Meeroos Addresses It's Pet Issues

 

Longtime residents will likely remember the Meeroos, even if they never got one. Introduced in 2011, these cute virtual pets known for their wanting to snuggle were very popular then. Almost fifteen years later, they're still around, with a smaller but still active fanbase.  Recently a friend of mine who owned some started telling me about trouble. But after several days, there was finally a response from someone in the company behind them.

Read the story in Design. 

Office Chair Issues

 

 

 Well, a recent small meeting at the Newser office in HV Community had a slight snag. I'd gotten some new chairs to go with the new building. While they seemed to work well when I got them, on the day of the meeting there was a snag. We couldn't sit in them right. It seemed out of the early days of SL in which you needed a poseball to sit properly.

Thankfully Gemma had a solution. She rezzed a dinner table with chairs. While a bit unconventional for an office, it was certainly welcome especially with lunch available.

Hopefully we'll have the chair situation taken care of soon.

Bixyl Shuftan

SL Video: "Second Life Community Roundtable Meeting"

 

 

 For those who missed the Community Roundtable Meeting on Monday, here's a recording made by Pantera Polnocy. The Newser will have a review of it soon.

EOTB: "Community Roundtable" Tomorrow, Monday May 20

 

Tomorrow at 9:30 AM SL time is the "Community Roundtable" with Linden Lab.  This is a chance for residents to discuss concerns and other matters with two of the Lindens, preferably those sent over in advance. 

We take all feedback (good and bad) from the community seriously. That’s why we’re excited to begin a new initiative that allows Residents to share their thoughts and interact directly with top executives at Second Life. 

We hope you’ll join us for the first of many Community Roundtables with Second Life Leadership – it will be held on Monday, May 20 from 9:30-11 a.m. SLT. For this inaugural session, you’ll have a chance to meet and interact directly with Linden Lab Executive Chairman Oberwolf Linden and Senior VP of Product & Engineering Grumpity Linden.

The Lab would state "We encourage community members to submit questions in advance ... and we’ll do our best to address as many as we can," asking them to use this google doc (link). 

 

While no doubt there are a variety of concerns, it's expected many of the questions will be about the changes in the policies about child avatars announced earlier this month.

The suggested SURLs were

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Linden Estate Services4/237/19/27
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Linden Estate Services2/26/229/28  

 

For the blog post in full, (click here). 

Linden Lab Updates Terms of Service, Child Avatars Completely Barred From Adult Sims, Now Need "Modesty Layer"

 

Yesterday on Thursday May 2, residents logging in were told they would have to read and sign an updated Terms of Service. At the same time, there was an announcement in the official blog, "Enhancing Our World Together: Important Updates For The Second Life Community."

 

Our priority has always been to maintain a safe and welcoming environment for all while preserving the freedom of expression that makes our virtual world so special. That’s why we’re working to further enhance the safety and protection of the Second Life platform. These efforts include strengthening some of our community and employee policies as well as evaluating improvements to our age verification process. 

One area of ongoing scrutiny both internally and externally concerns child-presenting avatars. We recognize and want to acknowledge the vibrant community of residents who enjoy roleplaying as such, and we also feel that it is crucial to reinforce our stance that sexualized ageplay is strictly prohibited. Today, we are updating our Child Avatar Policy to ensure a clear separation and to safeguard all community members. We know that this update has the potential to cause confusion or concern in our community, so we’ve prepared an FAQ which we will continue to update as questions come up.

 

As before, actions of a sexual nature between adult and child avatars (which includes teens and "tweenagers") is strictly forbidden, and will result in being banned. And as before, child avatars are  barred from places that are a clearly adult nature. Also, content intended for child avatars, and this includes teens and "tweens", cannot be of a suggestive manner. There were two additions that are likely to draw at least a few complaints. One was that child avatars cannot enter any sim rated Adult, even if the area itself has no sexual or violent or anything else clearly adult around. Also, the way child avatars are made has to change. While under the old policy genitals were not allowed, under the new one this isn't enough. Even if nothing "bad" shows, child avatars cannot appear nude at all and now need a "modesty layer" in their skin, "Child avatar content creators are required to add a modesty layer which is baked into child avatar skins or bodies, is not transparent, does not match the skin tone, and may not be removed."

