EOTB: Second Life "Moving From Jira"

 

 Most Second Life users are probably aware if JIRA, even if they themselves don't use it. This system for technical support has been used for reporting bugs and requested features for most of the virtual world's history. But, this won't be the case for much longer. In the official blog on Friday January 12, Linden Lab announced that they are in the process of moving away from the system. 

Unfortunately, Jira Server, the software and license agreement we use to host Second Life's jira.secondlife.com site, is being discontinued and its official replacement cannot handle the number of users (over 300,000) that Second Life needs. Long story short: we need to move off of Jira before support ends in early February, 2024.

 

The Lab announced they were opening "a new community portal," https://feedback.secondlife.com/ saying, "This site will host feature requests, bug reports and ultimately replace the public BUG project on jira.secondlife.com ." But for now, https://support.secondlife.com/ is still the place to report support issues, "We will keep using Freshdesk for all personal and content-sensitive tickets."

 

The Lab did post a timetable, which stated the process had started in December, and will conclude next month in February with the shutdown of JIRA. 

 

The Lindens stated the new system has a new software called Canny, "Part of the rationale for moving to Canny, the software behind feedback.secondlife.com, as opposed to alternative issue tracking solutions is that it is a very focused product that is tailor made for responding to user feedback and prioritizing ideas."

The Lab also reminded there are a couple differences between the new system and JIRA, "which may require changes to behavior." There will be limited attachment support, and no private posts can be done, "If your report contains sensitive information then please redact/censor private information. If this is not possible, because it is material to the issue being filed, then please file a support ticket if it is personal in nature or security report if it represents a vulnerability."

 

The Lindens admitted these changes will be a big thing to some residents, "Making a significant change like this is no small task. Staff and residents alike have grown deeply familiar with jira.secondlife.com through countless hours spent using the site. We hope you will have patience as we migrate data, build documentation, develop new muscle memory and smooth out wrinkles in tools and processes."

 

As the post was named "Part One," it's a sure thing more information is forthcoming.

 

Source: Linden blog.

 

Bixyl Shuftan

News in Brief : Possible Viewer Trouble, Updated Linden Game, Google Plus Shut Down

 Once again, there's a lot more news than there is time to go over it in detail. So here's more brief descriptions of several things that have been going on.

Is Animesh Update Causing Viewer Trouble? - Has your viewer been having problems lately? A couple people have come to me, saying they've been crashing a lot lately. My attention was directed to JIRA BUG-225584 done by the creator of the Black Dragon viewer, saying ever since the Animesh update to Second Life, his viewer has had "massive performance loss" with frame rate. The problem isn't limited to Black Dragon, but could hit any Second Life Viewer. Linden Lab is investigating the issue, and people with problems, are encouraged to discuss it on this thread in the official forums.

Source: New World Notes

New Linden Realms - On the Linden Blog, there was an announcement that one of the older Linden games has been given a new twist. Linden Realms is now "Linden Realms: The Search For Magellan."

New Sunweaver Halloween Attractions - The Sunweaver community has two new Halloween-themed attractions. These are Shockwave's Haunted Maze at Sunweaver Eclipse (102/39/2201) and the Happy Vixen Haunted Manor.

Google Plus Shut Down After Data Breach Exposed - Google announced on Monday October 8 that it would be shutting down it's social network Google Plus. This announcement came shortly after a Wall Street Journal article that there had been a data leak affecting a half million users, and Google made the decision not to warn people fearing disclosure might mean bad press and possibly increased regulation as a result.

Source: Ars Technica 

Dysphoria to Euphoria. The Newser was alerted to a sim that had been recreated by it's fans. Dysphoria was an Alice-in-Wonderland style sim that it's owner announced would be closing due to her changing real life. When an attempt to save it failed, fans made the decision to rebuild it, under the new name Euphoria.

Source: Euphoria Wonderland

More on these stories, and others, when time permits.

Bixyl Shuftan

EOTB: Linden Lab Makes JIRA Reports Readable to All Again

It was about eighteen months ago that Linden Lab made an unpopular move with its JIRA reports page, "Although some categories had been closed to public viewing, such as security issues, most were accessible to the public for residents to read to see if a reported bug was the same as the problem they were having." As of Sept 6 2012, this came to an end, " In the summary of changes, it was stated 'Second Life users will only see their own reported issues.' No longer can residents read and compare."

On Friday February 28, Linden Lab announced on their blog that there would be some changes. The Lab admitted the JIRA wasn't as good as it could be.

Recently, this system was working in a way that wasn’t very transparent, and it frankly wasn’t a good experience for the users who care enough about Second Life to try to help improve it, nor was it the best set-up for the Lindens tasked with addressing these issues. So you can see why we’re happy to be changing it!

 The changes the Lab is offering are:

"All users will be able to see all BUG issues, all the time."

"You'll also be able to comment."

"Lastly, 'New Feature Request' is back!"

A thread started in the forums about the JIRA changes. The results were mostly positive, "Thanks Ebbe." "OK - I'm officially impressed!" Some however were less than enthusiastic, "It's great to have it back, though it'd be better if it didn't get hidden again after triage.  Additional comments with updated incidents with further info could help narrow down the issue, or reveal other potential causes." Still, everyone agreed this was a step in the right direction.

