th, 2007 at 3:27 AM
@ 45 Shinyukie Takakura - Doesn’t look like it did, unless they edited it out…
@ 52 jefferey Hear - awww Jefferey, you didn’t really think they were taking this seriously do you? They don’t want people to hear, in cse it upsets their view of a ‘kewl place’. Unhappy residents? Naw, thy’re just a few glitches really, we’re working on that…
@ 24 Gwyneth Llewelyn - Good old days? I haven’t seen any. It was bad when I started, now it’s worse than ever. Normally software gets better with age, not here….Pretty much all the problems makibng people angry, and making sl unusuable, have been around since before September, with no sign of being fixed soon on the horizon.
What we have had are lots of tweaks which break more than they fix. The hailed First Look render pipeline which is actually slower than 1.13; the rushing out of 1.15 to fix the borks in 1.14, the update they’d rather forget about, as the problems spread from “a very few” to almost all users; that introduced a new messaging system, supposed to reduce load along with dropping ratings - end result? Well, the grid is slower than ever, we’ve lost a useful feature (again), we’ve lost Live Help (replaced by a Beta version of software [oh, it's LL, figures]), and to cap it all, the said messaging system doesn’t work, and has borked up Group IMs, inworld emails, vendor systems etc etc.
So then they released the server bork fix to fix the borks caused by the bork fix which was to solve the borks caused by 1.14. Well, it got rid of left session spam, didn’t fix a lot else. But because they are Linden, and love tampering, they added in a “fix” for inv loss and new scripts which have resulted in…. inv loss (!)….
Well, actually a bit step forward. It isn’t inv loss at all there. Those items are still in your inv, they just all have 00000-000000-000000-00000000 UUIDs and so are unusable….
Meanwhile, it’s all our fault because we don’t test enough on the Beta and it’s all blamed on load, not their programmers. Funny, but these things fail to work or crash the client whether there’s 20k on or 38k on….
Well SL is dead. You can see that by the Last 60 days logins DROPPING, new users tailing off, retention rate plummeting, and the total frustration of users who are leaving in droves.
Already it is now an ugly world full of revolving For Sale signs, scams, frauds, and thousands of identical Business in a Box shops.
But they don’t need to fix the bugs. They aren’t providing a Second Life at all. It’s just a business churning out more land for their chum Land Barons to sell at hideously inflated prices to the next wave of noob suckers…
After all their policies have destroyed geniuine businesses here, driven out long term residents, destroyed any feedback mechanism, destroyed a working system… what else can it be?
@ 49 Eva - Quote from an interview with Ian Wilkes, Director of Operations at Linden Lab:
“in our operation we say the Databases Are Not Special – this is an unusual view. Most organizations coddle their DBs, spend a lot of time and attention on them”
Ah yes, also most organisations have a management structure. Most organisations assign tasks to staff not let thm pick their own. Then again, most organisations have stable software that works as advertised, they fix bugs, listen to customers. I wonder if there’ any correlation? :-O
May 4th, 2007 at 11:39 AM
This has become my SL experience
If i can login which i cant the past hour but when i can get onto sl then 95 percent of the time either I cant move, cant tp, cant load or rez inventory, or it takes 20 minutes to rez an item, inventory loss or when i pick up an object to put into my inventory it never arrives there or does a few days later, crash constanlty, the sim i am working on crashes for no reason constantly.
Things start to get a little better about 10 days after an update for about 2 days then suddenly another update so then back to another 10 days of headaches. After the last update the one mainland sim was never reset and immediatly was a total mess and took us 2 days of hell to finallly get it rebooted causing every vendor 2 days of loss and no way to get help because live help is gone and the new help took 2 days to get it fixed.
How has this make my business in sl. Well if people cannot tp to my store a great deal of the time, the sim crashes once people actually get to my store and it starts crashing evey hour for no reason all my customers get crashed out and never return. When they actually can shop they cannot rez their item or it gets lost in inventory or lost when they try to rez it so i have to handle each customer and resend the item. My business has dropped considerably during the past few weeks just when it starts to finally get back the next day there is an update and then I go through it all over again. My friends who have businesses alot larger than my little one in all areas are having the same difficulities. Most of the time I just want to pull out my little hair i have left on my head. Even when I am trying to create a new product I have to wait till the middle of the night because that is the only time I have a half chance sl is working enough for me to work on a product.
There are some people who make a living in sl but they wont and cannot after the last update. Please make it top priority to get the stablity issues onder control. I still cannot login to even get to sl.
limit none paying logins after 25K concurent.
Dont worry about changing features or adding
just fix the ones that are already there
and when i went to town hall meeting i stood there outside of the meeting and the group was broken so all of us people couldnt even read what was going on please bring back voice
May 4th, 2007 at 11:42 AM
@ Jesse, #17
*aplausing* Thank you!
May 4th, 2007 at 12:10 PM
My region(s) are immediately being placed for sale…This is UTTERLY ridiculous… It’s QUITE obvious LL CANNOT manage this system any longer… I wonder truly HOW many BBB complaints are on file in the SFO Better Business Bureau about Second Life… All it will take is a few more hundred (or thousand) like to leave me, and then all the NPIOF can rule the wastelands, as legitimate land owners/content providers such as myself pull out
May 4th, 2007 at 1:16 PM
Hmmm… Lets see… 8000+ regions x min $200USD=1.6 million USD INCOMING monthly, and YOU GUYS won’t even spend MONEY on your databases? Let me ask one small question WHERE IS THE 1.6 MILLION DOLLARS PER MONTH GOING? CERTAINLY not INTO SECOND LIFE!
January 19th, 2008 at 11:36 AM
http://groups.google.com/group/hardcore-a/web/teen-couple-hardcore;Teen Couple Hardcore