 

The Lab did state, "Merely having a childlike avatar does not violate this policy. It is not our intent to banish childlike avatars in and of themselves." This likely means tiny avatars. 

Later that day, one Relay event would he affected. The Sunbeaver Moon Dance takes place in one of the community sims, and a few years ago, the sim rating had been changed to Adult out of worries that Linden Lab would boot consenting adult avatars from activity done behind closed doors. So when Purple Tears' team captain, Wateru Kohime, showed up, he had to change. 

"So stupid," he would later tell me, "Everyone on an adult sim is supposed to be over 18, who cares what we look like? I could be a dwarf that looks exactly like myself but has a big beard and that's perfectly fine, but shave my face and suddenly I have to go?

"I think the way it was before was perfectly fine. Child avatars are okay on an adult sim as long as nothing 'adult' is going on. That's basically what they want to prevent, so as it stood, the rules already prevented it. Like most rules/laws, it only really affects the people that follow them. The people that want to go and break the rules are still going to go and break the rules."

There is a thread in the official forums about the ToS changes. Reading the first five pages, on the whole, people approved of the changes. One poster would comment, "Think it's Linden Lab just covering their you-know-what.  A lot of people are so sensitive on things nowadays.  As a business owner (a bar) I've noticed how the clientele has changed over the years. I've seen some patrons joking and one threatened a lawsuit on the other.  Old times they would laugh it off.  Same thing here. The Lab has to deal with much more regulation stuff then when Philip started the Lab eons ago." One other person wondered if a few venue owners might start booting out everyone who was short or of a certain body type without checking profiles. A third pointed out because some were tired of reading such a long list of ToS without a clue of what changed and what didn't, the Lab needed to make double certain word was getting around. A fourth worried some might try to abuse the rules, "I can easily see these rules being weaponized by bad actors who have a grudge against, say, anime-style avatars."

What do you the readers think? Please comment below.

Bixyl Shuftan

Letter To The Editor, And Response: The Borrower

 

Recently the Newser got a reader submitted article in which the writer was looking for advice. Among the people he knows is someone who is seemingly always asking for Lindens and real-life money, saying he needs it for his SL & real-life, and wonders just what is with this guy. Editor Bixyl Shuftan had a few things to say on the matter.

Read more in People.

 

Discord Issues

 

If you were having trouble getting on Discord on Friday September 29, you weren't alone. Numerous users using the client software were getting a while screen with the words "You have been blocked."

 

Someone posting on Twitter to Discord Support stated, "I suddenly get a Cloudflare "Sorry, you have been blocked" page when opening the Discord desktop client. Is something wrong on your end or am I false positive in some DoS detection?"

The problem is described as lasting for hours, and the company pinned the issue on the service experiencing "unusual traffic spikes."  It has been suggested that the reason was issues at Cloudfare, which Discord works with to improve it's service. 

The issue came up in a couple group chats in Second Life. Later in the day after the problem seemed to be resolved, it was suggested to users still having trouble that restarting the client, or their computers, would resolve the problem. A suggestion that Discord itself had been making.

 

Sources: Techcrunch,  Bleepingcomputer, Twitter,

Bixyl Shuftan

Glitches Plague Second Life

 

 

 Second Life invariably has occasional glitches. But February 1 2023 was worse than usual. Numerous sims were offline. Some avatars wouldn't rezz properly or at all. People had trouble logging on. The Lab had been doing some rolling restarts. But it soon realized it had a problem, admitting to outages and script errors on it's Grid Status Report.

 

We are investigating reports of occasional errors upon logging into the viewer as well as reports of slowness or time outs on web pages such as the Marketplace and my.secondlife.com. We are also aware some residents are appearing as a cloud for longer than expected upon logging in. Our engineers are actively trying to alleviate the issue. We apologize for the inconvenience.