Bixyl Shuftan

Team Firestorm Holds Public Meeting

By Bixyl Shuftan

On Saturday August 10 at Noon SL time, Jessica Lyon and others of Team Firestorm held a public meeting concerning developments with their viewer. Staff included, the meeting was attended by close to 80 residents. Jessica talked about the CHat User Interface or CHUI, and that putting it into the Firestorm Viewer was taking some work, "Linden Lab put a lot of stuff in" with code that conflicts some with Firestorm's own programing. Fixing it was proving to be something of a "nightmare" with "broken" codes.

Of Linden Lab's Project Sunshine, Jessica thought it was going smoother than she believed it would. She had earlier predicted that it would take three rollouts before the first part of it could get going, and the Lab had gotten it right on the first try. She told the audience Project Sunshine and it's server-side baking currently covered about 20% of the Grid.

Jessica and others in the staff, such as Tonya Souther, talked about other issues, such as the "chiclets," or mini pictures on the Linden and Firestorm viewers, Jessica commenting, "We've been trying to kill chiclets for ages." Whirly Fizzle stated in chat, "we have chiclets as optional for the next release." Of the next Firestorm update, Jessica promised it would be a major one.

For those who were more than a little critical of Team Firestorm's work, and it's discontinuing work on the old Phoenix Viewer, Jessica reminded that they were a group of volunteers working for free, and telling them what to do was a bit like "herding cats." This got some chuckles as Jessica'a avatar is a neck catgirl with ears and a tail, and teammate Tonya Souther a furry tigergirl. There were also reminders about filing JIRAs, "seriously, file a JIRA issue and explain as concisely as you can what the problem is and what you want to see changed and if we need more clarification, you'll be asked."

Someone also brought up the old Emerald Viewer, and there was a short explanation to newcomers that Jessica and others on Team Firestorm were once part of the team behind that old popular 3rd party viewer before some "drama" with Linden Lab, and they left to form Team Phoenix.

The Firestorm Viewer is the most popular among supported third party viewers. Except possibly for the old Phoenix Viewer which it developed but no longer supports, no other Second Life viewer is as popular.

The Phoenix blog is on http://www.firestormviewer.org/. Tonya Souther, who leads the Mac development team, has her own blog at: http://secondden.blogspot.com/.


Bixyl Shuftan

Eye on the Blog: New JIRA Reports No Longer Visible to Public

Tonya Souther of Team Phoenix had a few things to say about Linden Lab's new JIRA policy. Although some categories had been closed to public viewing, such as security issues, most were accessible to the public for residents to read to see if a reported bug was the same as the problem they were having.

According to the JIRA update on Thursday September 6, this will no longer be the case. In the summary of changes, it was stated "Second Life users will only see their own reported issues." No longer can residents read and compare.

Tonya mentioned earlier on her blog about a JIRA being made secret, which held up the release of a Firestorm update, "as I said in my last post here, having the JIRAs be secret hurts TPVs, too. It makes it much harder for us to know whether the bug we're hunting is a LL bug. It also makes it harder for us to realize that we just fixed an LL bug and contribute the fix back to them. They spend a lot of time assuring us they want our contributions. This change makes that much more questionable."

She felt the decision will hurt in other ways, noting the "people who watch the LL JIRA and help with triaging, work with reporters to make sure the needed information it present, and suggest fixes without ever writing a line of code." Also, the move ensures the Lab will get a number of JIRAs that are duplicates of others already filed because no one could see that someone else reported on the same issue. This decision, she concluded, will further strain relations between the Lab and Second Life's residents.

One can read the blog update in full Here. There's also a thread in the Second Life forums Here.

*Addition* Hamlet Au later put up his comments, notably referring to blogger Darius Gothly whom thought this marked the beginning of "The End of Second Life."

Bixyl Shuftan

"Direct Delivery" Marketplace Troubles and Rodvik's Response

Direct Delivery for the Second Life Marketplace hasn't gone the way Linden Labs intended. At first, it seemed to be a simple bug of gifts to others not always reaching the recipient. But apparently, it's much more.

Inara Pey noted a number of other problems, including, "Listings on Marketplace do not match the actual items," incorrect merchant information (products from one seller listed as belonging to another), "products from one merchant appearing in stores belonging to other merchants, items incorrectly priced," and "incorrect ratings assigned to products (G-rated items appearing as Adult, etc)" She also stated she was beginning to observe "rising accusations of 'theft' among merchants as they come across what appears to be their own goods being listed by others." Tateru Nino called the source of the problem a "unicode bungle," listed in the JIRA as "WEB-4587."

The initial response from Linden Labs was largely silence. Then a few days ago, Rodvik Linden gave a few answers on his Twitter account, pointing out an update on the commerce forum, "team has been crunching non stop to get those issues addressed. We will update as soon as we have a fix." Calling it "not an acceptable quality of roll out," Tateru Nino deadpanned, "perhaps is wasn't an acceptable quality of rollout, but it was the level of quality that we have become used to all these years."

