The LDPW moles are hard at work on the new “Bay City” Regions even as we blog, however we need more ideas and input! Please consider adding your suggestions to the CONTRIBUTE section of the LDPW public wiki page HERE. We’d love your input!

Jack mentioned in the initial LDPW post that we’d be “… finally completing the missing coastline on the southern continent.” Well, the thirty new “Void” regions are now being terraformed, excavated, massaged, smoothed, named, and textured.

We’ll hide a few easter eggs here and there, but we’ll also include a small island which will be set in the gap between McManus and Pogon. We could just throw down some palm trees but that’s no fun so we need suggestions. What do you think? Tiki huts? Evil supervillain hideout? Man eating tigers playing bocce? The island is small (under 100 meters across, maybe 200-300 meters long north-south) and therefore it only has a few hundred prims. So whatever you suggest, consider that it probably shouldn’t be too complex or large as it’ll be a couple of hundred meters from the nearest Resident-owned land.

Jack has now started to contact builders from the applications we have received, we have a few on board but there’s still plenty of opportunity to get involved. If you’ve applied, watch your inbox!

If you haven’t applied and you’re a skilled Second Life builder, scripter or artist and interesting in being part of the LDPW then do it now…you might have what it takes to be one of the few, the proud, the moles!

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Work has begun on Bay City, home of the “Fighting Moles” also known as The City by the Void.

LDPW is getting in touch with, and getting signed contracts from, our first set of resident builders and we expect to have our first team meeting in the upcoming week to discuss allocation of tasks, share reference materials, and hand out trowels & grout bags. These skilled contractors will be given project-specific accounts so should you run into a very small avatar with a hardhat, bearing the last name “Mole” be sure to say say hi!

In the meantime, Michael and I have been organizing the layout of the Regions and parcels. You can expect to see…

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View the latest Second Life newsletter on our website and, coming soon, grab a newly updated copy from one of our in-world location (don’t forget to sign up for automatic in-world delivery of upcoming issues!) This month, find out about plans for the SL’s 4th Birthday party and how you can get involved, find out how teens’ concerns have resulted in a new layout for the Teen Grid, and visit five outstanding environments in Second Life…and more!

Also, as a reminder, we are no longer emailing the newsletter, but will instead continue to improve the online and in-world versions for everyone to enjoy. For example, you can now get the RSS feed directly delivered to your RSS reader du jour. Have any suggestions on how to make the newsletter better? Email them to the editor.

We are initiating a rolling restart of sims to address issues that arose yesterday, as indicated in a previous blog post. These include slow logins, slow or failed group chat and teleports, and presence issues which can be described as people being reported as offline or online when that is not the case. Also to be addressed are problems with group membership lists.

The rolling restart sweeps through the grid north to south in a wave, asking each region to restart. The regions start a 5-minute countdown with warnings given in-world, then restart. You can teleport south to avoid a restart, or (once the wave hits the mainland) teleport north by several regions to jump “over” the restart wave.

During the first ~10 minutes of the wave, it’s expected that Group IMs and email to LSL will be affected. If you are having trouble after 10 minutes please close all IM windows. To restart the group chats, you have to hit the blue button labeled “close” in the group im panel, not the orange x. If this doesn’t help, please restart the SL client.

The restart wave will start at 12:15pm SLtime and take approximately 2 hours to hit the entire grid.

Thank you for your continued patience!

[2:30pm SLTime]  Rolling restart is complete. 

An issue has sprung up this afternoon that has manifested itself in a broad set of symptems including slow logins, slow or failed group chat and teleports, and presence issues. The devs are currently in the process of diagnosing the problem and we’ll be sure to post more info here when we have it. We are very sorry for any inconvenience caused.

[UPDATE Friday May 25th]  We will be rolling out a resolution to these issues today.  Please watch for new blog post with more info.

We’ve identified a memory leak and have narrowed the problem down to Vote Tally Notification, which has been temporarily disabled. Group Voting is functional apart from the IMs… You are able to create and send votes, and they are tallied and the results are displayed in the Group Vote tool, but the IMs are not sent out to each online member of the group as is typical.

We apologize for any inconvenience this causes and will post more info here when it’s available.