 

Some residents would describe their problems on a couple forum threads here and here, "I've been an orange cloud for three hours." Draxtor Despress' Second Life Book Club would have to postpone it's weekly show to Saturday due to the glitches, which showed in his recording. Checking the maps, one friend commented, "I don't think I have ever seen so many sims down at once on the map."

 

On 3:45 PM , the Lab posted that the issues were resolved. But for about an hour after that, I continued to see people having problems with their avatars rezzing. By 6PM, it appeared things had finally cleared up.

 

It;s safe to say this was Second Life's most glitched day in many months. Fortunately, it wasn't as bad as the early days in which it seemed Linden Lab had to shut down the Grid for a few hours every week to "bang on things" until the bugs were fixed.

 

Image Credit: Vicious Hollow, Matoazma Kazyanenko

 

Bixyl Shuftan

 

Daniel Voyager's Blog On Hiatus

 

Noted SL blogger Daniel Voyager hasn't been doing well. It's been several weeks since his blog, Daniel Voyager's Blog, published an article.  Taking a look at his Twitter, it seems he's been dealing with some real life issues that will take some time to resolve. In his last post, he expressed hope at being active again sometime in June.

Best of luck Daniel, and hope you'll be back soon.
 

"Scheduled Agent Appearance Service Maintenance" Today

 

If you have trouble seeing other avatars rezz the right way, or they appear slowly, it may not be you. In the Grid Status Report, the Lab stated they will be performing maintenance today on "Agent Appearance Service."

We will be performing Scheduled Maintenance on our Agent Appearance Service on Thursday, April 28th, starting at 9:00 AM PDT. While this maintenance is in progress, avatars may fail to rez correctly and there could be other issues relating to avatar appearance. Please monitor this blog for updates.

How long it will take was not estimated.
 

EOTB: The Lab Adresses Recent Outages

 

Second Life has seen it's share of glitches over time. But last week there were a number, notably the rolling restarts on Tuesday January 27 that went snafu and resulted in some sims offline for a while. A few days ago in the "Tools and Technology" section of the official blog, the Lab came out and admitted there were multiple problems.

*  *  *  *  *

Well, this is not the way we wanted the past week to go -- multiple outages in the same week! Not fun for anyone. Here’s what happened.

Login and Inventory Issues: Monday, 1/24 - Friday, 1/28
On Monday, January 24, residents’ inventories stopped responding to requests. Some residents were unable to log in as a result. We identified the affected accounts, addressed the problem and restored services to full operation in a little under 3 hours. 

Beginning on Wednesday of this week, we received reports of intermittent inventory issues – failures to rez, unpack and delete inventory items; and intermittent errors upon login.

When the number of reports increased, it became clear that this was an outage. Several Lindens jumped in to diagnose the reports. After some digging, we discovered our back end infrastructure was being overloaded. Once this was resolved, the positive impact was almost immediate. The data now looks good -- on the back end and we are no longer receiving inventory reports.

We’re taking steps, including a deploy late last week, to prevent these issues in the future - and we have already seen progress in making the service more robust.

Weekly Rolling Restarts: Tuesday, 1/25
Every week we restart the simulator servers to keep them running smoothly. We only restart a certain number at the same time, allow them to finish, then start another batch. That’s why we call them “rolling restarts.” But on Tuesday a recent upgrade to the simulators meant that the usual number of simultaneous restarts was too much for the system to handle. The result was load spikes and numerous regions going down. Ultimately more than 12,000 regions were stuck in restart mode, which is 40% of the grid. Not good!

The team came together quickly to bring simulators back up in smaller batches, and then manually fixed blocks of regions. After some trials and monitoring, we found a smaller number of concurrent restarts that worked better. By 1:00 PM all regions were restored and operating normally. We apologize for this lengthy outage!