The commerce forum update was further updated the next day, saying "two of the top three outstanding issues" were addressed

• WEB-4580: purchases are now delivered to recipients with the inventory name (which does not allow unicode characters). This will prevent future orders from getting stuck in the Being Delivered state due to this issue. In addition, all orders affected by this problem have been pushed through.
• WEB-4587: updates have been made to support updating store search results, which we will process over the next week; we continue to work on the issue related to mismatched data on listings. We do know that this issue has existed since September 2010 (during the migration from Xstreet to the Second Life Marketplace).


Hamlet's article on Rodvik's response drew some positive feedback from readers, mixed in with cautionary notes, "Wow, a straightforward acknowledgment, with no BS, no spin. … Kudos to Rodvik, may this act serve as an example for all of LL. This kind of forthcoming communication can make all the difference in the world in making SL live up to its full potential." the same resident also stated, "Whether it's truly accompanied by the promised action is a different issue … everyone should hold LL's feet to the fire on this regardless until it's fixed."

On the Linden forums, residents seemed a bit more critical, "And yet he can't even manage to post this timely info on his company's official website?" "Although it is refreshing to see a CEO like Rodvik use some of the other social media to communicate with the community, the flaw with Rodvik is that he seems to ONLY use non-LL official tools to interact with his customer base. "

Second Life Newser has yet to hear whether or not things have improved on Marketplace or not. But judging by some of the comments observed, some merchants and shoppers will be relying less on it.

Sources: Living in a Modem World, Tateru Nino, New World Notes, Twitter, Linden Forums,

Image Credit: Emilly Orr, Sera Lok

Bixyl Shuftan

Linden Lab Responds to "Bring Back Last Name Options!" JIRA

For some time, there's been a JIRA aimed at amending Linden Labs' decision to change the way new accounts are created from first and last names to a name that on Viewer 1-based viewers appears to have the surname "Resident," with an option for a display name. The new system is disliked by many, and some see it as creating a division between newer and older denziens on the Grid.

Although there were stories of individual Lindens talking about this behind the scenes, there has been no official response, until now, when ProductTeam Linden finally made a post in the JIRA.

It's clear there is a lot of interest in SVC-7125. The intent was for users to specify their last name using the Display Names feature found inusers' profiles, which most Viewers now support. For those that haven't used Display Names yet, you can also set them on the web: https://my.secondlife.com/settings/profile.

Know that we hear you and value your passion and that we are currently reviewing some of the decisions that were made with the username /Display Names implementation.

While a canned response that was quickly answered, "We know that was the idea, but it DOESN'T WORK for the things about which we're complaining ... ," this shows it's finally gotten through to the Lab that they, or rather the "Resident"s, have a problem. Hamlet Au predicted Linden Lab would soon give those under the new naming system the option for a surname. No doubt they're hoping for this or something close to it.

Other articles: New World Notes, Daniel Voyager

Bixyl Shuftan.

Megaprims Accidentaly Removed by Linden Lab, Lab Says Problem Solved

Last night, I was contacted by Jasmine Dawn, whom pointed out to me a thread in the SL Universe Forums. It stated Linden Labs had “blacklisted” someone and their actions in dealing with him had the side effect of removing megaprims with his name on them. There was a link to a JIRA filed about the problem, which had been written down:


Just a few moments ago most megaprims contained in the SALT collection were blacklisted. These megaprims are part of a collection used by most creators across the grid. Any items created with these prims are no longer rezzable. This includes components of a product I work on as well as possibly thousands others. It is not even possible to remove these prims from builds as the items containing them are not rezzable.


This was a potentially big mess, as a numble of builds I knew made use of megaprims such as Tuna Oddfellow’s Odd Ball and Club Zero Gravity. but stopping by the club, it was intact, and Tuna Oddfellow held an impromptu event that night without trouble. I never heard from any of my friends having a build taken down that night.

A couple posters on the SLU Forum thread checked and found of about a dozen makers of megaprims, it was one whose creations were blocked. Looking further, a couple posters mentioned having items taken down, and another those of his customers.

Later on, there was a Grid Status Report about the issue. Apparently, Linden Lab had fixed the problem, and while the affected megaprims weren’t back up, theye were no longer blocked, so those whom had them returned to inventory could rebuild. Those whose builds had disappeared were asked to contact Linden Lab, with a shortcut for Premium members.


[POSTED 10:35AM PDT, 20 October 2011] Due to a change we recently made to address a griefing problem, some megaprims were removed from the grid, which has affected users’ creations containing these megaprims. The issue has been resolved, and the megaprim objects can be re-rezzed from your inventories at this time. If you do not have a copy of the affected build, please go to your support portal immediately and file a case. If you are Premium member or above, you can use these case types: “Technical Questions” > “Objects (Rezzed) Issues. If you have a free membership and your group owned land was affected, please use “Land & Region” > Report an Offline Region”. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and are reviewing our processes to try to avoid repeating this situation in the future.


There was also a post in the official forums, though with no new information.

So hopefully the mess is resolved. But this on top of the mass of sim restarts earlier this week, one wonders what next?

Sources: SL Universe Forums, Grid Status Report

Bixyl Shuftan