Release Notes for Second Life 1.16.0(5) May 23, 2007
=====================================
New Features:
* Sculpted Prims
** Sculpted Prims are a new primitive type that uses a texture to control its 3D shape
** See http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims for FAQ and detailed information
* Add “Mute” button to block unwanted notecards, landmarks, and textures

Changes:
* Improved muting of particle systems

LSL Changes:
* New function: llRegionSay()
** Allows object to communicate region-wide
** Does not allow communication on channel 0
** This is intended to reduce simulator load by eliminating the need for relay objects

Bug fixes:
* Text for several alert messages has been updated
* Fixed positioning of maximize button when minimizing both script and lsl window
* Fixed positioning of LSL help window after minimizing/maximizing main script window
* Fixed group chat IM showing sender as the only participant until someone responds
* Fixed group chat IM reopening with an error when sending a message after user closes group chat
* Fixed ‘… has left the session’ when leaving group chat after talking
* Fixed failed email when no subject is included
* Fixed object loss occuring when taking an item
* VWR-657: Beta -> Linux -> Startup -> Crash

[5:53am SLTime] Scheduled downtime is proceeding as planned, and logins have been restricted. For details on the contents of today’s patch, please refer to the previous posts here on the Official Linden Blog. I’ll be bringing you the play-by-play this morning, with hourly updates should all go smoothly.

We appreciate your patience as we work to make SL better!

[7:04am SLTime] Maintenance progresses steadily. In addition, we are currently investigating slow logins on the beta grid.

[8:03am SLTime] Beta logins continue to be problematic, but scheduled maintenance is proceeding smoothly.

[9:01am SLTime] Maintenance proceeds apace. Beta grid logins are slow due to heavy load. Waiting patiently while trying to login is recommended as relogging will put you back at the end of the queue.

[10:13am SLTime] Scheduled maintenance continues to proceed smoothly while beta logins remain slow due to a record high concurrency.

[11:08am SLTime] Nothing new to report, but available now are the full release notes (see above).

[11:36am SLTime] We are now expecting the update to run long. No ETA as to when it will be finished at this point, but we will continue to provide updates here on the blog. Thank you for your continued patience!

[12:05pm SLTime] Regarding the update running long…We have isolated the problem to the inbound mail to LSL and email to IM subsystem and are working on fixing it. Some inbound mail to scripts and IM may be lost. More info here as it’s available.

[12:44pm SLTime] The problem with the mail system has been identified and fixed, with a relatively small loss of messages. Per James: “We found a problem where our system was attempting to process e-mail bounces (undelivered email notifications) that the system is supposed to discard.”

And with that we’re ready to open back up. Thank you for your patience!

Since the rolling restart we received reports of the llGiveInventoryList function not performing as intended and have confirmed that its functionality is impaired. Instead of an object’s contents being copied to a new folder in inventory, the items are placed by type, ie. notecards in the Notecard folder, objects in the Object folder etc. and clothing is immediately worn.

Inventory is not being lost, just misplaced. Please use the Recent Items tab in your inventory to quickly find these mis-sorted items.

It is expected that we will not be able to address the issue until Monday and apologize for the inconvenience. Thanks to those who sent bug reports and used the Public Jira to bring this issue to our attention!

Previously announced changes to Help Request have been delayed with the postponement of SL version 1.14.1 (currently on Beta Grid). Planned in conjunction with this release was a move by Liaison Specialist teams into their new roles, including training in the new support systems being implemented as part of the overall improvements being made to Customer Support, elaborated on in Robin’s blog post here. In order to prevent a delay in the release of the new ticketed support system, Liaison Specialists will be moving into their Specialist roles regardless of the new version’s delay.

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…to be processed soon!

Currently we’re looking at a rather large backlog of Volunteer Program Applications. We’ve been going through the process of approving and inviting applicants manually, but we haven’t been gaining much ground. Thankfully, we’ve almost completed tools to help automate the process and as I mentioned, in a previous blog post, we’re bringing in some lovely Liaison Specialists to help us! So if you’ve signed up to be a volunteer you won’t have much longer to wait to find out if you’ve been accepted.

In the process of working on changes to the Volunteer Program, we’ll be disabling the ability to sign up for Help Request. In addition, we will not be inviting Volunteers during the period in which the new Volunteer application processing tool is being enabled and tested. But as mentioned above, when we’re back in action, we’ll be able to get through the existing backlog quickly. Whew! We very much appreciate your patience while we work to help you to help make SL a better place for everyone.