Advance… Retreat!: Wednesday, 1/26
We had planned a deploy to the production grid that would help us gather information on group chat performance. Unfortunately, the procedure used during testing did not work in production. We figured -- OK, we’ll just roll back. But then the rollback itself had problems!  Residents experienced issues with login, group chat, and presence information. The team was able to isolate the problem and complete the rollback, getting a few more gray hairs in the process. We’re going to take what we’ve learned and do a better deploy that will give us the information to improve group chat in the long run.

Last week was no fun for a lot of people at the Lab. Thank you for your patience. We really don’t like interrupting your enjoyment of Second Life. Here’s hoping we don’t have to come back with another one of these blog posts for quite some time! 

*  *  *  *  *
 
The Lab expressed hope that "we don’t have to come back with another one of these blog posts for quite some time! "
 

"Unscheduled Maintenance" Offlines Second Life For Hours

 

If you tried to log into Second Life yesterday and couldn't get on, you were far from alone. For much of the day, residents couldn't log in, or access secondlife.com, or the Marketplace. The Grid Status Report first mentioned there was a problem at 11:14 AM SL time. 

We are currently seeing intermittent issues with Profiles, Marketplace, and Log ins, and we are currently investigating this. Please watch this blog for updates.

Posted * ***** ***. Aug 31, 2021 - 11:14 PDT

Unfortunately, the issue was not resolved quickly. Hours would pass, and the Lab's finest were still working on the issue.

We are still working on resolving this, and we thank you for your patience! Please watch this blog for updates. 

Finally at 3:57 PM SL time, the Lab stated they were on their way to fixing the problem.

All services should be recovered, and we continue to monitor their performance. If you're having trouble getting to some of the websites, please try clearing your cookies. Thank you for your patience, and we hope the rest of today is going to be all smooth sailing. 

Still, it wouldn't be 5:54 PM SL time before the Lab would say with confidence, "This incident has been resolved," over six hours since they announced their was a problem. When residents tried to get on the website, sometimes all they got was a blank page. At other times they would get the "Uh oh, it's buggy" 500 error message shown at the top. A few residents would look back to earlier times when Linden Lab was more willing to poke fun at itself and post a picture of apes armed with bones gathering around a monolith, "The grid is down while we bang on things." A few more irritated residents wondered if the glitch was a result of the Cloud Servers, and something they could expect time to time for the forseable future. 

In any event, the glitch has been fixed, and all is well again, for now.

Bixyl Shuftan
 

News and Commentary: Looking Back At Ebbe Altberg

 

When Ebbe Altberg was made CEO of Linden Lab in February 2014, the reception overall seemed to be cautious optimism. Under the direction of Rod Humble, the Lab had gotten itself out of financial difficulties. But not all was well. The events in which Lindens and Residents met up were gone and there was talk of a "no fratenization" policy. With the Terms of Service controversy, some content creators were worried the vauge language in one part of the ToS gave the Lab the right to claim their content to claim and sell as their own. A few were leaving to the Opensim grids, notably InWorldz. While Linden Lab had made or bought a number or spinoff products, only one was making much money. Ebbe Linden, as he was soon known, would later say, "when I came here, the users were a little bit angry (and) there was a disconnect between the Lab and ... the residents," and that some of the Lab's policies "didn't make much sense."

But in April, he got attention and praise for speaking plainly about the Terms of Service issue, and in months the controversial wording was changed to the satisfaction of most residents. Communication between the Residents and the Lindens improved greatly under him, with "Meet the Lindens" events at the Second Life Birthday, and also the Best Practices in Education event, as well as occasional Town Hall meetings. He was a believer in making an effort for transparency and openness.

Under Ebbe Altberg, Second Life's long slow decline in terms of both sims and active users would halt, and eventually began to grow again. While practically everyone appreciated that, some weren't so sure about another move of the Lab's under Ebbe Linden's watch: the way residents in Second Life paid money to them. Sim tiers were reduced, as well as set-up fees, making land cheaper to get and more importantly cheaper to keep. But Linden Lab had to make up the money somewhere, and did so by increasing the fees to buy Linden dollars. This was the equivalent of reducing real-estate taxes but raising sales taxes. Some residents complained. Others had mixed feelings as even if they didn't own a sim, their favorite places were more likely to last. Under his watch, the Tila company was created. Eventually, it would not only handle Second Life's money transactions, but also Sansar's and a third virtual world: Upland.

Under Ebbe Linden, the Lindens were able to accomplish what under his prececessor they couldn't: bring back last names for accounts; or rather, make last names an option by allowing residents to change them. Some resident's had mixed opinions due to the high fee, and to a lesser extent the choices available (which in my opinion were reasonble ones, given the Lab's options). But overall the residents were happy.

When he was interviewed by Hamlet Au in 2019, at times Ebbe Altberg seemed to have an understanding of Second Life that previous CEOs Mark Kingdom and Rod Humble lacked, at one point commenting it was his opinion "Adult" marked sims didn't always mean X-rated activities, but that the users valued their privacy. He also expressed an enthusiam for it at times, supposedly saying "We are still the s**t when it comes to virtual worlds."

Not everything went well under Ebbe Altberg. It was under his watch that a customer service mishap caused the end of the SS Galaxy as an active area. While preserved by the Lab, it would never be the active resident-run place it was. A similar mishap caused the first Steelhead community to fold. Another customer service mishap almost caused the end of the noted Grendles mall, but the actions of residents saved it. One controversial move was the banning of Linden resellers, making resident-run Linden exchange services no longer permitted. While the idea for Sansar came about under the previous CEO, it was under Ebbe Altberg in which it came about. But Second Life residents were unimpressed and only a handful of people were spending much time there. While a few felt it was an idea worth trying, most residents saw Sansar as a mistake, and the reaction to it's sale was along the lines of "It's about time." Linden Lab would also see a couple rounds of layoffs, related to Sansar's lack of success.

Two moves later in Ebbe Altberg's term also got some controversy from the residents. One was the move of Second Life's data to Amazon Cloud servers. Altberg's Lab stated that it would eventually improve performance and allow for a reduction in fees. But as the move was being done, there were a number of bugs and glitches that the residents openly complained about, and the Lab had to acknowledge and ask for patience. Today, while some residents say there's been some improvement, notably with sim crossings, others say they've only noticed continued glitches such as inventory issues.

And then there was the sale of Linden Lab to a team of investors. Under the terms, Linden Lab would retain a good deal of autonomy and continue to make just about all of it's decisions on it's own. And no doubt this meant more money for the Lab to continue to improve and develop Second Life. But naturally many residents were very worried, some fearing the new owners were only out for a quick buck and jack up tier and fees while cutting development and customer service, or worse. But a year later, the virtual world continues to run smoothly.

There have been numerous comments on the SL forums. Among them: Prokofy Neva, "I remember my main impression was that he was normal. Normal! That may seem funny, but we have had some rather eccentric leaders, who could get pretty wild, and while that is good in the early start-up stages, at some point the grown-up has to come along." ArgontheDevil Ormega, "He understood that SL was unlike any other business in that the relationship between the Lab and the Residents was not purely business.  That is why we mourn his passing.  He was not just the CEO of the company.  He was, in a very real sense, one of us." Trinity Yazimoto, " Ebbe arrived with a positive and friendly attitude (at the opposite of his predecessor). He was humble and open mind. Ebbe gave back SL its stability. Ebbe made SL a better place and i will remember him for this."

While the cause of Ebbe's passing has not been officially released, it has been made known he was sick for two years. But instead of stepping down, he continued to run the company. Inara Pey would write, "It is clear that illness did not in any way blunt his determination." Hamlet Au would comment, "One insider told me that his illness didn't undo him, but rather, gave him a serene confidence in his mission and his life course." Eventually, he would make fewer appearances inworld, his last one being at Oz Linden's retirement party in February 2021. And his last comment on his Twitter was in November last year. He would not speak at the Education conference in March, Patch Linden taking the lead instead.

Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale was quoted by Hamlet Au as saying, "I can't say enough about Ebbe. He was such a warm, smart, optimistic person who was loved by everyone he came into contact with. I will miss him a lot, and we were so lucky to have him."

So in conclusion, Ebbe Altberg made a good CEO of Linden Lab. Not everything under him went perfectly, but under his leadership Second Life bounced back from it's slow decline and went on the upswing. The virtual world is doing better and it's future is looking better than in over a decade. Second Life still faces some challenges, such as the question of will those who returned during the Pandemic stay and the increasing popularity of VRChat among younger users of virtual worlds. But Ebbe Altberg's time at the helm of the Lab can only be considered a success.

"Sleep well Ebbe, thank you for everything."

Other tributes: Daniel Voyager, Moden World, New World Notes

SL Forums: RIP Mr. Altberg

Bixyl Shuftan
 

Amazon To Link Users of Alexa, Other Devices, To One Another

 

For those who own an Alexa, or other devices by Amazon that you use, an article in Ars Technica has some troubling news for those who value their privacy, and don't like the company getting them into something without their okay. According to the e-zine, Amazon plans to launch "Amazon Sidewalk." The service will link those who use Amazon products to their neighbors who also use them and share their bandwith for the purpose of helping those without a connection. But instead of asking users if they want in, people have to actively opt out of it before the date of Tuesday June 8, one week from now.

Amazon Sidewalk helps your devices get connected and stay connected. For example, if your Echo device loses its wifi connection, Sidewalk can simplify reconnecting to your router. For select Ring devices, you can continue to receive motion alerts from your Ring Security Cams and customer support can still troubleshoot problems even if your devices lose their wifi connection. Sidewalk can also extend the working range for your Sidewalk-enabled devices, such as Ring smart lights, pet locators or smart locks, so they can stay connected and continue to work over longer distances. Amazon does not charge any fees to join Sidewalk.

Amazon insists the service is to help the users of it's devices. They also released a report to address security and privacy matters.  But as Ars Technia put it, "But there are enough theoretical risks to give users pause. Wireless technologies like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have a history of being insecure. ... If industry-standard wireless technologies have such a poor track record, why are we to believe a proprietary wireless scheme will have one that’s any better? ... Extending the reach of all this encrypted data to the sidewalk and living rooms of neighbors requires a level of confidence that’s not warranted for a technology that’s never seen widespread testing. ... Amazon’s decision to make Sidewalk an opt-out service rather than an opt-in one is also telling. The company knows the only chance of the service gaining critical mass is to turn it on by default, so that’s what it’s doing."

The good news, users can opt out of "Sidewalk." The steps are:

Open the Alexa app.
Open "More" and select "Settings."
Select "Account Settings."
Select "Amazon Sidewalk."
Turn Amazon Sidewalk "Off."

Ars Technica stated they contacted Amazon representatives to comment on the matter, but got none.

Bixyl Shuftan
 

Breaking News: Second Life's Cloud Servers Degrading, Lag And Other Issues To Get Significantly Worse

 Update: April Fools

In a stunning development, Linden Lab announced an unexpected and severe problem with the Amazon Cloud Servers that now house Second Life's data. The servers have been deteriorating and glitching, and the problem is going to get much worse.

"It turns out the servers that Amazon provided us with weren't meant to take the strain of a virtual world as active as Second Life is," the statement by the Lab explained, "Not only are we not getting the performance improvements we were hoping for, the lag and other issues such as teleport fails and inventory issues have been slowly getting worse over the past few months."

The statement went on to say that the servers are starting to deteriorate faster,  and so the issues will start to get even worse, and fast. It's estimated that within two weeks, viewers will need four to five times to load information around an avatar after TPing or logging on. Crashes an teleport fails will be several more times likely to happen as well, and items will start vanishing from inventories. Within three weeks, viewers will take ten times as long to process information after logging on or teleporting. That is if people can log on or teleport at all as fails will start to keep people from doing so for five to ten minutes. And within a month, Second Life will become unusable to those without newer and more powerful computers.

Linden Lab is working with Amazon to get better servers and transfer the data to them, but this will take time. For now, the Lab is offering a downloadable code that will allow the servers to better recognize users and their data and not suffer quite as much lag.

For more information and to download the code: Click Here. 

Bixyl Shuftan
 

Linden Lab at the VWBPE Conference

 

At the Virtual Worlds Best Practices for Education conference last week, there were three discussions in which there was at least one member of Linden Lab taking part, one per day of the three day event. At the first one on Thursday, Patch Linden was the sole person from the Lab. Of the three people leading the investment group that bought Linden Lab last year, Randy Waterfield, Brad Oberwager, and Raj Date, Patch stated he mostly worked with Oberwager and was optimistic about his intentions for the virtual world. "He has one mission: to be the best and biggest virtual world there can be. He wants to grow and invest in Second Life. He genuinely loves the product." All three were very interested in making Tilia, the virtual currency exchange service under Linden Lab, "grow and prosper," but as it had a "symbiotic relationship" with Second Life, the virtual world would grow as well. Patch stated Oberwager had the goal of increasing Second Life's userbase, "we want to double the resident population over the next 3-5 years." The team itself wanted to finish work on Amazon Web Services, and there were plans to work on the "onboarding experience for newcomers, "We've learned through the Pandemic. We've listened to users. It's given us stuff to latch on to, to make improvements that will help everyone."

At the Roundtable discussion on Friday, Patch, Brett (Marketing), Grumpity (VP of Product), Madori (Land Operations) were before an audience of residents. Grumpity expressed excitement about the Cloud Server project, "that will allow us to use cloud technology in ways to improve user experience." Brett talked about the Adult Swim event and the NFL Alumni Experience (that took place around the Superbowl). When asked about the possibility of the return of the Teen Grid, which was taken offline on Jan 01 2011, Grumpity stated they had "frequently talked about Teen Grid internally." When asked about the Zoom video communication service, Grumpity stated, "Being in Second Life creates a sense of presence that's not present on Zoom, and also they don't have to turn their camera on here, like in Zoom." When asked about the upcoming Android client, Grumpity answered, "We hear you, we're working on figuring out a solution to that. We're excited about possibilities that will allow us to bring SL to mobile devices."

On Saturday, Grumpity and Brett Lindens were the ones appearing before the audience. Among the subjects discussed were trouble with griefers. They also discussed accessibility for residents whom English was a second language. They also talked about the Community Gateway Program, Grumpity commenting, "Nothing beats someone showing you the ropes." Grumpity stated there were new starter avatars in development by Linden Lab. Of when the Education discount was discontinued in 2010 and not brought back for three years, Grumpity would call it, "dark times ... I won't blame anyone, but it was wrong."

The Linden events and others can be seen in the VWBPE Youtube channel.

Bixyl Shuftan

EOTB: April Linden Explains Last Weekend's Issues

If you had some trouble getting on Second Life on Sunday August 30, it wasn't just your imagination. April Linden would explain things this week in the Tools and Technology section of the Linden Blog.

A lot of people had trouble connecting to Second Life yesterday (Aug 30th, 2020), and I want to explain a bit about what happened, and why we didn’t post on the Second Life Status page right away.
Early in the morning (US time) yesterday one of the major Internet providers had an issue that impacted a lot of the Internet as a whole, including Second Life. Several other Internet companies have written their own really good blog posts about what happened. We got caught up in the same thing. 

The reason we were slow to post on the Second Life Status page is because, from our monitoring systems’ point of view, Second Life itself and all our systems were functioning normally. That means, our operations team wasn’t getting alerted. Of course, from the Resident point of view, Second Life was effectively down in some parts of the world, and that’s really what matters.
To help us react quicker in the future we’ve made a few changes. 

Yesterday evening we added a new monitoring service that checks on some of Second Life’s core systems from all around the globe. It’s a service that a lot of other companies use too, so we’ll get alerted better in the future. When Internet-scale events like yesterday happen there’s not a lot we can do about it, but we can post on the status page quicker to let our Residents know we’re aware things aren’t right.

April Linden would apologize for the earlier lack of communication, "We know how important Second Life is to our Residents, and we’re taking steps to increase our visibility into issues outside of our servers. It’s our hope that these steps will enable us to communicate better with y’all in the future."

Source: Linden Lab

Hat Tip: Inara Pey

Bixyl Shuftan

Reader Submitted: The Cloud Move

Kἶէმƈεlἶმ Lմἶղƈօɾἶმlօէε Kεlνმɾl (Kitacelia Resident) recently sent a reader submitted commentary about what she feels has become quite an aggravating problem: increasing lag along with bugs and glitches due to Linden Lab moving data from it's current servers to cloud-based ones. The Lab's "good idea," from her point of view, is causing a lot of problems. So she took the time to explain the problem as she sees it.

Read Kitacelia's reader submission in Extra.

Glitches on The Grid

On Friday January 17, Club Cutlass in Sunweaver Bay was having it's "Military" party when all of a sudden, everyone's viewer crashed. As people came back online, they saw the sim was down. It took several minutes, but eventually the area was back online and the party resumed.

But this wasn't the only glitch this weekend. On Sunday afternoon, January 19, people were saying in SL and Discord they were having a hard time logging on.  Checking the Grid Status Report, the Lab confirmed there were login issues that day, as well as trouble on the 17th.

We are aware that some Residents may be experiencing problems trying to log into and/or stay connected to Second Life. Our engineers are actively trying to alleviate the issue.

It took a few hours, but eventually the Lindens "banging on things" had some results, and people were able to login and log off without worry. At least most of us weren't worried. One friend of mine whom was both at Cutlass on Friday and had login trouble Sunday half-seriously wondered if somehow the Lindens were out to get her. They weren't of course, though it certainly felt like it.

Bixyl Shuftan

April Linden Explains Last Sunday's Outage

If you tried to get on Second Life on Sunday October 27th, then you may have been blocked by issues that persisted all afternoon. On Wednesday, April Linden, the Operations Manager of the Grid, posted in the Tools and Technology blog just what happened in "The Sunday That Was Not a Fun Day."

The trouble started back on Thursday. We had some pretty bad problems talking to key services (packet loss) on one of our Internet links. It didn’t impact everything, but the stuff it hit was pretty important. It started for a few hours on Thursday, but just magically went away on its own. It’s never good when a problem just magically fixes itself because it’s pretty likely it’s gonna happen again. 

The same thing happened again on Friday, but once again it went away on its own before we were able to debug what actually happened. 

We were nervous going into the weekend, and sure enough, it bit us again on Sunday. We started having more Internet communication problems, but this time, it didn’t just go away. 

Now that we had it in a bad state we started to troubleshoot and figured out really fast that it wasn’t our equipment. Our stuff was (and still is) working just fine, but we were getting intermittent errors and delays on traffic that was routed through one of our providers. We quickly opened a ticket with the network provider and started engaging with them. That’s never a fun thing to do because these are times when we’re waiting on hold on the phone with a vendor while Second Life isn’t running as well as it usually does. 

After several hours trying to troubleshoot with the vendor, we decided to swing a bigger hammer and adjust our Internet routing. It took a few attempts, but we finally got it, and we were able to route around the problematic network. We’re still trying to troubleshoot with the vendor, but Second Life is back to normal again.

April went on to say that the power outages affecting much of California had nothing to do with the outage, although one of the people working on the issue was, "One of our engineers was working in the dark in a house without power, with his laptop being powered by a long string of extension cords that ran to a generator outside."

We’re really sorry that this past Sunday wasn’t very fun. The weekend before Halloween is a really fun time to be Inworld, and it was a frustrating day all the way around. (I personally love the way our Residents really get into Halloween in a way that’s only possible in Second Life!) Knowing that it wasn't as awesome as it could have been makes me sad, and we’re working to make it better in the future. 

April requested that if anyone suspects an issue that may have been caused by the outage, please let the Support team know.

Source: BBC, Tools and Technology

Bixyl Shuftan